When values kill. How the Russian Ministry of Health triggered an HIV epidemic

“Sensing some incomprehensible danger, one goes to Sokolinaya Gora today, to the address published by the media,” wrote the Ogonyok magazine in 1987. There, at Infectious Diseases Hospital No. 2, a community-funded office for anonymous HIV diagnostics opened after the USSR detected its HIV patient zero: a national of South Africa. Professor Vadim Pokrovsky received patients in a private consulting room. He sponsored the initiative to set up HIV diagnostics labs all over the country, and there were already about a hundred of them in late 1986. Dr. Pokrovsky referred to foreign students and people registered with drug abuse and venereal disease clinics as risk groups. “We expect active input from the police in identifying hotbeds of drug abuse, prostitution, and homosexualism,” the professor said at the time.

From the onset, Dr. Pokrovsky demanded that the government allocate money for prevention and treatment, warning that the lack of these measures would result in an epidemic in Russia – but up to this day, the Ministry of Health is yet to support his alarmist sentiments, although Russia's infection rate has long been close to that of Equatorial Africa.

With just a couple of rooms, Dr. Pokrovsky managed to scramble together enough equipment and reagents to diagnose HIV with high accuracy (by the then standards). The lab was manned by students, who worked voluntarily. One of them was Alexei Mazus, a first-year student at a dentistry college (Semashko Moscow Medical Institute). Years later, his official biography would suggest that he ostensibly founded this lab. Mazus later created the Anti-HIV Center for AIDS Prevention. It is hard to pinpoint the nature of the center's activities in the 1990s, as they received no media coverage except for occasional statements by Mazus, who criticized the existing laws for being too protective of HIV-positive people's rights. Mazus later re-registered SPID.Ru, the only Russian website on HIV and AIDS at the time (SPID is an acronym for AIDS in Russian), to his own company, and by the early 2000s, he had become friendly enough with the Moscow city administration to associate his center with a government organization. After that, Mazus launched an aggressive PR campaign, becoming a regular keynote speaker on HIV in the Russian media.