Fear of AIDS Highlights Prejudice Against Blacks, Soviet Paper Says

Russians often throw glasses away after African students drink from them and many mothers warn children to stay away from blacks, partly because of a widely held belief they carry the AIDS virus, a newspaper said Saturday in a ground-breaking article on prejudice.

Komsomolskaya Pravda, the daily newspaper of the Young Communist League, published both a series of letters by black African students studying in the Soviet Union and printed the results of a survey about attitudes toward blacks.

“Out of 100 Moscow schoolchildren, only 16 said the Africans were the same type of people as the Russians, and only one said the blacks were good, kind people,” the newspaper said.

“Of 850 Muscovites who were questioned, one-third said racial and national prejudices are common to many people, and 50% said prejudices exist but are not common to many people, and only 11% said there were no prejudices,” it said.

But the most graphic illustration of the extent of prejudice in Soviet society was provided by a sampling of letters from black African students.

“African students complain that sometimes people throw glasses away after the blacks have drunk from them, because (of beliefs that) all the Negroes have AIDS, or mothers shout to their children to run away from Negroes because of AIDS,” the paper said.

Acquired immune deficiency syndrome, a major health problem in many African nations as well as the United States, has only recently become a concern for health officials in the Soviet Union.

The newspaper blamed the Russian prejudice “on our low cultural level, false stereotypes about developing countries that do not change and the difficulties of Soviet life” that make many citizens resent Soviet aid given to some African nations.