Nörüön Nörgüy (Welcome)

Original Russian article published in Takie Dela

Text by Anna Vasilyeva
Photos by Alexei Vasilyev
Translation by Kat Tancock

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One in four crimes in Russia is committed under the influence of alcohol. In the fight against inebriation, authorities are implementing a variety of restrictions: in most regions of Russia, alcohol will no longer be sold at night, during high school graduation, or near schools, medical facilities, or athletic venues.

But in Yakutia (officially the Sakha Republic), there are more than 200 communities where alcohol is essentially not sold at all. Local officials believe that the ban reduces crime and that the absence of drunks on the streets is a positive example for young people. We visited 12 towns and villages in Yakutia to find out how residents feel about the alcohol ban and how well it’s working.

“Hardly a time for drinking”

The village of Bulgunnyakhtakh is located 120 kilometers south of Yakutsk, the republic’s capital and largest city. A massive two-story building with a yellow tile facade stands out among the many-hued wooden houses. Above its entrance hangs a banner that reads “Nörüön nörgüy,” Yakut for “welcome.” This is the village House of Culture, and on this Tuesday afternoon it’s deserted. The only sounds I can hear are coming from somewhere on the second floor, where five women are working in a small room.

I greet them and get to the point right at the threshold into the room.

“Do they really not sell alcohol in your village?”

The women freeze for a moment, startled by my sudden appearance and unexpected question, then nod in agreement.

“And so, is it true that locals have started drinking less?”

“Yes, absolutely,” they replied, almost in unison.

“Before, people had free access to alcohol,” one of them explained. “And now, there’s none at all, so they go and occupy themselves with other things. Them putting a stop to it from above helps, naturally.”

An electric rotary cutter buzzes in the background as we talk: one woman, refusing to be distracted, is cutting green fabric into long, even strips. The others also keep focused on the task at hand while answering my questions: they’re weaving these strips into camouflage netting for the front (in Russia’s War on Ukraine). They tell me this is the second year that several motivated individuals from their village have been working on this daily:

“It’s hardly a time for drinking.”

More than 1,600 people live in Bulgunnyakhtakh, but the streets are deserted. There are several schools and daycares, a sports center, a library, a cultural center and campsites for tourists – this is where they gather for excursions to one of Yakutia’s main attractions, the Lena Pillars. Two teenagers are kicking a ball around on a small soccer field. Both say that, as far as they can remember, they’ve never seen alcohol for sale in the village shops.

Alcohol sales were officially banned in Bulgunnyakhtakh in 2016. Aytalina Vasilyeva, head of the nasleg (the Yakut word for a village), said that business owners were the first to step up and “give up this income”: “If they hadn’t agreed, then nothing would have happened.” But she admitted it wasn’t easy at first: while most residents did support the new protocol, “informational campaigns” were still needed. They organized numerous events in the village to demonstrate how enjoyable sober living can be. Experts in various fields came from the city to run classes for locals. For example, after a course on Nordic walking, 80 people took up the sport – and now they regularly go for hikes around the region.

“Plus, we show movies and cartoons all the time,” said cultural center director Tatyana Yefremova. “We’ve got a choir, our own artists, ethnofitness classes.” ^[1]

It’s easy to believe: my arrival interrupted a village administration meeting discussing plans for an upcoming holiday.

“When I was a child, there were many people in the village who would sit around drunk outside storefronts,” Vasilyeva recalled. “And now there’s none of that – no one drinks in public. And that paints a different picture for the younger generation. If someone’s walking around drunk, it completely blows their minds. They’re embarrassed: how could somebody do that?”

But, as they say, seek and ye shall find.

Nowadays, those who desire a tipple have to go to the nearest village: Bestyakh, 15 kilometers toward Yakutsk. Or perhaps travel even farther, to the town of Mokhsogollokh. Alcohol sales aren’t banned in either place. If you have a car, that just means paying for gas. If not, a taxi costs 300 to 400 rubles each way, depending on the time of day. That triples the price of a bottle of vodka. And for village residents that’s a significant surcharge.

