Alcohol Control Policies and Alcohol-Related Mortality in Russia: Reply to Razvodovsky and Nemtsov.

We are happy to have our article (Khaltourina and Korotayev, 2015) reviewed by Prof. Nemtsov, whose work on alcohol-related mortality in Russia greatly improved our understanding of the problem, as well as by Prof. Razvodovsky, whose work provides important insights on alcohol situation in Belarus (Nemtsov and Razvodovsky, 2016). The effect of policy measures on alcohol mortality in Russia is a topic hard to research, because in this country alcohol is regulated predominantly at the national level, unlike in such countries as the USA, Canada and Australia where states and provinces have a mandate to develop their own laws, which allows for cross-sectional analysis of the policy effects. We only have one-time series data set without regional policy variation in Russia. There is also a problem of high unrecorded production and sales. Additionally, not all regulation documents are available for the public. Therefore, in our article, we have qualified our conclusions as interpretations and hypotheses. We are happy to discuss alternative explanations of the alcohol mortality dynamics in Russia, as long as they are well documented and substantiated, with ‘serious scientific proofs’, as Razvodovsky and Nemtsov (2016) call it. Razvodovsky and Nemtsov propose the following explanation of alcohol mortality decrease in Russia from 2005 to 2013: It is …