Literaturnaia gazeta, May 6 1986, p. 15
Late-Soviet mainstream-press article about the AIDS epidemic (from the newspaper Литературная газета)
Perestroika
1986
This article from the latter years of the Soviet era (and the earliest years of perestroika) presents expressions of the aggressive Soviet conservatism regarding homosexuality (particular male homosexuality) and the perhaps counterintuitive coincidence of its Soviet posture vis-à-vis homosexuality with that of far-right conservatives in the West.
Published in the latter years of the Cold-War era, the piece places a lot of emphasis on the suggestion that the United States is the center, if not necessarily the original source, of the AIDS epidemic. While ultimately dismissed as unlikely, the hypothesis that the virus is a biological weapon engineered by the United States is referred to repeatedly. One of the longest-standing indictive tropes the ostensibly ultra-progressive, anti-imperialist Soviet political culture used against its primary post-WWII rival to the right was the American legacy of racism, first and foremost its enslavement of Africans. The statements quoted in the article make much of the implicit racism of circulating hypotheses, apparently of American origin, that the virus originated in Africa and spread from there to the West. If their anti-racist spirit aligns with forces on the left side of the American political spectrum, the stances vis-à-vis homosexuality expressed/ in the statements quoted in this article, which are in essence the stances of the assertively atheist late-Soviet officialdom, are remarkably coincident with those on the far right of the contemporary American political spectrum, which tended to object to homosexuality primarily on religious grounds. One of the experts quoted in this piece gives voice to the official Soviet position that, because homosexuality is still criminalized in the Soviet Union and not tolerated in Soviet society, the preconditions for the large-scale spread of AIDS did not exist there. Regarding HIV/AIDS as a disease effecting only marginal societal categories — gay men and illegal-drug addicts — and one not of concern to the broader public, was precisely the response of the Reagan administration, which relied heavily on the conservative religious contingent in the US as power base. Later, anxiety about alienating this population, whose religious morality was likely to be offended by any appearance of tolerance of homosexuality, would be blamed for the Reagan administration’s response to the crisis, which in turn would be cited as the cause of the disease’s explosive spread. Here the assertion that the broader population of the USSR is safeguarded against the mass spread of HIV/AIDS by Article 121 of the Criminal Code prohibiting male homosexual relations is made with the authority of the USSR’s Deputee Minister of Health Petr Nikolaevich Burgasov.
Russia
Literaturnaia gazeta, May 6 1986, p. 15