Health and human security - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 168

dismayed at the way that Task Force members from the West had 'carved up'
the Russian regions among themselves at a meeting: 9 ' it evoked a feeling of
amusement ( chuvstvo yumora ) in me - it is, after all, our country ( eto zhe nasha
strana )!' The way he recounted this story, however, reflected exasperation
rather than amusement. Despite the ambiguity in his tone, he clearly resented
Westerners coming to Russia and 'doing as they like'. Representatives of dif-
ferent Western countries quarrelling over which Russian regions are 'theirs' is
a good illustration of this. Finally, a topic raised by a few of our interviewees
concerned the general ignorance of the foreigners who come to Russia with a
view to reform its post-Soviet health sector: 'The Americans walked in - no,
they trampled in - without the slightest knowledge about how things work
here.' Despite the divergent attitudes outlined above, a marked majority of
our interviewees expressed a desire to distance their regions and states from
the origin of the communicable disease problem.
'Not really ours': distancing oneself from
stigmatizing problems
One noteworthy feature of our interviews was the tendency of the Russian and
Baltic project participants to make comments, without being asked, about
the origin of the problems addressed by the Task Force. A Russian HIV/AIDS
specialist began his project presentation by pointing out that HIV came to
the Russian Republic of Kalmykia in the late 1980s, when a Soviet sailor
returned home from a visit in Angola. Discussing the HIV/AIDS problems
in Kaliningrad Oblast with us, another Russian civil servant was at pains to
emphasize that the virus had not originated there: 'it's actually from Poland'.
In Arkhangelsk Oblast, we were informed that the virus was 'imported' from
the Volga and St Petersburg areas, so the region itself was originally 'clean'.
Our interviewees in the Baltic countries generally identified Russia as the
source of most of the problems addressed by the Task Force. They also said
that some of the underlying issues contributing to the spread of communica-
ble diseases had been 'imported' to the post-Soviet area from outside. Drug
addiction is an obvious example, frequently referred to in our interviews, but
prostitution was also placed in the same category of problems by one of our
interviewees:
Prostitution is not really a Russian phenomenon. In Russia, we treat our
women [well and give them] good food and drinks and flowers, and what
happens afterwards … who knows? But we don't pay them to have sex
with us. That's not how things are done in Russia.
The interesting thing here is not so much whether it is 'true' that a problem
is imported. It is widely known that HIV did not originate in the Soviet