MOSCOW -- With the winter holidays upon us, Russians are looking forward to the longest drinking binge of the year. It started with "Western" Christmas, which Russians began celebrating after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Then come New Year's Eve, Russian Orthodox Christmas on Jan. 7 and the old New Year, commemorated according to the Julian calendar, on Jan. 13. Even Chinese New Year offers an excuse to throw down a shot of vodka.

Most Russians will watch a movie whose title might be loosely translated as "Fate's Irony, or Have a Nice Sauna," which portrays the adventures of a man who gets drunk after a sauna on New Year's Eve and is put on a plane by his similarly inebriated pals. He ends up in the wrong city and falls in love with woman who finds him, staggeringly drunk, in her apartment. The movie is a tradition as beloved in Russia as "It's a Wonderful Life" in America.

It is amazing how alcoholism is celebrated in Russian culture. Even the intellectuals, who should sound the alarm when there is a danger to the country, find alcoholism funny and make the evil appear attractive. Nearly two weeks ago, for example, Yury Simonov-Vyazemsky, anchor for the popular children's TV program "Smart Girls and Smart Boys," told the intellectual newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta: "The tradition of drinking proves the Russian national character. In my opinion, a person who doesn't drink at all is either under treatment or not Russian in his spirit."

In Soviet times, popular culture developed an image of the alcoholic as someone who can't openly protest against the state, so the inner tragedy makes him destroy himself through drink. Sergei Dovlatov and many other talented writers drank heavily and celebrated drunks in their writing. One of the most outstanding pieces of modern Russian literature is "Moscow-Petushki" by Venichka Yerofeyev -- written from the perspective of a character suffering from deliriums.

Editors often bring cases of vodka into the newsroom at the end of the workweek, and the staff guzzles vodka, which, they insist, "has lots of tasty vitamins."

This attitude can have tragic consequences. During one drunken journalists' party in Vladivostok in 1996, a reporter I knew jumped out of a window and killed herself. Her husband, also a journalist, moved to Moscow, but he came home drunk one night last year and hung himself. Once I found a neighbor -- the anchor of a regional program about road accidents -- in the stairwell of our building, so drunk he could barely stand upright. He had urinated all over himself.

Russia's chief physician, Gennady Onishchenko, announced last week that there are about 2.2 million alcoholics and more than 400,000 heavy drinkers in this country -- 1.5 percent of the nation's population. And that only counts registered patients in clinics and hospitals. The Ministry of Health stated that about 8 million men, 2 million women and 500,000 teenagers under 14 suffer from alcoholism, according to the newspaper Kommersant-Daily.

The ministry reported that during the past two years the number of alcoholics grew by 30 percent. Those who suffer from deliriums rose by 50 percent. Onishchenko said that during the past three years the number of teenagers suffering from alcoholism grew by 15 percent, and teenage drinkers increased threefold. He called alcoholism "an extreme emergency."

"Immoderate drinking of alcohol products, often of a very bad quality, leads to the deaths of a few hundred thousand Russians every year," he added.

You would think that television would try to battle this national emergency. But Russian TV personalities seem not to notice destructive stereotypes. In the post-Soviet era, the broadcast media have never sponsored a public education campaign about the tragic sides of alcoholism.

The problem is compounded by the Russian taste for hard liquor. According to the National Alcohol Association, vodka and hard liquor comprise more than 70 percent of the drinks sold across the country. Beer amounts to only 19 percent. About 30 percent of households in Russia produce homemade alcoholic beverages, and about 1,600 illegal distillers make fake vodka and other liquor.

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev tried to combat Russia's alcoholism in 1985, but his approach was a typically totalitarian one: It amounted to prohibition. Yet life expectancy was at its peak until 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed.

Life expectancy in the past decade for Russian men has plummeted to as low as 58 -- lower than in Egypt or Bolivia. Some argue that this is because of economic reasons. But a group of experts from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine demonstrated last year that alcoholism is the culprit, ABC News reported.

It may be "unpatriotic, antinational and unnatural" to say so, but it is time for Russian intellectuals to take alcoholism seriously. Otherwise, someday they may find no audience for their work: People suffering from deliriums don't read books.