“The result is that this nearby village is living off us,” Vasilyeva said with a gesture of helplessness. “We made an agreement with the taxi drivers that they wouldn’t just deliver alcohol. But if people order a taxi and go off to buy it themselves, we can’t in any way forbid that. There’s a contingent of people who want to, can, and will drink. Despite the ban – they’d go all the way to Africa to get it. But it’s a small group – you can count them on one hand.”

Most of these people, she’s noticed, have neither families nor jobs. And while alcohol isn’t the most affordable way to have fun, they’ve found a solution. Vasilyeva said that locals who partake turn their homes into places where anyone can come and have some drinks, and vodka is a sort of entry fee. In local slang, they call a house like that a khata, or “hut.”

“We don’t have the administrative resources to combat this, because it’s private property,” she said. “And so, we try to target the people who go to these homes – and that includes those who get drunk just once a month and those who stay drunk for days at a time. They’ve got a wife and family at home, that’s why they go elsewhere.”

Aytalina Vasilyeva is only 28. She is petite, even dainty. But that’s only at first glance. During our conversation I gradually get the impression she’s going to bang her fist on the table and, as Nekrasov wrote, “stop a horse in its tracks.” In these parts the phrase is not just metaphor, but reality: almost every household has horses and cows, and you come across them in the fields and by the roads.

“After her husband leaves for the khata, the wife will call me – and we go there and fetch him,” Vasilyeva said. “We leave him at home for the night so he can sleep it off. And I show up first thing in the morning, grab him by the scruff of his neck and bring him and his wife to have a chat in the administration building. He’s feeling bad, he agrees to everything – it’s the best time to hammer beneficial ideas into his head. Other times he’ll brush them off. And we explain to him that every time he goes there, he’s taking a risk: anything could happen, and no one will be able to save him. We ask him, why do you drink, what are you missing in your life? And we start thinking about what to do.”

She said that “impulse” drinking in the village has been almost completely eradicated. When someone argues with his wife or, conversely, has had something wonderful happen, he can’t just pop into the store to calm his nerves or celebrate. “And that’s that, people calm down and the impulse passes,” Vasilyeva said.

But extraordinary events can still take things off the rails. “During the coronavirus pandemic, more people were drinking for a while,” she said. “And then, during the big wildfires, and also when the SVO [special military operation] started... They’re all triggers, of course.”

“At first, after hostilities began in Ukraine, everyone was saying goodbye to each other: ‘That’s it, we’re leaving, I’m a reserve officer after all,’” Yefremova recalled. “But when they said there wouldn’t be further mobilizations, people calmed down a bit. Naturally, everyone was on edge for six months.”

“Now we’ve been seeing people come back who are demobilized or just on leave,” Vasilyeva said. “And we haven’t had any cases where they’ve behaved badly. Of course, when people first meet up, they drink, but it doesn’t go on for more than a day. There’s one guy who hasn’t gotten over the hump, but he doesn’t have a family. Family and work are key forms of support, after all.”

As our conversation comes to a close, Vasilyeva added: “If you compare the situation in the village 20 years ago to now, it’s night and day. Everything we’ve talked about today in terms of our problems, that’s to do with three or four families. We know them and keep them under control. But in those days, drinking and living like that was the rule.”

Just the Facts

Russia has a federal law that gives regions the right to place limitations on alcohol sales, excluding the food service industry. For example, in Yakutia alcohol cannot be sold between 8 p.m. and 2 p.m. the following day, or in stores located in apartment buildings. But in 2015, local authorities decided to go further and create so-called sober villages: communities where alcohol may not be sold at all. This ban is now in effect in 203 communities, out of about 600.

There is no precise data on alcoholism within the Russian population. Rosstat, the federal statistics agency, only collects data on the number of patients undergoing treatment for the disorder after an initial diagnosis. Accordingly, 108 out of every 100,000 people received this diagnosis for the first time in 2010, a figure that dropped to 37 in 2023. The numbers in Yakutia have been quite a bit higher. In 2010, the rate of alcoholism and alcohol-related psychosis was 290 out of every 100,000 people; in 2023, it fell to 119.

