If not, why?
First I would say we need to look at the structural factors that might make it difficult for us to have a clear scope of the early HIV epidemic as it pertains to the Soviet Union.
The first structural issue (and this is a fairly obvious one) is that the Soviet Union was particularly good at obfuscating, and little information on the state and spread of HIV in the USSR was released to the West throughout the latter days of the Soviet Union. For example, prior to October 1988 the country only reported 1 HIV infection publicly, and this is likely a misrepresentation. What we do know (and this still holds true in Russia today) is that the primary transmission route of HIV in the USSR was injection, specifically the multiple use of syringes. The leads to the second structural issue: contemporaneously there was not only a shortage of syringes in the country in general but the USSR was significantly behind the West in deploying single-use (disposable) syringes; in other words, the common syringe you would see in the country would be old-fashioned, heavy, multi-use syringes that, at least in theory in clinical settings, would be sterilized between use. In practice, even in a clinical setting, this was not always the case. This lead to many of the earliest “outbreaks” of the virus. These were often among children who had been hospitalized in the same institution (significant instances of this occured in the cities of Elista and Volgograd). Because of this same scenario, there was also widespread co-infection with Hepatitis B, and Tuberculosis spread dramatically among these populations (TB is an opportunistic infection for advanced HIV-infection/AIDS).
Into the 90s, the fall of the Soviet Union and the entrenchment of widespread poverty and joblessness proved to be, as it often does, fertile ground for drug use. By 2000, there were estimated to be 2.3-4 million injection drug users in the country and 2001 had a higher incidence of new HIV infection than all previous years combined. I cite these more recent figures because HIV burden accumulates by a magnitude, and very high rates are as a result of the spread of HIV through the period you enquired about. The low penetration of HIV treatment and antiretrovirals too adds to the rates of transmission, as higher viral loads (common in untreated or poorly treated persons) lead to increased likelihood of transmission.
As to the crack question, I can’t really speak to that (like another commenter I’m not sure as to the relevance or relationship you’re drawing between it and HIV, other than a supposition that because HIV and crack emerged as major societal concerns at a similar time in the US they might have behaved analogously in the USSR). Otherwise, I hope this was helpful.
Seale, J R & Medvedev, Z A. Origin and transmission of AIDS. Multi-use hypodermics and the threat to the Soviet Union, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 1987, Vol 80(5), pp. 301-4.
Medvedev, Z A. The AIDS epidemic and emergency measures. (Evolution of AIDS policy in the Soviet Union, part 2) British Medical Journal, 1990, Vol 300(6729), p.932-3.
Schwalbe, N. HIV and tuberculosis in the former Soviet Union, Lancet, 2002, Vol 360, pp.19-20.
Edit: forgotten words, clarity
The Soviet Union had problems with AIDS and illegal drugs in the 1980s, but strict rules, mass testing and at-times brutal punishments kept those problems largely underground or under control until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Let's talk about illegal drugs first. In the latter years of the Soviet Union, there was a vibrant underground — particularly in larger cities like St. Petersburg and Moscow — trading in samizdat, illegal but prized media. This could be political stuff, but it was usually innocent. The gold standard was the VHS tape: Finnish TV broadcasts of Western TV shows would be recorded and re-recorded, passed from hand to hand through the samizdat networks. Think sneakernet.
I've talked with a few people involved in this trade — Alaska and Seattle were the back doors into this, thanks to direct Aeroflot and Alaska Airlines flights to the Soviet Union.
In addition to media, the samizdat providers were usually the people you went to for things ... a little less savory. One defector I've written about went to a samizdat guy who had a rack of humming VCRs in his apartment. He wasn't there for tapes, though. He was there to pick up a false passport and documentation he would later use to cross the ice to Alaska with.
Others, of course, traded in illegal drugs alongside their illegal tapes.
The key source for the Soviet Union's illegal drug trade was Afghanistan. Before, during and after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, that country and Pakistan were the world leaders in heroin and opium production.
