RUSSIA-ALCOHOLICS-ANONYMOUS

TO GO WITH AFP STORY BY MARINA LAPENKOVA-MAXIMOVA - Members of the Alcoholics Anonymous self-help group take part in a meeting in Moscow, on December 1, 2012. Twenty-five years after their arrival in Russia there are some 400 AA groups with 10.000 members in the country with 143 million people. The AA movement of "mutual aid" groups created in the United States in the 1930s first came to Russia at the end of the 1980s during the perestroika era, as the country opened up under the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Yet more than 20 years later, Russia has just 400 AA groups with 10,000 members -- a tiny number for a population of 143 million where alcohol abuse and its social effects are a national scourge.AFP PHOTO / YURI KADOBNOV (Photo credit should read YURI KADOBNOV/AFP via Getty Images)