Aids And Punishment

Add a new danger from AIDS: the Gulag. A Soviet decree issued last week specifies prison sentences of up to eight years for spreading the disease and five years for exposing another person to the virus, even if the infection is not passed on. The law empowers authorities to conduct compulsory AIDS tests on those suspected of carrying the virus, and any foreigner who refuses to be tested may be expelled.

Though the Soviets have not recently repeated their claim that AIDS is a strain of germ warfare concocted by the CIA, they do maintain that the disease is essentially a Western problem because of the allegedly low incidence of both homosexuality and intravenous-drug use in the Soviet Union. According to the TASS news agency, 1 million tests have been conducted among blood donors and people in high-risk categories. Out of this number, the agency said, there have been 102 positive tests, 80 of which were obtained from foreigners.

Dr. Valentin Pokrovsky, a Soviet AIDS specialist, said in June that only seven patients, six of them foreigners, were undergoing hospital treatment for AIDS in the Soviet Union. About 30 foreigners had been treated and deported, he told TASS, while six more would be sent home later. He also said that the one Soviet patient, a homosexual who had caught the disease during a trip abroad, had infected 14 others, presumably all Soviets, who had been treated in a hospital and sent home but were being kept under observation.

Some press reports suggest that Soviet authorities are using the disease as a means of dissuading citizens from having contact with foreigners. If so, the strategy is probably working. On one occasion, people in the Siberian town of Bilibino objected to the use of a bathhouse by a group of Western journalists. & African students in Moscow, already feeling somewhat lonely, report that the AIDS scare has made life even more isolated. "I used to hear people say 'Monkey' behind my back," says a Senegalese student. "Now I hear them say 'SPID,' " the Russian acronym for AIDS.