Authors

Katerina Suverina¹;  ¹ University of Konstanz, Germany

Discussion

The spread of HIV/AIDS continues to be notoriously silenced out of the public and private spheres in contemporary Russia, similar to when it first emerged in the 1980s. That is despite the fact that the number of identified cases has been rising continuously and remains over 1% of the country’s population, thereby making it an epidemic. The medical officials publicly referred to the recent UNAIDS report as a “propaganda provocation”, making it clear that the issue of the HIV epidemic is more a matter of politics and ideology than medicine or public healthcare. At the same time, the history of Russophone HIV/AIDS activism remains unwritten and exists only in the form of fragmented memories. However, these memories can offer a different perspective on contemporary Russian history, particularly on the establishment of the early hybrid Putin regime during his first two terms, still remembered as ‘democratic’ by the general public and journalists. In this presentation, I will focus on the memories of the largest Russophone HIV activist group, Front AIDS, and show how stigmatizing policies targeted at the most vulnerable groups, such as people who use drugs (PWUD) and people with HIV, which, in my opinion, should be regarded as an early precursor to the later conservative turn and the patriarchal ideology of traditional values that was a central element of Putin’s conservative politics. I will describe how the authoritarian political system and the normalization of violence were established primarily through the recreation of neo-Soviet punitive normativity, which is directly linked to the stigmatization of the aforementioned vulnerable groups. I will also show how the practice of collecting these memories also gives us the opportunity to create a complex and diverse narrative of resistance that helps to challenge and revise established contemporary Russian history.