AIDS and the End of the Soviet Union

In the mid-1980s, HIV and AIDS were initially dismissed in the Soviet press as infections that could only be contracted by individuals engaged in ‘deviant’ or ‘promiscuous’ sexual behaviour. However, in late 1988 a different narrative took hold when the mass nosocomial infection of children occurred in hospitals in Elista, Volgograd and Rostov-on-Don. These tragedies — and the Soviet government’s lack of action in their aftermath — crystallized the public perception that the spread of HIV and AIDS was primarily due to government negligence and the deficiencies of the Soviet system. In this context, civil society organizations sprang up across the USSR to critique the government’s AIDS response, address the country’s inadequate healthcare infrastructure, and formulate their own solutions. This article explores how this played out in Moscow and Riga in 1989–90, where grassroots AIDS action was inflected by the local political context and indicative of the broader disillusionment with the Soviet government. Because of the specific conditions of Soviet society, AIDS action was more centred on the collapse of the social contract between citizens and the government in a socialist welfare state, and less about the de-stigmatization and liberation of marginalized groups.