At some point in the very beginning of 199x the humanitarian aid of NATO MRE got distributed in our dormitories - it were kind of hungry years in USSR, empty store shelves, rationing of staples, and as a student i had at that time barely enough money only for cheap illegal vodka (highest bang for the buck) and hardly could even indulge in beer, let alone buy any food - and those MREs went down very nicely, 30 years l…
The Night Watch series books talk about “fake vodka” which I found highly amusing. I assume it’s watered back industrial ethanol?
usually that is what you hope for. Sometimes the seller would claim that it is off-book ethanol supply from the liquor or medical industry - no way to verify of course. On the very bottom of the range is pretty "dirty" ethanol and even occasionally methanol (couple months ago there were 2 clusters of 80+ such poisonings in the regional cities in Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_methanol_poisoning_inc...), though you usually don't venture that low. In a smaller cities and of course villages you'll also meet moonshine. Once back then we bought in a normal store in a small town several 1L jars of what happened to be moonshine which had their wide mouths capped with single use cap - i.e. you open the jar and consume it :) Which is what we (me and 2 crewmates) did with the head of local police and the driver of our loaded (~10 tons of construction supplies) truck while waiting for the ferry to take the truck and us across the river - to say honestly, as the jar at the ferry crossing wasn't the only one, we lost the truck that day and found it couple days later missing about 10% of the cargo :)