4 ideas
Polish reporter Jacek Hugo-Bader drove a Russian-made off-road vehicle alone in deep winter from Moscow to Vladivostok. Along the way he stopped in Siberian and Far Eastern towns and villages to record the lives of people stranded by the Soviet collapse. The title comes from the Russian slang 'belaya goryachka' (white fever), meaning delirium tremens, and he uses it as the diagnosis for the whole region he crosses.
The Soviet north was held together by state provisioning: subsidized jobs, supply runs, housing and a sense of purpose tied to the state project. When that support vanished, remote communities lost their economic base and their story about themselves at the same moment. Vodka became the cheapest available substitute for both, so mass drinking works as a structural symptom of abandonment rather than a private vice.
When an official belief system collapses, people do not stay without belief. They rapidly assemble substitutes such as revived shamanism, new prophet-led sects, and reinvented ethnic traditions. These revivals are often improvised, commercialized, or blended with Soviet habits, which shows that the need for an organizing faith outlasts any particular content.
To see what a system's collapse really cost, look at its farthest edges, not its capital. The periphery depended most on the center's transfers and gets the least attention once they stop. Damage that the center can absorb or hide shows up there raw, in deaths, drinking, depopulation and abandoned settlements.