Being a Soviet/Russian conscript is a terrible fucking lot in life. Being raped, beaten, denigrated was and remains extremely common. You're taken from wherever you had probably spent your whole life, thrown into a shitty uniform, shipped off like cattle to wherever it is that the motherland needs you, and used as an inanimate tool until you were either too broken and destroyed to function anymore, or you had managed to survive to the end of your term.

Alcoholism was and remains rampant, and in many cases even encouraged, as to keep the system 'lubricated'. Getting shitfaced on whatever you could find that'd get you there quickly is just an extension of that.

I left the country when I was young, and as soon as I became of age, the military came around my old apartment to find me. I couldn't return to the country for a decade - there was absolutely no way I was going to take even the slightest chance of being in the Russian military.

This is very much the same reason I'm not going back now. It saddens me that I may never step foot there again.

Remember the military bukhankas rolling around in late May and early June, grabbing men off the street for conscription if they looked even a little bit like they'd just finished high school?

I've got a pretty vivid memory of seeing the 'recruiters' grabbing an amputee out of a wheelchair in broad daylight and shoving him in the back of the van along with the several other men they already had in there.

It's probably not the clothing, but rather some aspect of the circumstance that coincides with the uniform (such as, loss of freedom.)

Oh ye ofc. There are many normal professions with uniforms.

But when you are in it, putting on the uniform is the magic transition between the real you and vice corpral Rightbyte.

Loss of freedom is certainly the main factor.

You clearly don't know many people in uniform, to make that sort of sweeping generalization.

I am a NCO in the reserve. I am speaking from experience and I can add that I am not arguing I am smart and others are stupid.

Note, that my emphasis is on the system that make people behave strange.

It is somewhat ironic too, since being a soldier exposes you to so many practical and different problems that are so different each time that there is no room to be actually stupid.

And I am not talking about combat, but mundane stuff like, tying a rope between two trees to hang wet cloths on. In normal life people that would fail at stuff like this can get routine and hide that they can't do such tasks without messing up, but soldiers do so much different things that they don't get routine and if you are a bit off you are exposed.

If you are the kinda guy that can tie ropes between trees to dry cloths on, the military structure makes you behave like you would have been "stupid" in many situation that only is a problem because you lack power.

So Soviet or American sailors, that wanted booze but had no way to get it, solved it in the way they could. In civilian life they could just not have put them self in the situation where they couldn't buy booze.

Hazing is maybe a big problem since you are locked in with some jocks you can't escape since the front gate is guarded by MP.

Simple as that. The limitations make you stupid.