At Moscow’s Only Sobering-Up Station for Women, Tempers and Temperance

To celebrate her daughter’s eighth birthday, Svetlana Fateyeva bought a big bottle of grain alcohol to share with her co-workers.

By midnight that night, Fateyeva was flat on her bare stomach, tied to a bed with cloth strips, sobbing and railing about missing her party. The cake that never made it home was locked in custody with her clothes and purse.

“Because my child is 8 years old, I have to walk around naked?” she had cried, wild-eyed and confused, her breath still 100 proof, as policewomen forced her to strip to her panties. “Why?”

“You brought it on yourself,” policewoman Lida Karetnikova told her. “You’ve punished yourself.”

Fateyeva was also being punished by a nasty remnant of puritan Soviet communism, that infamous institution known as a vytrezvitel, or “sobering-up station.”

Believed by officials to be unique to the Soviet Union, the sobering-up stations traditionally went a step further than the regular police drunk tanks known in the West.

Supplied with beds, linens and a medic to check for serious health problems, they have also acted since the late 1920s as moralistic avengers in a society that loves vodka but has long viewed alcoholism as a sin rather than an illness.

Particularly under then-Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign in the mid-1980s, the stations’ staffs would routinely get drunks into trouble by informing their employers and neighborhood officials of their misadventures.

Display cases near police stations and factories showed photos and cartoons of local people caught drunk in public, listing their names and addresses, often with unflattering limericks. Even now, staffers call inebriates’ relatives to “confirm their identity” in what seems an attempt to shame them even further.

And although people enter the station only under duress, after police pick them up for public drunkenness off the streets or from the subway, they must pay about half a day’s wages for the “services” they receive there--typically, several hours on a narrow bunk in a room crammed with beds and redolent of urine, bleach and body odor.

“It would be better if they just left us in peace,” muttered Yelena Yolkina, 28, still bleary-eyed and mussy-haired as she prepared to check out of Moscow’s only sobering-up station specifically for women.

Yolkina may soon get her wish. In a major rejuggling to make Russia less of a police state than was the Soviet Union, the government has decided to reassign several police functions to civil agencies--including the running of the sobering-up stations.

This week, the Russian Health Ministry, which already runs hospital drying-out programs, formally takes over the stations, two dozen of them in Moscow and hundreds around the country.

As part of a notable shift in Russia toward helping rather than simply scolding and penalizing alcoholics, the police will still collect the drunks, but now doctors will take care of them.

That is probably a good idea, even though it means that she will lose her job, said policewoman Tatiana Trifunova, a 21-year-veteran of the women’s sobering-up station. She has long felt it wrong to charge women for their forced stay and to send them back on the streets with no more counseling than a shouted, “Don’t drink anymore now, you hear?”

“Our institution should exist,” Trifunova said from behind her long counter near the station’s entrance. “But for protecting women. There should be psychotherapists; there should be treatment. We should give them shelter.”

Serious female alcoholism is rising at a striking rate in Russia, according to official statistics. In 1980, men outnumbered women alcoholics 12 to 1; that ratio has dropped to 8 to 1--among minors, 5 to 1.

But the women’s sobering-up station is hardly doing a booming business--if anything, the opposite. With its 18 beds, it is down to only a dozen or so clients a night. The station has only two police cars to bring them all in, and the cars sometimes break down or run low on gas. The staff expects the situation to get even worse when the station switches to the Health Ministry, which is even more strapped for funds than the police.

The four beefy policewomen and single male medic on the job one recent night at Trifunova’s sobering-up station were undeniably good-hearted. But the whole routine they observed was the stuff of nightmares for any woman who has ever had a bit too much to drink and set off for home through the streets.

Nina Felkova, a hefty, short-haired woman in her 40s with transparent blue eyes, admitted grudgingly that she had imbibed too freely. At the Rotfront Chocolate Factory where she works, employees often sneak swigs of the rum that is supposed to go into candy fillings. When she staggered and fell in the slushy street after work, the police picked her up.

“But I didn’t do anything bad,” she maintained. “I was walking near the Paveletsky Station, and they jumped out and stuffed me into the police car.”

Trifunova laughed skeptically. “You were lolling about!” she corrected in a strident, scolding voice.

When Felkova had slept off the worst of it, policewoman Karetnikova called the man with whom Felkova lives, had him confirm her identity--by cursing her out on the phone--and sent her home.

Felkova promised to pay her fine but was unapologetic. “You get tired after work. You’re up to your elbows in chocolate, and your back feels like it’s falling off. So you drink. Everything hurts by the time you’re 45.”

Galina Volodina, her plump cheeks covered with circles of orange rouge and her eyelids slathered in turquoise, was caught trying to hawk high-priced boots in the street while in what police term a “non-sober state.” She maintained that she had just happened to slip and fall down. It was an icy night.

“Some women fall and they can get up again,” Trifunova said. “When they fall and can’t get up, they end up here.”

Volodina understood immediately where she was but was unwilling to believe it. When the policewomen descended on her, she cried: “For God’s sake, leave me alone! I’m perfectly sober!”

They knew better, and Volodina reluctantly followed orders to undress--a precaution that staffers said is necessary to turn up hidden weapons, prevent suicides and make women more docile--in the station’s chilly hallway right near the entrance door.

The process stalled embarrassingly as Volodina struggled with a complex corset arrangement she had sewn together. Then she minced down the hall, tiptoeing on the cold floor, and was led into an eight-bed room already occupied by several women in a similar plight, one crying quietly in the corner.

When her estranged husband came to get her, the two were subjected to the kind of browbeating that is the special vocation of Soviet women in positions of moral authority.

Volodina’s husband, Boris, sneered upon seeing his disheveled wife, “Oh, very pretty, very pretty”--only to be snapped at by Trifunova: “That’s probably why she doesn’t live with you. Because you’re such a smartass. Women don’t like smart men. They like loyal men.

“You probably caress her with a belt, or your hand,” Trifunova added.

“That’s the problem,” he retorted. “I don’t touch her.”

“Then maybe you should,” Trifunova said, adding later: “You blew it somewhere. You should have made her work. . . . It’s bad that you only have one child. You must be weak or something.”

Oksana Negrova had lizard eyes, a dead, dark stare between swollen lids. Her bleached hair had four-inch black roots. When the three policewomen pulled the clothes off her, she blinked stupidly, too dull to be ashamed that she had wet her pants.

Her thigh bore an apple tattoo that indicated she had probably spent time in prison, where tattoos are common. Several hours after her admission, when the policewomen were ready to discharge her and called her sister, they were told that she had two children, ages 2 and 4, and “never stops drinking long enough to dry out.”

They clucked, telling Negrova that she should be deprived of custody. She answered in a flat voice that she had already lost custody, that her sons were living in a sanitarium. Then, her hands shaking so badly that she could barely hold the pen, she signed her checking-out papers.

Negrova had been hoping to sleep at the station until morning, she said, but at close to midnight, the policewomen sent her back out into the freezing night. It was not clear whether she had a home.

And meanwhile, the staff members say, as the economy worsens and the general chaos of Russian life increases, despairing women will drink even more.

“Our lives force us to drink,” Yolkina said, shivering in the thin white robe she had been given for check-out procedures. “It’s become frightening to live. How can I have hope when I can’t even be sure that they’ll let me out of here?”