Despite this positive trend, actual numbers in the regions could be much higher. The republic’s Center for Hygiene and Epidemiology pointed out in a report that the divergence of data from reality can be explained by the fact that “a large portion of the population that uses addictive substances or abuses alcohol is not registered at drug and alcohol abuse clinics.”

According to data from the agency in charge of alcohol and tobacco control, residents of Russia have been buying more alcohol in recent years. For example, retail sales of alcohol (excluding beer, cider and mead) came to more than 2 billion liters in 2022 (about 580 million gallons), 3.6 percent higher than the previous year. And in 2023 the amount rose even higher.

As for Yakutia, annual retail alcohol sales add up to more than 12 million liters. “While the sales volume of hard liquor over the past six years stayed more or less the same, sales of beer saw a 60 percent increase,” said Georgy Stepanov, the republic’s deputy leader, in spring 2025. “The number of alcohol-related motor vehicle collisions in the region is 28 percent higher than the national average, and the number of deaths related to alcohol use is 29 percent higher.”

The Sakha Republic Ministry of Internal Affairs informed us that 96 alcohol-related crimes were committed in sober villages in 2021, 193 in 2022 and 176 in 2023. For the most part these included theft, lesser degrees of assault, and violations of motor vehicle laws.

“Drinkers will always find a drink”

It’s 15 kilometers from Bulgunnyakhtakh to the nearest shop in a “non-sober” village where one can buy alcohol. Sibiryachka, a store where, like elsewhere in the republic, beer is sold between 2 p.m. and 8 p.m., is not far from the highway, in the village of Bestyakh. But literally two meters away, a bar called Herase offers beer on tap from 10 in the morning until 2 a.m. And this contradiction troubles no one but the store’s employees.

“We don’t sell vodka now, though when we did, people came [from villages with a ban on alcohol sales] pretty much every day – though not the same people,” said Natalya, who works at the shop. “It never happened that people bought a whole case. If they needed to, they’d come and buy a couple bottles.”

“And if they brought a ban like that to your village?”

“I think it’s dumb,” she replied with a smirk. “I don’t drink, but I need a bottle of good wine or vodka when I have guests over. Why should I have to go to other villages for a single bottle? And drinkers will always find a drink.”

Higher-proof alcohol is sold in only one Bestyakh store, a little less than a kilometer away. But the man who just arrived in a taxi obviously doesn’t know this. He jerks open the car door, staggers out and goes into Sibiryachka. A few seconds later, he comes back out and plods to the bar next door, dragging and barely lifting his feet. He has no success there either. His last hope is the grocery store across the street, which he stumbles toward. Unlike him, we know that the shop that sells wine and vodka is in the other direction.

A few more kilometers away is the town of Mokhsogollokh, where you’ll find a chain liquor store. Alla, who runs the shop, said that she recognizes several frequent customers as residents of sober villages: “They don’t just shop for themselves, but for their neighbors too, and sometimes they come as a group. Some buy something every week; others drop in only once in a while. With some, we see them and know in advance what they’ll buy. If they brought in an alcohol ban in Mokhsogollokh, it would be a total nightmare.

“We’ve got our regular drunks, but they’re peaceful, they don’t cause trouble, and I wouldn’t even say there are many of them,” she continues. “But almost the entire adult population drinks regularly. They might have a bit every day, but they still go to work in the morning. They understand moderation, they behave well, and so a ban that hits everyone really isn’t the way.”

Almost everyone in her village works at the cement factory, which is the main employer, Alla said. “That’s why we don’t really have that kind of alcoholism, because people have to work,” she said. “Maybe that’s why there’s more alcoholism in the villages, because there’s no work and nothing to do. That’s why they drink.”

“People should have a choice.”

The first place we visit in every sober community is the grocery store.

About 1,200 people live in the village of Ymyyakhtakh, 60 kilometers north of Yakutsk. A referendum was held here in 2018, and more than half the residents over the age of 18 voted to ban retail alcohol sales. Local authorities implemented anti-alcohol restrictions in the village soon after.

Nestled in the village is a small, unremarkable store. We enter, pretending to be regular shoppers.

“Do you sell alcohol?”

“What do you need?” the woman at the counter asks somewhat hesitantly.

