USSR's first HIV-positive man still enjoys life at the age 53

Nikolay was born in the city of Kaliningrad where he later graduated from the department of law at the university and began working at the police. He got married at the age of 23. He says the relations with the future wife were spontaneous. They divorced in 13 years when their daughter and son grew up and the couple understood they still failed to understand each other properly. Nikolay says his ex-wife is a scandalous woman: she made complaints about him to the police chiefs and said he was gay. That was a real scandal in the 1980s in the USSR, when homosexual relations were regarded as a blatant violation of human morality, so Nikolay had to stop working as a policeman.
   
In 1987, Nikolay had some health problems and was taken to a hospital where blood tests showed he was HIV-positive, a really sensational and terrible diagnosis for that epoch. In Kaliningrad, Nikolay was officially registered as HIV-positive and immediately felt that people began to shun him. Then the man was sent to a Moscow hospital for three months where another four HIV-positive patients stayed. At that time Nikolay believed that such a terrible diagnosis was quite normal for some African country, not the Soviet Union, but still he took the awful diagnosis rather optimistically. First HIV-positive individuals in the USSR were basically homosexuals. As a rule they received the information about the terrible diagnosis adequately as they know AIDS is typical of gays. Doctors wanted to find out the source of the infection but it turned out that Nikolay was the only HIV-positive man in the Kaliningrad Region. He guesses that he caught the infection after a short romance with a student from South-East Asia being on a business trip to Moscow. As for himself, Nikolay is absolutely sure that he has not made at least one man HIV-positive.

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- In 1987, I was sentenced to four years of imprisonment for the risk of spreading AIDS and for homosexuality. In the USSR people would be thrown into jail for homosexuality without any court hearings.

- How did other prisoners treat you when they knew about the diagnosis?

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