The poppies that grow in Pakistan and Afghanistan supplied as much as 85 to 90 percent of all heroin sold in New York City in 1983, but there was more than enough to flow to the Soviet Union, too. It wasn't just heroin, of course. "Half of them smoke hashish," a Soviet defector said in 1985 of the invading soldiers.
Why? The answer's in the New York Times story I linked above:
According to Western diplomats and analysts of the Afghan situation in Pakistan and elsewhere, Russian troops in Afghanistan have turned to drugs for the same reasons that many Americans did in Vietnam: They are young, away from home constraints, bored, frightened and under fierce pressure to prove themselves. And many of the Russian soldiers in Afghanistan are said by the defectors to have a 10th-to-12th-grade education.
Soldiers returning from Afghanistan brought their drug problem with them, and the samizdat conduit provided the drugs they needed. With a steady supply available, the market for illegal drugs expanded. By 1986, when the Soviet press started covering the illegal drug trade significantly, the CIA estimated that there were hundreds of thousands of drug addicts nationwide in the Soviet Union.
By August 1990, the head of the KGB said publicly in Pravda that the illegal narcotics trade was worth 14 billion rubles. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, of course, these figures skyrocketed, and the growing illegal trade expanded from a quiet network into a mafia ...
The case of the AIDS epidemic is an interesting one. The United States identified the disease publicly as early as 1981, but at the first world AIDS conference in 1983, the Soviet representative reported no cases of the disease. (In comparison, 267 cases had been reported in all of Europe.)
In fact, the Soviet Union at first looked to AIDS as a propaganda tool. In 1985, the Soviet weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta published a story declaring that AIDS had been created by an American military laboratory. The Soviet Union subsequently provided scientific experts to lend credence to the charges. The next year, state television aired The Man From Fifth Avenue, a documentary that depicted New York City as "Gomorrah on the Hudson" and was at the time one of the longest examinations of American life ever shown on television in the Soviet Union. Drugs, squalor, pornography and poverty were prominently featured.
And yet, the Soviet Union could not hide its own problems. In December 1985, a Soviet publication acknowledged for the first time that AIDS existed in the Soviet Union, but the number of cases was fewer than "the fingers on one's hand." As late as October of that year, a deputy health minister had said there were no recorded cases in the Soviet Union. Previously, the party line had been, "'in foreign countries AIDS is primarily found among people who lead a dissolute sex life and are inclined to sexual perversions,' as well as among drug addicts who use unsterilized needles."
By 1987, when the United States had recorded at least 30,000 cases, the issue had "become a matter of concern at the highest levels" of the Soviet Union. That year, a Soviet law mandated testing of anyone suspected of carrying the AIDS virus and provided jail time for anyone who knowingly spread the disease. The same year, the Soviet Union began general testing of foreign visitors to the country. The testing was limited to those who intended to visit for more than three months.
In 1989, an outbreak of AIDS in the Soviet city of Elista garnered international attention. It was the largest publicly documented case and it came when 27 children and five women were infected through contaminated needles and blood.
By and large, however, the Soviet medical system either kept AIDS in check or at least under wraps until the collapse of the Soviet Union. After the collapse, of course, AIDS cases skyrocketed — and at least part of that increase may be attributable to the chronic underreporting of bad news in the Soviet Union.
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I recognize that this is not what you asked, but I feel that it is really relevant to your question, and that there will be many overlaps between your answer and my response, which will hopefully expand on the topic.
During the eighties, Poland suffered from a severe heroin outbreak. Polish Heroin or kompot, was invented sometime around the end of the seventies. In a very short amount of time, the drug became incredibly popular, as communist-enforced closed borders prevented another source of heroin to enter the country, but mostly because the poppy plant was so widely available (my dad recalls it basically being, "A weed on the side of the road.") The drug was extremely deadly, not only because of the rudimentary and crude ingredients (often times adding ammonia was the only thing done), but because there was little understanding of how the drug worked, leading to a large amount of people overdosing (living in Warsaw up until '86 when he left the country, my dad says he lost somewhere around thirty friends to overdoses, and that going when going to parties, seeing people doped up was more common than not.)