I immediately become flustered. In all the other villages we’ve been to, they offered up almost a mantra: no, we don’t sell it, and not for a long time.

“Well, beer...”

She walks slowly to the refrigerator, which contains several cans of beer, and holds one out to us.

“And that’s non-alcoholic?”

“Of course not, 4.5 percent,” she answers in bewilderment.

I feel like it’s time to drop the act: I explain who we are and why we’ve come.

“But this is actually mine, I’m just filling in for a friend,” the shop assistant hastens to explain. “And my friends are about to pick me up so we can head out for a picnic...”

That said, a few minutes later she does admit that she’s not a big supporter of the restrictions in place in the village. “Out of the entire village, there are two or three people who really drink,” she explains. “They’re alcoholics, and that’s a full-on illness. But you can drink in a cultured way. We’re civilized people, we want to spend time together on holidays or, for instance, we have friends to visit. And for that we have to go somewhere to buy alcohol. And who’s going to drive us if we don’t have a car? It’s 300, 350 rubles one way to get to the shop, and that’s a lot. It’s an infringement of our rights. People should have a choice. And everything has been decided for us.”

It’s worth acknowledging that hers is a minority position in the sober villages.

“We’ve completely stopped seeing drunks around, and they used to always be staggering down the street,” said Maria, a retiree we meet on the road from the store. “What’s important is that young people don’t drink – the old ones won’t change. If there were no ban, then everyone would drink. Even if someone doesn’t want to, they pop into the shop, see the cans and bottles behind the counter, get tempted and buy something. And when Yakuts drink, they drink all the way, until they fall down. They have no sense of moderation.”

Maria is short and looks much younger than her 64 years. She said she can’t give us any more time: she’s rushing to the bus stop to meet a relative. She takes two steps away from us then turns – she obviously has something more to say. “I’ve got five sons all together. And two of them drank – one died from alcoholism. It was written on the death certificate: alcohol poisoning.”

Maria’s husband also used to drink, but he’s now “old and sick” and can no longer go on days-long benders.

“And he’s got nowhere to buy alcohol,” she said. “If someone close by sold it, he’d probably limp over and buy it.”

Almost everyone we meet along the way said that they either drink a little only on holidays or gave alcohol up completely many years ago. If the conversation lasts longer than five minutes, then it comes out that every second person, like Maria, has personal experience of having a loved one with an alcohol addiction.

Lyubov Kumichko, who is 68, lives with her 91-year-old mother. Both say they enjoy a glass of champagne a couple of times a year. “People don’t drink as hard in our village as in the west,” she said. “I studied in Irkutsk, where everyone made moonshine. But here that’s not okay.” One of Lyubov’s two brothers suffers from alcoholism. She said he started drinking after his army service. The whole family has tried multiple times to help him get better, but the treatments only helped for a few months, after which he started drinking again.

Lyubov is now waiting for her brother, who will be returning on leave from the War on Ukraine any day now.

“And you’re not worried he’ll start drinking more now?” I asked.

“I don’t know what will happen,” she answered pensively.

Ymyyakhtakh is part of Namsky Ulus, where alcohol is sold in only two of the district’s 19 villages: at three shops in the district center of Namtsy and at one in the village of Khomustakh. The latter, with a population of about 2,600, is no more than 15 kilometers away from Ymyyakhtakh. Alexei Zakharov, the village’s deputy leader, said that “even in the winter some people manage to walk” from Ymyyakhtakh to Khomustakh: they wait until 2 p.m., when the local liquor store opens, do their shopping, and then walk back home.

The whole village was drinking. They had moonshine, they set it out, and they drank, and drank, and drank.

Local representatives considered banning alcohol sales in Khomustakh as well, but, after public hearings, residents “chose a happy medium,” Zakharov said. Alcohol can now be purchased between 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. in one store outside village limits, near the highway. He said that the majority of Khomustakh residents work, and so “drunkenness isn’t a major problem,” and the number of binge drinkers can be counted on one hand.

“They say in nearby villages that people drink there because we sell alcohol here,” he said with a smirk. “They heap all the blame on us, like we’re the ones getting them drunk. But if we closed the shop, then what would happen?”

