Even more remarkable is how she got there.

Tisch—a longtime Saratogan, an upstanding citizen who has a master's degree in counseling and another in music, a former Junior League president, certainly a pillar of the community—found her way to Moscow, not as a tourist but as a result of her addiction to alcohol.

Twenty years ago, when Tisch was getting help with her alcoholism, she also learned how the disease affects families. What alarmed her most was that research at the time showed that one out of every two children of alcoholics would probably become one. To Tisch that meant one of her two daughters could wind up addicted to alcohol.

"No, not mine," Tisch says. "I was going to do everything I could to prevent that." (Tisch says current research shows the probabilities are more like one in three.)

Tisch's determination to prevent her daughters from becoming alcoholics was what started her on a journey that has become international.

Photograph by George Sakkestad Rosemary Tisch's life took an amazing turn when she set out to make sure her daughters did not go down the same path of alcoholism as she did.

Others got involved. Los Gatan Julie Scales, an adult child of an alcoholic, was living in Saratoga when she underwent the Kids Are Special (KAS) training from Tisch. Scales became a staff member at the local KAS center and began working with the children.

She says the KAS program helps children begin to identify that the problem in their family is the disease of alcoholism. She explains that most children in alcoholic homes think they are doing something wrong. "They need to learn that it's the disease that's the problem, not them," she says. The children who attend KAS sessions are, by and large, brought by family members who have broken the silence and want to deal with the family disease.

Scales explains that children of alcoholics learn not to talk about what's going on in their family, not to trust adults and not to experience their feelings on a conscious level. The KAS program gives these children a safe place to talk about what they feel and also helps them find safe and appropriate ways to communicate with their parents and others and deal with what's going on at home.

"This is a tough disease," Scales says. She tells of one child whose father hung himself and a sister and brother whose mother died young because of the disease.

"We give the children the opportunity, through art and activities, to express their feelings," she says, "so they don't have to keep them inside." She says keeping feelings inside makes the children ill. Scales says research shows that children of alcoholics spend more time in hospitals than other children, and they stay longer.

Tisch and Scales are passionate about their work.

Tisch's talents for writing curriculum, training and being a prime mover got her even further into the community.

She became president of the National Prevention Task Force and was a member of the Alcohol & Drug Master Plan Review Committee for Santa Clara County. She even spoke in 1987 before the U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing on children of alcoholics.

Then one day, while running a KAS training program in Santa Cruz, one of the trainees asked Tisch if she would be interested in doing a KAS training in the USSR. The woman was on the board of the U.S.-USSR Initiative, an organization that helped start and nurture Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) in the Soviet Union. AA had been growing there, and the country was just waking up to the effects of alcoholism on families.

"This was during the Gorbachev-Yeltsen time," Tisch says.

After a brief hesitation, Tisch decided to go to Russia. It was the summer of 1989. Her husband, Tom, would join her after two weeks, and they would tour the country together. Tisch received two visas, one for two weeks as an invited guest and the other for two weeks as a tourist.

The official at the Moscow airport didn't know what to do with two visas, so he told Tisch to simply put the tourist visa in her pocket and bring it out in two weeks, when she would be a tourist.

"My reception was fabulous," Tisch says. A man met her at the airport with a sign that had her name written on it so she could find him. He escorted her to his tiny car, tied her luggage and her boxes of curriculum on the top of the car and off they went.

Tisch stayed in two different homes for those first two weeks—one was the home of an older couple in Kiev. They spoke Russian, German and French, but no English. Tisch only spoke a little French, which she had studied in high school. "We couldn't have an in-depth conversation," Tisch says.

"I found out what it is like for immigrants to the U.S., when they have no English language skills and cannot read the signs," she says. "It's tough." She would like to have spoken more with the couple because the woman was a poet and her father was a well-known architect.

Tisch also stayed with a woman whose daughter was learning English, but there, too, she couldn't have an in-depth conversation.

Tisch recalls the way things were in Russia at that time. "The people I was staying with told me not to speak in the elevator," she says. Her hosts didn't want their neighbors to know they had a foreign visitor. Grocery stores had little on their shelves. "No hard cheese," Tisch says, "and maybe one tired-looking chicken."

"Everything seemed dark," Tisch says. "People wouldn't put many lights on in their house." She says she had the urge to go around and turn on more lights or put in brighter light bulbs.

But Tisch found herself turning on the light in other ways.

She says that back then the people in the USSR knew nothing about the disease of alcoholism. "We were teaching at a very rudimentary level," she says. "We were teaching them what a drink is and what it does to their body." (A drink is defined by the amount of alcohol the liver can process in one hour, which has nothing to do with whether it's beer, wine or hard liquor.).

"We explained that once an alcoholic is in recovery, it's never safe to drink again. They didn't know this," she says. "It wasn't denial, and they didn't get angry. They just didn't know." Surprising, because the group she was training were psychologists, law enforcement people, ministers and priests. She says she found the people there "so ready and so open."

Scales accompanied Tisch in 1991 to the USSR to help train police in the KAS model. "Then the police could help train others," Scales says. "The KAS tools are very effective," Tisch says.

One of the tools is role-playing, and one of the role-plays involves a family dealing with addiction. "When the audience watches the role-play, they feel the chaos and the pain of an alcoholic family," Tisch says. "It's very powerful." She says the USSR groups were deeply moved. She was amazed when one of them got up in front of the whole group and asked: "Would a country be like that family if the leaders were all alcoholics?"

