Welcome to world of AIDS: needle-prick narratives from the 1980s to the present day

Abstract

The paper dwells upon peculiarities of Soviet and Russian narratives about AIDS-infected needles that were circulating actively in the Soviet Union during the post-Olympiad period and still come up in the news today. In these stories, saboteurs put AIDS needles in the seats at the public transport and cinemas, infecting the healthy. Similar legends had been appearing in other countries from the beginning of the century, however, they became especially widespread among Soviet population during the Olympics at 1980, when a lot of foreigners, potential carriers of the dangerous disease, came to USSR. This fear of the «outsider», of contacting them, as well as fear of ostracism for such a contact, engendered such legends justifying the «innocent» Soviet citizen, exonerating them from responsibility for taking an exotic infection. Narratives transmitted in our time are more concise, they are preventive and they arise in connection with periodic outbreaks of epidemics within the country. There is also a collection of texts included in the paper - the legends about infected needles, recorded by the author in 2017-2018 - and an index including the following tale types: “Foreigners infect during the Olympics”, “Anonymous villains infect in a cinema”, “Infected blades in entrance hall handrails, elevator”, “Razor blades in the subway”, “Danger in buses, trolley buses and suburban trains, supermarkets”.