As an answer to this question, Zakharov presented a few scenarios, none of which, truth be told, seems all that credible. “Maybe a woman with lots of children leaves her kids at home and goes off to Yakutsk, 70 kilometers away, and never comes back. She falls, gets run over – and that’s it, her kids are orphans. Or a laborer wants to celebrate something. He comes here, gets drunk – and wanders around here for three or four weeks, living on the street. But if the store were closer, he could go there, make his purchase, and go home again,” Zakharov theorized. “Or a guy doesn’t drink for a year, then wants to celebrate some kind of occasion. He drives drunk, goes off to Khomustakh to buy more. And the cops catch him, and that’s it – he loses his license. And if he’s a taxi driver, then the family loses its income. If there’d been somewhere in the village to buy alcohol, he could have bought it there and celebrated at home.”

Yuri Dyakonov, deputy in charge of social issues for Namsky Ulus, said he is certain that the absence of alcohol sales within walking distance has had a positive effect on the population. “Young people are no longer drawn to alcohol,” he said. “For them it’s normal that you can’t buy alcohol in stores. Whereas before, there was a great deal of drinking at dance clubs and even in schools. Now you don’t see that at all.”

“But wouldn’t it be more effective if the ban covered the whole district? So it would be a long drive to the store?”

“I hadn’t even considered that,” he said in surprise. “And the question hasn’t been raised. Ultimately it’s a business sector...”

“In other words, a comprehensive ban, even across the entire republic, wouldn’t solve the problem?”

“That would help a certain percentage successfully quit,” Dyakonov said. “But people can adapt to anything. I think they’d find an alternative, maybe homebrew, or maybe they’d go on to something different.”

Doing the Math

Magaras is 100 kilometers west of Yakutsk. Resident Anna Konstantinovna’s husband built many of the houses in the village when he was working at the sawmill. They met when she was 18, and when they decided to get married, the whole community was against it. The issue was that he was the only Russian in the village, Anna said: he came to Yakutia from Gorky Oblast for work. ^[2] “There was even a meeting, people came from the district, and they reprimanded me, a Yakut woman, for marrying a Russian,” she recalls. “They criticized me, said, 'If you marry a Russian he’ll leave you.' But we tied the knot at the village Civil Registry Office. I was sitting doing laundry by the porch. And the secretary showed up and threw our marriage certificate on the ground. That’s how it was then, in 1973.”

In the end, the concerns didn’t pan out: their 45 years of marriage, eight children, and 27 grandchildren are proof of that.

Anna remembered how surprised she was when she visited her husband’s family and hometown: “We got there and the whole village was drinking. They had moonshine, they set it out, and they drank, and drank, and drank. We’d never had anything like that. And at first I was afraid, because I didn’t know what to expect from them.”

Anna’s husband was able to drink for two days running, but “never a third.” Her children, she said, only drink on holidays.

“I’m a strict mother; I expect them not to drink.”

“Did you explain to them somehow when they were kids that drinking is bad?”

“No, I didn’t explain anything, they figured it out themselves.”

Anna Konstantinovna’s husband died several years ago. She now lives alone in Magaras and keeps two cows on her property. There are five buckets of fresh milk on the floor inside her house; she makes sour cream and butter from it to send to her children. Her son and daughter and sometimes her grandchildren help her with household chores.

“Of course, it’s good when they don’t sell alcohol,” she said confidently. “Young people used to drink, and now they go and cut hay, help their parents.”

Polina recalled that in the Magaras of more than 10 years ago, there would be lines of people wanting to buy alcohol in the village stores. “Either from the administration, or from the school, or from the daycare. They’d go after work so they could get some before the stores closed.” After the ban came in, people started to lose the habit. But now residents want more: for the stores to stop selling the Yakut fermented milk product byrpakh.

“It’s not considered to be alcoholic, but it does contain a small amount of alcohol,” she explains. “People drink it for a hangover and get a buzz and then go off drinking again. We have one young family where the husband goes off at the store employees on WhatsApp – he wants them to stop selling byrpakh to his wife. We’ve even collected signatures against selling it in Magaras.”