After two weeks of teaching the KAS program, Tisch checked into the Cosmos Hotel in Moscow, anticipating the arrival of her husband and two weeks of touring. She got a call from the desk clerk to come down to the desk and bring her visa.

At the desk she was told, "We have no record of you entering the country." Then she was escorted to an area under the hotel, where she was taken to a room with a cell and an armed guard. A plainclothes man and a translator began interrogating her. "I was so scared," Tisch says.

After awhile the officials moved her to another, similar room, where she was interrogated again. This time the official was of a higher rank. "He made a call and then told me it was OK," Tisch says, but not before making her sign a statement that was written in Russian. "I couldn't understand a word of it," she says. But she spent the next two weeks touring with her husband, and there were no further incidents.

Tisch returned four more times after that, until 1992. By then the Soviet Union had disintegrated and Russia was in chaos. Tisch's visits stopped for awhile.

Through the 1990s, Tisch's knowledge of the affects of alcoholism broadened considerably. After learning about fetal alcohol syndrome and how alcohol consumption during pregnancy can cause learning problems for the child, Tisch became the primary mover for creating the first diagnostic clinic in the state of California for individuals exposed in-utero to alcohol and other drugs. She began learning about the connections between children growing up in alcoholic homes and a number of socio-educational problems—teen pregnancy, juvenile delinquency and addiction.

She traveled to places where they were having success with helping these kids and learned that these youngsters could be taught with a nontraditional educational approach to become healthy citizens. She served as co-chair of the Santa Clara County Community Learning Assessment Task Force to develop a model for early identification of children with learning differences. She founded the Family Education Foundation, a program that works with high-risk adolescents in the area of teen pregnancy.

What Tisch was learning was that youngsters can be taught living skills in such a way as to actually help prevent many of them from becoming addicted to substances.

By this time services for children and families of alcoholics had blossomed. Scales had become the executive director of the Legacy Foundation and the director of The Children's Place, programs in Redwood City dedicated to helping children of alcoholics and addicts.

Then Scales got a call.

Linda and Dave Sibley run a Christian organization that works with troubled children. The Sibleys were connected to OPORA, a Russian nongovernmental organization based in Moscow that was helping schools set up an addiction-prevention curriculum.

They asked Scales to help. Scales called Tisch.

Coincidentally, Tisch had been working with health teacher Amy Obenour on a "life skills" curriculum for all freshmen students at Saratoga High School. The curriculum would be implemented for the first time in the year 2000 for the purpose of preventing addiction.

"Through academic studies," Tisch says, "we've found that we can significantly reduce children's use of alcohol, tobacco and other drugs, including prescription drugs, if we teach them life skills." She says, though, that her curriculum was for average American youngsters.

Russian children would be a different story. "We looked at the Russian project with the idea that Russian classrooms were full of children of alcoholics and addicts and that there were fetal alcohol children in the mix, too," Tisch says.

Statistics were showing that the rate of alcoholism had grown in Russia. The World Health Organization (WHO) considers an average consumption of eight liters of pure alcohol per capita a dangerous level in a country. In Russia the average consumption is 13 to 14 liters. This finding doesn't include bootleg vodka.

WHO states that every liter over eight liters per capita per year will kill an additional 65,000 Russians annually. Male life expectancy in Russia went from 65 in 1990 to 57 in 1994. The book Health Promotion and Health Education in Secondary Schools of the Russian Federation found that Russian minors account for 29.1 percent of all registered drug abusers. (This number only reflects those who've asked for treatment.)

The first deputy health minister of Russia says, "Alcoholism threatens the very existence of the Russian nation and state."

At OPORA's request, Tisch returned to Russia in May of this year.

In spite of the bleak statistics on alcoholism, she found a Russia that is remarkably changed. "Things are brighter. People are optimistic. The shelves in the stores are filled," she says. "Designer stores have opened in Moscow. Restaurants are clean, well-lighted, and the service is good." Where there was only one McDonald's in Moscow before, Tisch says, there's now one in every neighborhood.

With the growth in alcoholism, AA has also grown. There are now some 200 AA meetings in Russia, plus Alanon (a group for family and friends of alcoholics) and Narcotics Anonymous groups.

In Russia, Tisch introduced a chemical dependency prevention curriculum to an impressive group—the head of the Russian Addiction Institute, the Russian delegate to the World Health Organization, the director of the Moscow Committee of Education, and to representatives of 10 Moscow school districts that serve 10,000 students in grades 1­11. "They are very excited about the program," Tisch says.

Photograph courtesy of Rosemary Tisch Rosemary Tisch (center) is training Russian psychologists, ministers, priests and other professionals to use an addiction-prevention program in Moscow schools.

OPORA will translate and implement the program in 10 Moscow schools. The project's stated goal is "to maximize children's potential to be healthy, responsible and addiction-free young adults by addressing the five aspects of health as defined by the World Health Organization: mental, physical, emotional, social and spiritual."

Education officials will be monitoring the results. If the program is successful, it will be used in more Russian schools. WHO is also watching the results. It would like to offer the program to other countries.

In any measure, the writing and training for this program is a huge task. "It's overwhelming and exciting," Scales says.

This week Tisch is returning to Russia to do more training, and she will likely go again in January.

It's a long, long way from a time and place when she was worried about her own daughters. She beams when she says her daughters have grown into healthy, happy young women.

These days Tisch travels to Russia with a work visa safely tucked in her purse. The only time she returned to the Cosmos Hotel was to do a training in the large conference room. "I haven't avoided staying there," she says, laughing. But her experience in the rooms under the Cosmos make for a great story.