Word: sasha
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ripped open his shirt to reveal a wound caused by a U.S. machine gun, a Viet Nam veteran displayed a leg wound inflicted by a Soviet-made mine. Suddenly, the strangers sensed, as American Larry Oswald put it, that they were "in many ways brothers." Said Soviet veteran Sasha Karpenko: "We feel ourselves part of those who died in Viet Nam. This is our mutual tragedy...
...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...
...contrast, Sasha says, he is enthusiastic about A.A.'s methods. "The beginning for me was when I learned that the word alcoholic could be said out loud, that people would even applaud. With alcoholism, you have to admit despair before you can experience victory...
...Until I joined this group, I felt isolated," says Sasha afterward. "Now I am helped by my friends -- and by my strength and my example, I can be of help to them." By helping others help themselves, Moscow Beginners is rebuilding the sense of self-worth that society had stripped from them. In a limited way, the A.A. style could turn out to be just what the doctor ordered for a society that is trying to humanize itself. Says Volodya: "What I like about A.A. is that it ends our dependence on a cure from above. We are rediscovering...