Polina herself doesn’t drink, even on holidays – she said her health won’t allow it, even though she’s only 46. She used to have a roadside café where she worked alongside her older brother.

“When he went on a bender, that was it: he was constantly drunk, couldn’t work,” she recalled. “Three, five days he wouldn’t come to work at all. But he still managed to head off to town and disappear. And he was my cashier. How can you have a café without a cashier? I spent 11 years dealing with all that. Treatment would last three months max. We took him to a shaman in Yakutsk; that also lasted three months, then he went back to drinking. I know some people make it up to seven years without drinking after seeing a shaman, so it depends on the person.”

She doesn’t offer treatment to her brother anymore: he’s 62 and doesn’t have the strength to drink regularly or a lot.

If they brought in a ban there too... well it wouldn’t change anything. I’d go to where they do sell it.

“My husband drank too,” Polina said with a sigh. “We lived together for four years but then divorced, specifically because of that.”

Another sober village is Asyma, located 120 kilometers to the west of Magaras. There’s only one village between them, Berdigestyakh (the administrative center of Gorny Ulus), plus kilometers of endless Yakut taiga. For half an hour on either side of the road we see only charred black poles, interspersed with young birch scrub. This area was hit by the exceptionally strong wildfires that ravaged the republic in the summer of 2021.

Nikolai is 55. We catch up with him in Asyma, where he’s building a summer house. He lives with his wife and younger son in Berdigestyakh. He once worked in these same parts as a tractor driver at the Kirov collective farm, but then the Soviet Union collapsed and there was no more work – and he started abusing alcohol.

“But do you want to quit?”

“Of course I do!”

Nikolai has sought help from a shaman three times. The most recent was 10 years ago. It cost 3,000 rubles then, he said, but now, of course, it’s more expensive. “One used some kind of hypnosis, another treated me with needles, and the third put up a photo of the famous shaman Nikon and muttered something,” he recalled. “One time worked for a week, another for a month. When you’re not drinking, you think it’s been forever, and then you do the math: it’s only been three days. But the longest time I’ve gone without drinking is a year.”

“And if they brought in a ban in Berdigestyakh like they have here?”

Nikolai chuckles.

“But it’s almost a sober village there too,” he said. “It’s a full 10 kilometers to the store in Berdigestyakh that sells alcohol. And if they brought in a ban there too... well it wouldn’t change anything. I’d go to where they do sell it. It’s the opposite, people are dying from withdrawal. Of course, byrpakh helps you make it to lunch.”

“So what would help you to not drink then, if bans don’t work?”

Nikolai thinks for a bit.

“If everyone had work, fewer people would drink. Take me – even if I drink for 10 days, I still get back to normal after that: I’ve got to work, after all. Plus they take away your rights, they take away your guns – and then how can you go hunting? If I didn’t have a car I’d drink more.”

The last thing I ask is where else to find people in the village who suffer from alcoholism.

“Well you won’t find anyone right now. The ones who were here have gone fishing to have a nip and recover. I’m here alone, and I’m going around sober. Plus the ones I used to drink with, they’ve gone off to the SVO [Special Military Operation, aka Russia’s War on Ukraine]. And the wounded are now recovering in another city. That’s how we live...”

We’re already gathering our things and leaving when Nikolai shouted after me:

“And what about you? You don’t drink?”

“Well, you know, a little, but not very often these days,” I admitted.

“It’s okay to drink, it’s better for the soul,” Nikolai said, breaking into a wide smile.

* * *

During our trip we visited 12 villages, seven of which have been designated sober for many years now. Our conclusion was that full bans on alcohol sales work here, though not 100 percent, of course. During our entire time in the region, we met only one drunk person on the street, and that was in a village where alcohol sales are permitted. Most locals we met said that they drink only on holidays or have given up even that. After the bans were brought in, the adult population started getting out of the habit of drinking as a way of life. They have other amusements now: motorcycles are very popular. And things to do – like helping older people with their homes and yards.

It’s entirely possible that under these kinds of restrictions, it’s just a matter of time before an entire village no longer drinks. But there will always, everywhere, and in every situation, be some people who abuse alcohol.