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Union, and that social problems like drug use and HIV have flowed into the
Baltic states in recent years from the Kaliningrad and St Petersburg areas in
Russia. The interesting thing is that many of the people in Russia and the
Baltic states who are involved in Task Force projects want to distance them-
selves from the problems addressed by Western initiatives of this sort. Not
only do Western governments and organizations occasionally 'ride roughshod
over Russia and the Baltics' (often with simplistic 'magic formulas' and little
knowledge of Russian and Baltic society, at that), they stigmatize the coun-
tries in their references to them as 'AIDS-ridden' and 'overflowing with drugs
and prostitution'. The general reaction seems to be something like 'OK, we
do have a problem at the moment, but it is not really something that is intrin-
sic to our society. We got them when the old borders were opened; they were
never really ours.'
Both these and the 'Cold Peace' attitudes previously discussed have several
points in common. When our interviewees asked 'Why are they so interested
in us?' they were alluding first to the putative interest of Western govern-
ments to exploit Russia or damage its competitiveness, and second, to the
perception in the West of Russia as a country that was particularly in need
of aid. We encountered various degrees of such displeasure with Western aid
in our interviews. Especially in the Baltic states, we occasionally met slight
indifference combined with something akin to surprise that the Nordic coun-
participants seem to be ambivalent about accepting this aid. On the one hand,
they recognized that they have a problem with communicable diseases in their
country and that collaborative projects might help. There is also the pecuni-
ary side, as they often profit financially from such projects (either personally
or as institutions). On the other hand, they did not like being the recipients
of foreign aid and saw it as a reflection of Western arrogance to focus on prob-
lems in Russia, especially since similar or even greater problems are found
in the West. A recurrent argument in our interviews was that HIV/AIDS
quite fascinating to observe how interviewees changed back and forth from
expressing gratitude and satisfaction with the Task Force projects, to scold-
ing the West for singling out Russia as a 'problem area' while being in denial
of its own problems. We recognize that the idea of human security, with its
emphasis on acknowledging the insecurities of vulnerable populations that
exist within all states and spread across state boundaries, could lessen the
barriers that result from a foreign aid recipient country feeling particularly
singled out or stigmatized. However, it is also fair to say that such an effect
from the human security concept can only be hoped for at an official level.
Concepts like 'human security', 'soft security' and the like are not likely to
outweigh the dominant 'Cold Peace' discourse in Russia, which is more or less
deeply rooted in most post-Soviet societies.
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