This panel will explore the AIDS crisis during the tumult of perestroika, centred around Rustam Alexander’s shortlisted book AIDS in Soviet Russia: A Story of Deception, Despair and Hope. Alexander draws on archival research and personal testimonies to uncover the human impact of the AIDS epidemic: the targeted disinformation, the disregard for life and civil rights, and the networks of solidarity and gay activists who sought to tackle the crisis amid governmental failure.
Alexander will be joined by Dan Healey, expert in history of sexualities and gender in modern Russia and Peter Tatchell, human rights campaigner and AIDS activist. Together, they will shed light on these hidden histories of illness, exclusion and activism; on the relationship between the queer community and the state; and the intersection of healthcare, politics, and the rights of marginalised people. The discussion will be moderated by Claire Shaw, a specialist in the history of modern Russia.
This event is part of the Pushkin House Book Prize Festival. Festival Passes are now sold out.
Rustam Alexander is an author, a columnist for Novaya Gazeta Europe, historian and independent scholar specialising in the social and cultural history of Russia and the Soviet Union. His research focuses on the histories of homosexuality, HIV/AIDS, mental health, and sexuality in the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia, combining archival research with the study of personal testimonies to illuminate subjects long neglected in Russian and Soviet historiography. He received his PhD in Soviet history from the University of Melbourne. His work seeks to make rigorous historical scholarship accessible to wider audiences through both academic and non-fiction writing. His books include AIDS in Soviet Russia: A Story of Deception, Despair and Hope (Manchester University Press, 2026; There Was Sex: The Intimate Life of the Soviet Union (Individuum Books, 2025); Gay Lives and 'Aversion Therapy' in Brezhnev's Russia, 1964–1982 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024); Red Closet: The Hidden History of Gay Oppression in the USSR (Manchester University Press, 2023); and Regulating Homosexuality in Soviet Russia, 1956–91: A Different History (Manchester University Press, 2021).
Dan Healey is Professor of Modern Russian History at St Antony's College, University of Oxford. His research focuses on the history of sexualities and gender in Russia and the Soviet republics, medicine and psychiatry, and the Gulag. He is the author of numerous books, articles and chapters on these themes, including the first full-length study of LGBTQ+ Russian history, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago, 2001). His other books include Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917–1939 (DeKalb, 2009) and Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi (Bloomsbury, 2017). He co-edited Russian Masculinities in History and Culture (Palgrave, 2002) and Soviet Medicine: Culture, Practice, Science (DeKalb, 2010). His most recent book, The Gulag Doctors: Life, Death, and Medicine in Stalin's Labour Camps (Yale University Press, 2024), was shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize 2024.
Peter Tatchell has been campaigning for LGBTQ+ and other human rights for almost 60 years, since January 1967. During the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Tatchell became a pioneering AIDS activist. He authored the world’s first HIV self-help guide, co-founded ACT UP London, and successfully pressured global health ministers to oppose discrimination against HIV-positive individuals. He staged the first ever LGBTQ+ rights protest in a communist country, East Germany, in 1973, which resulted in his detention and interrogation by the secret police, the Stasi. He has been arrested twice in Russia, when he went to Moscow to support efforts by Russian members of the LGBTQ+ community to hold a Gay Pride parade. In 2007, he was badly beaten by neo-Nazis and Russian nationalists, with police connivance. He was also arrested near Red Square in Moscow on the opening day of the football World Cup in 2018, when he staged a LGBT+ rights protest against the torture and execution of LGBTQ+ people in Chechnya.
Claire Shaw is Associate Professor in the History of Modern Russia at the University of Warwick. Her research focuses on the history of disability, the senses and the body under Soviet socialism. She is the author of Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community, and Soviet Identity, 1917-1991 (2017) and a member of the editorial board of the Slavonic and East European Review.
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