Back in the mid-80s when we were still trying to make nice w/the Russkies, we hosted an IL-76 crew at McChord AFB (way before all the joint base bullshit)…we flew C-141s at the time; the IL-76 was/is a blatant copy/ripoff of the 141.
I got to fly a sortie with them, and it was pretty cold rainy that day, with a lot of slush building up on the wings, so we had them de-iced at the end of the runway. I shit you not, their ground crew mechanics ran out and caught the deicing fluid in buckets, and then rigged up charcoal filters to pour it into big 5-gallon (or whatever the equivalent was in liters) glass bottles!
If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I’d never believe it. Maybe they were just putting on a show for us, or did it to fuck with us as a laugh at the stereotype, but I doubt it. They were some hard-drinking mother fuckers. Interesting visit!
Edit: red Friday rules
In his book, Viktor Belenko who defected with a MiG-25 to Japan, really made a big deal about his fellow Russians drinking the alcohol intended for use in the jets. Some of the book seems like he played up certain aspects of Soviet culture to appeal to his Western/American audience, but I've always wondered just how prevalent that kind of thing was.