Placing Blame for Devastating Disease

In October 1985 a long article entitled "panic in the west: or, what Hides Behind the Sensationalism of AIDS" appeared in Literaturnaya Gazeta, the official journal of the Soviet Writers Union. Shortly thereafter the journal printed a detailed interview on the same topic with Professor S. Drozdov, the director of the Research Institute of Poliomyelitis and Encephalitis in Moscow. The theme of both articles was the same—AIDS was the result of a virus, man-made by the biological warriors at Fort Detrick, Maryland, in conjunction with the scientists at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. That blame for this dread disease was placed on a political adversary is not very surprising in light of the freeze on American-Soviet relations during the summer of 1985. More fascinating are the associations evoked by the political cartoonist for Pravda, D. Agaeva. His cartoon represents an American general paying for a test tube of AIDS virus supplied to him by a venal-looking scientist. Swimming about in the test tube, representing the power of the AIDS virus, are a multitude of tiny swastikas; the dead, the victims of AIDS, appear in the cartoon as concentration-camp victims, their bare feet echoing the death-camp photographs of bodies stacked like cordwood with only their feet showing.