The 240 inmates of Moscow's last prison for alcoholics walked out free men on Thursday -- free but far from cured.


Their faces had lost the battered, swollen look of the heavy addicts, their eyes were bright, but prison terms of up to two years in a Soviet-style labor camp had done little to quench their thirst.


"How can you be cured if you don't want to be?" said Anatoly Puzhakov, 56, waiting in a sunlit courtyard of the prison to hear his name called up. "I can't quit drinking. I can't live any other way."


Right outside the gate, one former inmate celebrated his release with his wife by doing shots of vodka. Around the corner, a man lay unconscious on his back.


By Friday, Russia's 171 labor camps for alcoholics, once housing 35,000 inmates, should be closed down, on orders from parliament and President Boris Yeltsin.


The move ends one of the major anomalies in the Soviet prison system, but some doctors and recovered alcoholics warn that there is no alternative drug rehabilitation available to battle the spread of alcoholism.


"After the closure, the addicts will just end up on the street," said Nikolai Shutov, chief physician at Hospital 19, which specializes in drug rehabilitation. "Where can they go? Nobody has considered that."


"You need to change the system, not destroy it," he added.


The camps, set up in 1968 as Labor Therapy Prevention centers, or LTPs, were supposed to cure alcoholics, provide cheap labor and hide a major embarrassment to Soviet-style communism.


The camps received a large influx of drunks after 1985, when the Soviet government tried to crack down on alcoholism. Refusal to get cured was grounds for imprisonment, but most were picked up on the streets for disorderly conduct or reported to the police by relatives and neighbors.


The chief doctor of the last LTP in Moscow, Leonid Stanev, said he had offered psychotherapy and medical care, but inmates insisted they worked from 8 A.M. to 5 P.M. and got no care at all.


Although alcohol was strictly banned in the camp, Puzhakov and others said they were able to do shots on weekend furloughs and at the prison's lock-making factory.


The camp's warden, Nikolai Sheptalov, called the closure "too hasty."


"Here, they are protected by the state," Sheptalov said. "There, they have to find a way to live. Not everyone is able to do so."


Colonel Rudolf Volzhanin, in charge of the labor camps at the Interior Ministry, predicted that many former inmates would soon start stealing and end up in standard prisons.


According to government data, alcohol is a factor in 38 percent of all crimes, with battery and murder of spouses figuring prominently in the statistics.


There are no plans or funds for any additional rehabilitation clinics to take the place of the labor camps, said Anatoly Shevchenko, narcotics expert at the Health Ministry.


The number of beds in state-run drug rehabilitation clinics, set up by large enterprises that employed the patients as cheap laborers, has been cut in half since 1989 because of lack of funds, Shevchenko said.


There are only two drug rehabilitation centers in Moscow, housing 3,300 addicts for an average of two to three months, in a city of about 10 million people.


Until recently, most addicts at Shutov's Hospital 19 were brought in by the police and forced to stay.


Now, Shutov said, patients are free to leave, but many homeless beg to be allowed to stay on.


Shutov said the hospital offers psychotherapy and a range of other medical services, but he made little attempt to claim significant success in getting his 800 patients off the bottle.


"But for a few months," he said simply, "that's 800 fewer battered wives, 800 fewer drunks on the street."


A growing number of private firms offer clinics or home care to those who can afford it. Recovery, a firm that opened in 1990, uses a U.S. program called Alcoholics Anonymous to help drinkers and drug users kick the habit.


The program prescribes intensive therapy, from 9 A.M. to 11 P.M., with psychologists and recovered alcoholics as counsellors. Over a third of its patients stay off the bottle, said Alexander Krivenko, deputy head of the center.


The Recovery center is designed for 30 in-patients and a larger group of part-time participants, and until recently, it had waiting lists.