AIDS REACHES THE SOVIET UNION
Bohdan Nahaylo finds
the Soviet press nervous in dealing with the disease
IT SOUNDS almost like a joke. What is the definition of the new Soviet policy of `openness'? A play about the Chernobyl disaster in which one of the victims — an alcoholic — acquires Aids from a dose of radiation. Yet this is precisely what occurs in a controversial play about to open in Moscow. Aids — for long a taboo subject in the Soviet Union — is gradually being brought out of the censor's closet.
This in itself is a notable step forward in a state which is anything but progressive where such matters are concerned. Homosexuality was made a crime under Stalin, and is still punishable by five years' imprisonment. The very word 'homosex- ual' is rarely encountered in the Soviet press and, instead, homosexuals are often referred to as 'sexual perverts'.
The spread of Aids is'also linked with drug addiction and, until recently, the existence of a drug problem in the USSR was flatly denied. The official line was that homosexuality and drug abuse are pro- ducts of bourgeois decadence and are essentially alien to Soviet society. In recent months, though, the Soviet media have not only acknowledged the existence of a drug problem in the country, but have also launched what amounts to a campaign against it. The Soviet press has even revealed that in Moscow alone there are 3,700 registered addicts.
Clearly, the Gorbachev leadership con- siders that the drug problem can no longer be ignored and has to be fought with a campaign of public information. But as far as Aids and homosexuality are concerned, the Kremlin's policy of glasnost, or 'open- ness', has not operated nearly as well. The Soviet press has still to publish a serious article on homosexuality and it seems unsure what line to take as regards Aids. In fact, to the apparent embarrassment of some members of the Soviet medical pro- fession, the temptation has been to exploit Aids as a propaganda weapon against the Americans.
Significantly, the first articles warning of the dangers of Aids appeared in the Soviet press on the eve of the international youth festival held in Moscow in the summer of 1985. Their aim seemed to be to discourage Soviet youth from mixing too freely with Western visitors. At the time, the academi- cian Viktor Zhdanov, the director of the USSR's chief virology institute, explained in the Communist Youth League's news- paper that 'the disease is most often caught by those who lead disorderly sexual lives, or who indulge in perversions, or drug addicts using infected needles'.
Although Aids, or Spid as it is called in Russian, was depicted as an exclusively Western problem, news soon got out that the deadly virus had reached the Soviet Union. In August 1985, during a visit to the. Odzhinikidze sanatorium in Sochi, Western journalists were told by the chief doctor, Leonid Filarov, 'We have some cases of the disease and of course it is a problem. It is a difficult situation.' Although his disclosure was reported in the Western press, the Soviet media remained silent. In October, the Soviet deputy minis- ter of health, Petr Burgasov, reiterated that there were no cases of Aids in the Soviet Union. 'The reason for this,' he assured the readers of the trade union newspaper Trud,'`is that the problem is largely a social one, since it is connected with sexual promiscuity — this, alas, is tolerated in certain circles in the West, but it is unnatural for our society.'
A further twist was added to the story when, at the end of October and again in November, the influential newspaper for the Soviet intelligentsia, Literaturnaya Gazeta, published allegations that Aids is `Where I come from it would have been a rubber tyre.' the result of experiments with bacteriolo- gical weapons carried out by 'the Pentagon and the CIA'. Two sources were cited to substantiate these accusations: 'the reliable Indian newspaper Patriot', and the Church of Scientology. The allegation was repe- ated on 13 November by the USSR's Radio Peace and Progress in a broadcast to listeners in Asia, The following month the line suddenly changed. Dr Zhdanov publicly admitted that a small number of Aids cases — not more than half a dozen — had been registered in the Soviet Union. Moreover, on 11 December, Literaturnaya Gazeta published an interview with a leading virologist who stressed that, although the disease was first diagnosed in the US, the prevailing theory is that it originated in monkeys living in central Africa.
For a while it seemed as if Aids was finally going to be treated by the Soviet media strictly as a medical problem. In April and May, though, two Soviet news- papers once again sought to blame Washington for the appearance of the disease. On 7 May, for example, Literatur- naya Gazeta carried a round-table discus- sion in which Dr Zhdanov and several other specialists took part. The newspap- er's representatives attempted to steer the discussion in an anti-American direction, emphasising, for instance, that 'the Amer- icans have still not proved that Aids originated in Africa', as if somehow the onus is on them to do so. To their credit, the specialists by and large refused to be pushed into giving spurious or simplistic explanations.
The renewed Soviet allegations that Washington is responsible for Aids caused a minor international incident. The US ambassador to Moscow, Arthur Hartman, wrote to the two newspapers in question protesting that their treatment of Aids was `nothing more than a blatant and repug- nant attempt to sow hatred and fear of Americans among the Soviet population and to abuse a medical tragedy affecting people all over the world, including the Soviet Union': Neither paper published or replied to Hartman's letter and eventually on 17 July the US embassy in Moscow released copies of his complaint.
In the meantime even more contradic- tory information about Aids in the Soviet Union was made public. In June, Dr Zhdanov told the second international Aids congress in Paris that in Moscow alone the virus had been discovered in 12 out of 10,000 people screened by hii unit. Among them was a young girl who had been found to have Aids in 1984 after evidently contracting the virus through a blood transfusion in 1975. What is more, he made the startling revelation that, because 'she had no foreign contacts and lived outside the Moscow area, this shows that the disease existed in the country before 1974 at least'. Dr Zhdanov also announced that the Soviet Union was starting systematic screening of blood donors and trying to find what groups risked catching the disease. The Soviet press, however, failed to report this.
Not long ago, the Chernobyl disaster exposed the limitations of Soviet 'open- ness'. Since then the Gorbachev leadership has sought to amend the damage that was done to its image and credibility. If the Soviet treatment of Aids is anything to go by, 'openness' remains a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.
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