A cold bath, a towel soaked with ammonia in your face and the threat of dismissal from work – these are but a few methods of treatment that Soviet sobering-up stations applied to people. Find out how Soviet drunkards were brought to their senses and what happened to those "shelters" for alcoholics.
.jpg)
A narcologist, a plump middle-aged woman with a short haircut, is sitting at a long desk in an assembly hall. There is a microphone in front of her, into which she - in a monotonous voice - is describing the dangers of alcoholism to an audience of several dozen unkempt men with wrinkled, drooping faces, who have not yet fully recovered from yet another hangover.
"I'll start with somebody who has been here more than once. Here is Nikolai Ivanovich Gulepov. <...> Please stand up. This is your eighth time in a sobering-up station, eighth time! <...> We shall have to have a very serious conversation indeed! <...> You have had treatment with a narcologist and yet, you continue to drink," she scolds a thin blond man in a coat and a checkered scarf.
The man, like a child, is trying to explain himself, saying that he was indeed receiving treatment, did not drink for eight months, but then stopped the treatment and took to the bottle again. The doctor says that unless he resumes treatment, he will have to be subjected to involuntary treatment, but at that moment another patient takes the man's side.
"Are you sure you are helping with this treatment? I had it and I want to say that it affects one's genitals and liver!” the man in the audience challenges the doctor.
"It is vodka that has this effect!" the doctor counters.
This is what a typical preventive chat in a Soviet sobering-up station looked like. Back then, there were sobering-up stations in almost every city in the USSR and they lasted well into post-Soviet years, too. However, in 2011, sobering-up stations were abolished. How did they operate and is there a present-day equivalent?