Change in Russia Brings Freedom but No Aid to Detained Alcoholics : Health: A total of 11,000 ‘patients’ are being released as 99 institutions close. No outpatient treatment has been set up.

Sergei Novikov stood in the sun-drenched courtyard of Treatment and Labor Center No. 1, his home for eight of the last 12 years, waiting for freedom with nowhere to go.

“I don’t know what I’ll do yet,” said Novikov, a 39-year-old whose ruddiness, wrinkles and stoop make him look more like 60. “I’ll get out there first, and then we’ll see.”

Novikov is one of 11,000 alcoholics--patients in official parlance, prisoners in practice--being freed this week from 99 such institutions across Russia, which were ordered to empty out and shut down by this weekend.

The Treatment and Labor Centers were created in 1968 and at their peak held nearly 100,000 offenders, a figure that was down to 28,000 by March. They housed people considered alcoholics who committed crimes not serious enough to land them in prison--anything from swearing in public to what officials call “household scandals.”

Soviet authorities saw fit to lock them up, claiming that it was for their own good and that of society.

The new, less paternalistic Russia is setting them free.

The order to shut down came last July from the Supreme Soviet that President Boris N. Yeltsin disbanded three months later. The lawmakers opposed the idea of forced treatment.

But the new Parliament has yet to set up an improved system of voluntary treatment, as promised, mainly because neither the Health Ministry nor the Interior Ministry wants to oversee it.

Meanwhile, soaring crime has become such a problem in Russia that some officials now question the wisdom of closing the centers.

“Dozens of thousands of aggressive and dangerous alcoholics are being kicked out into the street and left on their own,” said Anatoly Shevchenko, Health Ministry chief specialist on substance abuse. “It’s paradoxical that this is being done at the same time that the president issues a decree to fight crime. What we will have is a great increase in street hooliganism, homelessness and crime.”

Police say the number of crimes committed under the influence of alcohol rose by 40% in the first quarter of 1994, when nearly 3,500 inmates were released from the centers.

In one case, a Moscow ambulance crew Wednesday found the body of a 2-year-old girl who had been starved to death by her alcoholic parents.

Many of the men and women in the centers were there because relatives called the police when their drunken rages went too far. In many of those cases, the relatives now face revenge.

“I don’t know why they say a person ‘suffers from alcoholism,’ ” said Rudolf Volzhanin, chief of the Interior Ministry department responsible for the centers. “It is the wives and the children who suffer.”

But if the world is wary of the released drunks, the shuffling groups of men waiting for the metal gate to slide open at center No. 1 had similar qualms about life on the other side.

“It’s chaos,” said Vassily Mykalo, who said he did not set foot outside the drab brick complex during a year that gave Russia a violent coup attempt and threefold price rises. “It’s changing so fast, it’s wild.”

Mykalo, 40, lacks two necessities for the outside world: a house and a job. A construction worker by trade, he will be hard put to find work with the reference to his time in the center in his “work booklet,” an employment record required when applying for a job in Russia.

And like a number of alcoholics in Russia, he “drank away” his Moscow apartment, selling it at a low price at a moment when the next bottle looked better than the roof over his head.

Nikolai Sheptalov, the gold-toothed director of center No. 1, keeps a portrait of Soviet dictator V. I. Lenin on his office wall--a reminder of the system that ostensibly took care of its citizens.

Sheptalov claimed that many of his 240 charges told him that they wanted to stay in the institution, where he said they were guaranteed three meals a day, a job with performance-related pay and a bed with a sheet.

Not so, according to the inmates.

“Of course I’m happy to be getting out,” said Novikov. “I am a human being.”

Happy, yes. Cured? No. While the system was supposed to keep alcoholics in remission, the real purpose was to keep them off the streets and out of trouble.

“What treatment?” Mykalo scoffed. “What kind of treatment can there be in this dump?”

And Sheptalov admitted that some inmates drank with regularity during time off for good behavior.

“We let one guy out to bury his mother,” he recalled. “He never made it to her house, and we had to take care of the funeral arrangements.”

For the newly freed, the future is less clear than the bottles of vodka and grain alcohol lining the windows of street kiosks in every Russian city.

Most of those who seek help will have a hard time getting it.

In Moscow, the two hospitals that deal with alcoholics are overcrowded, and private treatment is expensive by Russian standards. Many won’t even try to overcome their addiction.

Asked how he will face his new life, Ivan Markin, a 59-year-old inmate at center No. 1, announced that first he planned to celebrate freedom.

“I’m going to go and get drunk,” he said.