Hidden Fissures and Epidemics in Plain Sight: The Common Paths of Syphilis and HIV in Russia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper examines and compares two epidemics in Russia: syphilis in the first quarter of 20th century and HIV in the early 21st century. The author considers both epidemics from the standpoint of the social sciences by applying the concept of vulnerability to underline the social and cultural factors that cause one social group to be more susceptible to a disease than another. The article focuses on gender-based vulnerability and maintains that both epidemics follow a single, structurally similar scenario. The author shows that the vulnerability of women during both the syphilis and HIV epidemics depends upon the clear continuity in the way gender roles and expectations and the relationships between men and women were structured during the early days of the USSR and in present-day Russia. The article analyzes how stigma arises and how in both eras inequality of power and expectations for men and women formed the main channel for transmission of disease. The paths along which modern epidemics spread have been mostly inherited from the epidemics of past centuries, and in particular the HIV epidemic is following a pattern derived from the syphilis epidemic. More precisely, the current epidemics exploit the same vulnerability of certain groups, vulnerability rooted in the past and still manifest in the norms and relations in contemporary culture and society where one group is much more exposed than the other. The article relies on historical sources, in particular Lev Friedland"s book Behind a Closed Door: Observations of a Venereologist published in 1927, for its account of the syphilis epidemic in the early 20th century and on the author"s own research into the experience of women living with HIV in contemporary Russia.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".