Far too long to quote, but an extremely depressing read. Excerpt:-
I can't fathom how people are still fucking sharing needles anywhere in the world, let alone Russia, but the common populace there are apparently stunningly ignorant of facts about HIV, AIDS, and most frightening in the long term, it's effects on society.The first days of spring are electrifying in St. Petersburg. The winters are hard and dark and long, and when the light finally returns each year thousands of people pour onto Nevsky Prospekt and into the squares in front of the Winter Palace and St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Petersburg has always been more open and more openly European than other Russian cities, and the day I arrived this spring was the first on which men in shirtsleeves could fling Frisbees across the endless avenues. I settled into one of the many coffee shops along the Neva River—they are a recent innovation—and noticed something else that was new: a large stack of pamphlets advertising an H.I.V. support group. aids is not a subject that people talk about much in Russia. Even though the epidemic is spreading here more rapidly than anywhere else in the world, there are virtually no public-service ads on television about it, and the government spends next to nothing on prevention, treatment, education, or care. This year, the entire budget for H.I.V.-related matters is a little more than five rubles per person, less than the cost of a pack of cigarettes.
St. Petersburg has been a rare exception to what seems like an official policy of ignorance and neglect. The city is responsible for the first program in Russia that sends buses to deliver information—and clean needles—to people who cannot be reached in other ways. It also pays for health workers to travel to schools, hospitals, and even construction sites to inform people about their choices. Condoms are available, and often free. Almost two years ago, St. Petersburg opened the country’s first aids hospice. There is still only one. Funded with local money, it sits not far from the city’s Botkin Infectious Disease Hospital, one of the largest such facilities in Russia. The hospice is small; it has just sixty beds, and they are not filled. The director, Olga Leonova, is a valiant woman with an impossible job: trying to assure patients that they have a future while convincing everyone else that aids threatens to turn Russia back into the Third World country it was before the Second World War. “You can see it getting worse every day,’’ she told me as we walked around the floor one morning. “It’s not just drug addicts now.’’ For years, H.I.V. infection in Russia was driven almost exclusively by shared needles. “We are seeing pregnant mothers and people we would never have even tested in the past.’’
Dr. Leonova is a middle-aged woman with chestnut hair and hazel eyes. She wore stylish striped pants under her lab coat, and her fingernails were painted gunmetal gray. She is proud of her ward, and enjoyed introducing patients. One of them, a frail boy with sandy-colored hair, had tried to kill himself, because he thought he had no hope of living. With drugs provided by the hospice, he would soon go home. Cases like his are common. “Most of our patients have nothing when they get here,” Dr. Leonova said. “They are dirty and hungry. The first thing we do is take their clothes and burn them.’’ We had returned to her office, and while we talked she stood at the window, staring at the birch trees. “I worry that aids will send us over the edge—that we will become a country too sick to cope. Most people don’t get it. Many of those who do understand have left. My five closest friends now live in the United States and Israel. My generation has no children. Husbands are dead. And now the young . . . ” Her voice trailed off. Dr. Leonova is an optimist, but she knows that the illness she encounters each day is a sign of an even larger problem—one that threatens Russia at least as seriously today as the Cold War did a generation ago. “We are on the front line of a war,” she said. “This city was under siege by Hitler for years. We lived through Stalin. We have to prevail, and I think, somehow, we will. We don’t have a choice.’’
From Tambov, the old Soviet breadbasket, to the Pacific port city of Vladivostok, and even in Moscow, which has become a world showcase for conspicuous displays of wealth, Russians are dying in numbers and at ages that seem impossible to believe. Heart disease, alcohol consumption, and tuberculosis are epidemic. So is addiction to nicotine. You won’t see many pregnant women on the streets; Russia has one of the lowest peacetime birth rates in modern history. Long life is one of the central characteristics of an advanced society; in Russia, men often die too young to collect a pension. In the United States, even during the Great Depression mortality rates continued to drop, and the same has been true for all other developed countries. Except Russia. In the past decade, life expectancy has fallen so drastically that a boy born in Russia today can expect to live just to the age of fifty-eight, younger than if he were born in Bangladesh. No other educated, industrialized nation ever has suffered such a prolonged, catastrophic growth in death rates.
You mean the famines in the 1900s, which killed millions of peasants while at the same time Russia was the leading grain exporter sucking Entente's balls, did not happen? Do you live in a parallel world, where parallel history is told?