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Men unable to sneak away from work frequently delegate the task of buying alcohol to wives and girlfriends. "What makes women stand in line?" the government daily newspaper Izvestiya asked recently. "Is the desire to preserve a good home atmosphere an impossible feat without the usual tipple? Is it a mistaken sense of bravery or of female weakness?" Last month, according to a privately communicated eyewitness report from one shopper, a woman standing at the front of a liquor store line in Moscow was knocked off her feet by a surging crowd when the shop doors opened. Before she could get to her feet, the spike heel of another woman shopper pierced her skull, killing her.
Treatment for the Soviet Union's estimated 9 million alcoholics ranges from spending a night in a sobering-up center or a factory clinic to a term in a work camp for those who habitually appear drunk at work or in public. Western- style medical detoxification and counseling is still rare: only two hospitals and 23 out-patient centers serve Moscow, a city of 8.5 million people. According to widespread rumors, one recent patient was Grigory Romanov, Gorbachev's erstwhile competitor for the party leadership. After resigning from the ruling Politburo last July, Romanov, long thought to be a heavy drinker, is believed to have checked into a drying-out program.
That was not the first time Gorbachev had used a rival's thirst to his own advantage, according to Fridrich Neznansky, who emigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union in 1978 and who, by his own account, attended Moscow State University Law School with Gorbachev. In a speech at Harvard University last September, Neznansky, co-author of the thriller Red Square, recalled that one night in 1950, he, Gorbachev and a third man who was active in the Young Communist League, or Komsomol, raised many glasses of beer and vodka together. Gorbachev stayed sober, but the party activist slipped into a stupor. The next day, claimed Neznansky, Gorbachev denounced his friend's drinking before the Komsomol. As a result, said Neznansky, "Gorbachev promptly became the new Komsomol organizer, and that's when his path to the Kremlin began."