"My name is Slava, and I am an alcoholic."
The young man speaks rapidly, but every syllable reverberates. More than 30 other men and women seated in a large, drab room at a Moscow community center listen quietly. Over the next hour and a half, most of them, giving only their first names, will stand under the bare fluorescent lighting and make the same confession. It is a painful admission to make anywhere, but especially in the Soviet Union, where drinking is legendary and individual accountability has decayed. This is the daily meeting of Moscow Beginners, the first antidrinking group for Soviet citizens that is registered with Alcoholics Anonymous.
A.A. is a new weapon in the country's struggle against alcoholism, encouraging people to rebuild themselves -- a sort of perestroika of the personality, one day at a time. More poignantly, it is an exercise in self- expression that is the essence of glasnost, an act of standing up and discussing a shortcoming that the state once preferred to keep quiet.
Disturbed by his countrymen's fondness for the bottle, Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 launched an all-out campaign against alcohol. The Soviets raised the legal drinking age from 18 to 21, limited the hours when alcohol could be sold and increased the price of vodka from 4.7 rubles ($7.75) to 10 rubles ($16.50) a liter. But popular resistance has forced Gorbachev to ease up on his crusade, and public drunkenness is on the rise again.
Moscow Beginners was started in 1987 by the Rev. J.W. Canty, an Episcopal priest from New York City who came to Moscow in 1985 to help lay the groundwork for the group. Meanwhile, Volodya, 36, a machinist, had heard about A.A. on a Canadian radio broadcast and had written to A.A. headquarters in New York, which in turn informed Canty that he had a taker in Moscow. The group's first session, held in a hotel room across from the Kremlin, was attended by Volodya and two visiting American members of A.A. Membership grew slowly, largely because the group did not have official recognition and would-be members were unaware of its existence. But radio and television programs highlighted Moscow Beginners, and now the Ministry of Health has endorsed A.A.'s self-help concept.
As at A.A. sessions around the world, the Moscow Beginners tell tales of & searing despair. For Sasha, a 37-year-old engineer, the horror culminated in 1987, when he was repeatedly hospitalized for alcoholism and his wife left him. "I was watching my life spin out of control," he now recalls.
Like Sasha, almost everyone in the group has undergone compulsory hospitalization, some as many as seven times. The hospital stays can last as long as six months, and patients are often treated with sulfazine, a drug that induces high fever. The intended result: to sweat the toxins out of the body and thus shock it into a change of behavior. The drug's effects are not long lasting, and Western doctors refuse to use it.
Two Moscow Beginners tell how they were forced to spend terms of up to two years in prisons reserved for those who cannot be cured by the hospitals. There, boredom was punctuated only occasionally by days of forced labor in understaffed factories. Even the government has admitted that these jails are not likely to keep alcoholics on the wagon.