Relating to your question about HIV, I believe that it was not nearly as much of a problem, as I will show you with a quote in a moment, because being that the drug was so crude, it was vital that the user used the cleanest approach so to ensure the best high.
Przemek Hirniak: So hygiene and careful preparation were crucial?
W: You could do it carelessly. But if did it for yourself, you would do it the best you could, the cleanest, the coolest and with good solvent.
...
W: I was working at the time and I had to function normally. I didn't want to inject it. I was doing the same thing as Marek [the other person being interviewed]. I would spread poppy juice on toilet paper and roll it, then I would put it on my tongue and wash it down with tea.
Krzysztof Krajewski wrote an article about the change in the popularity of the drug since the end of communism, it seems alright, but I will refer to it, because I cannot find much other sources of this epidemic sadly.
The scale and speed with which the problem developed may be illustrated by some statistical data. In the year 1978 there were 18 officially registered cases of death resulting from overdoses of drugs. Four years later, in 1982, 102 such cases were registered, in 1986, 117, and in 1992, 167 (an almost tenfold increase during twelve years). Also numbers of addicts registered by the police because of their involvement in criminal offenses increased from 6200 in 1975 to 8385 in 1980 and 16675 in 1985. There is no doubt that such official data represent only a small fraction of the real dimensions of the problem which may be only very roughly estimated.
I agree with Krajewski, and would like to say that the numbers do not nearly give justice to how grand of a problem this actually was.
Three references I can give to you -
The Krajewski journal piece, which explains the much about the drug on the first two pages:
http://www.bisdro.uni-bremen.de/boellinger/cannabis/15-kraje.pdf
An extremely interesting interview between two former kompot addicts in Poland, weirdly translated, but still effective, which is where I got the interview questions from:
http://www.narkopolityka.pl/[termalias-raw]/discovery-made-gdansk-one-can-get-you-really-high
and a Chicago Tribune article from '86 which discusses the wide use of the drug:
Additional question if not answered in response to OP: were these viewed as social or moral short comings in propaganda and public resources?
Related question: How widespread where things like the AIDS and crack epidemics? Were they relegated to the US? North America? Just the Western Hemisphere? Etc?
Not a direct answer to the question but an important point that hasn't been mentioned. I'm gonna copy and paste my child comment from elsewhere in this thread:
The "crack epidemic" is a misleading term. Infact some argue it only is viewed as an epidemic due to the media's scare-mongering. While drug use was increasing in many countries, especially harder drugs, other countries didn't cover it as an epidemic, so it wasn't viewed as one.
May of the "facts" at the time have turned out to be twisted, or even completely made up in some cases.
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/publications/abstract.aspx?ID=170650
A similar example from a comparable country is looking at the UK in the '90s and the media and politicians attitude towards increased ecstasy use.
Since the '90s people have been more critical of this. Even mainstream papers have run stories that question whether there really was an epidemic in the US (specifically thinking of the NY Times and The Guardian (UK)).
Some more extreme commentators even view the Crack epidemic as deliberately manufactured problem to justify tougher treatment of lower class black people. While it is currently impossible to say if that is true it is certainly a fact that black people bore the brunt of the government crackdown.
http://www.hrw.org/news/2009/06/19/race-drugs-and-law-enforcement-united-states
Drug use rises and falls based off various factors and the term "epidemic" is misleading hyperbole because it is being used as an adjective to mean "wide-spread" but people associate it with the noun meaning an infectious disease that is spreading radipdly. I was gonna provide some statistics where, by the definition of the US crack-epidemic, we can see more so called epidemics. Sadly the information I based this off seems to no longer be available online (or at least I can't find it on my phone) but I used the UNODC's reports on world drug use if anyone can find them.
Now, in the UK at least, most claims of illegal drug epidemics are dismissed as scare-mognering and pandering to worried parents. Except for papers like the Daily Mail who run many "scare" stories. However the abuse of prescription drugs is sometimes called an epidemic and isn't being dismissed as scare-mongering.
I havn't gone into anymore detail as it isn't a direct answer to the question, just a relevant point but I can write more and dig up some more articles and statistics if anyone is interested or feels like I havn't explained enough.