AIDS: More Questions than Answers

This article from the very late Soviet era—and the earliest years of perestroika—is typical of the Soviet Union’s aggressive conservatism on matters of sexual orientation, particularly male homosexuality. Apparently at odds with the revolutionary-utopian social values that inspired the Soviet project, this posture is in fact consistent with the sclerotic, backward-looking ideology of “really existing” socialism after Stalin—and recalls the natalist, socially conservative policies of Stalin himself. Strangely enough, this entrenched homophobia also aligned the late Soviet Union with its Cold War enemy, the United States, whose far-right conservatives were similarly embroiled in moral panic about the “dangers” of homosexuality. “AIDS: More Questions than Answers” appeared in the prominent cultural weekly Literaturnaia gazeta (Literary Gazette), which had been in print since 1830. Typically for the anti-Western rhetoric of the late Brezhnev era, the piece named the United States as the center, if not necessarily the original source, of the AIDS epidemic. Though ultimately dismissing it as unlikely, the authors repeatedly returned to the notion that the virus was a biological weapon engineered by the United States. In a return to a longstanding theme in the Soviet Union’s performance of ultra-progressive anti-imperialism, the article indicts America’s history of anti-Black racism by emphasizing the absurdity of Americans’ assertion that the virus originated in Africa. At the same time, the article’s homophobia—an official Soviet stance oddly consistent with American conservative Christianity—gives its American counterpart a run for its money. One of the quoted “experts” voices the official Soviet position that, because homosexuality is still criminalized in the USSR and not tolerated in Soviet society, the preconditions for the large-scale spread of AIDS do not exist there. Regarding HIV/AIDS as a disease affecting only “marginal” societal categories—gay men and those addicted to illegal drugs—rather than a global public health concern was precisely the Reagan administration’s response to the AIDS crisis in America. The Reagan administration’s callous indifference to the AIDS epidemic—which contributed to its explosive spread—proceeded from worries about offending conservative Christian voters by any appearance of tolerance toward homosexuality. In the Literaturnaia gazeta piece, the assertion that Article 121 of the Criminal Code, which prohibited male homosexual relations, was keeping the Soviet public safe from the mass spread of HIV/AIDS, rests on the authority of the USSR’s Deputy Minister of Health, Petr Nikolaevich Burgasov. Published on the very eve of perestroika’s cautious rapprochement with the West — and specifically with the Soviet Union’s arch rival the Unites States — this article seems to document anxieties about a breach of Soviet society’s isolation from the potentially corrupting influence of Western culture and the dangerous, destabilizing potential of exposure to the same, instantiated in the issue of tolerance for sexual pluralism.