Call it Dostoevsky’s Revenge: Russia has closed down every gambling casino in the country, leaving vodka as the only palliative remedy for the cold Russian winters and the repressive Russian government.

We’re not sure that’s going to be enough.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin came up with the idea six years ago, when he was still president, and he rammed through a law requiring all gambling establishments to close on or before July 1, 2009. Just about everybody in Russia, including the casino operators, ignored it on the reasonable ground that the Russian government has been pretty much incapable of doing anything it says it’s going to do since the fall of the Soviet Union almost 18 years ago.

But Putin meant business on this one, and current President Dmitry Medvedev apparently went along rather than run the risk of having a radioactive olive slipped into his martini at the next state dinner.

Hundreds of Russian police officials oversaw the overnight closing of thousands of gambling houses, from palatial casinos in Moscow to ratty slot-machine parlors in tiny Russian villages. The government has promised tightly regulated gambling will be permitted in four isolated and economically strapped regions in Russia, sort of like those “enterprise zones” in the USA. The problem is that these areas are economically strapped because they are so cold and far away from most of the Russian population that nobody can get there, or wants to. One of them is near the North Korean border.

Soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, gambling halls sprang up in Russia’s largest cities like mushrooms in a cow pasture. The heady perfume of free enterprise wafted across the land, bringing with it an unexpected but inevitable byproduct: organized crime.

Putin contended that much of Russia’s gambling industry was controlled by Georgian mobs, and it’s true that many of the casino companies were based in Russia’s troublesome neighbor and former soviet partner-state. The problem is that in Georgia — and Russia, too — it’s hard to tell the mobsters from the so-called legitimate business guys, or the government. Putin probably didn’t much care about such distinctions; he was probably just trying to put the screws to Georgia in any way he could.

At any rate, we here in Denton can add one more item to our list of reasons why it’s better to live here than in Russia. Anyone in Denton who wants to play the slots or hit the blackjack tables just has to drive a few miles up Interstate 35 or U.S. Highway 75 to hit the casinos at Durant or Thackerville, Okla., courtesy of American Indian tribes that have finally found a way to get back at the white man, one roll of the dice at a time.

In all honesty, we should report that it is still easier to get vodka in Russia than in Denton. In Denton, we have to drive outside the city limits. The stuff’s ubiquitous in Russia; just about all a Russian has to do to get a shot of vodka is hold out an empty glass.

We do not begrudge them this. They are going to need all the solace they can get when winter comes.