More than 80 per cent are under 30, affecting large swathes of the working population. This compares to just 30 per cent in Western Europe and North America.The crisis in Romania is heightened by the Aids legacy of the former dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. One of the most striking aspects of the epidemic is the age of those infected. “With a bigger Europe and the whole movement of people we are looking at the same problem as in Africa – but for us it will affect the middle classes because they are more mobile.”The majority of new infections in Eastern Europe are through heterosexual sex, with vertical transmission from mother to child also accounting for a rising number. Dr Chris Pitt, the local director of the World Vision charity, said the current crisis threatened to spill over into the EU – particularly if the country joins, as planned, in 2007.”This is like a timebomb waiting to go off,” Dr Pitt said.

Both Russia and Ukraine have experienced a 40 per cent increase in HIV infection in the past two years.Aid agencies now fear that Romania, which has porous borders with Russia, Ukraine and Moldova, has become the new front line in the fight against Aids in Europe. As many as 1.9 million people in the region could now be living with the virus.The increase has been caused by a sharp rise in the number of intravenous drug users in Russia and Ukraine as well as the growing traffic in young prostitutes, most of whom are passing through Romania on their way to Western Europe. Previous estimates had suggested 230,000 people in the region were newly infected in 2003, but revised UN Aids figures put the number more than 50 per cent higher, at 360,000. An explosion in new HIV and Aids cases on the fringes of the European Union could engulf Europe in an Aids crisis as big as Africa’s, a leading aid organisation has warned. The Russian government turned down requests for financial help, so a logging business using rusting machinery formerly used by inmates was set up to pay for the project.. Also, obtaining permission to visit has involved a morass of bureaucratic paperwork.All that, says Vladimir Demidov, managing director of Dula Tours, will change “We will be able to organise these visits properly. There will be no problems, the local government is totally behind us,” he said “Nothing has been done to preserve these sites.

But it’s so cold that nature has preserved them perfectly.”Most visitors have been Russians We want to make this an international destination. People in the West know about the gulags and on the way up the river they can enjoy the wildlife and landscape of Siberia.”At Perm, on the western edge of the Urals, and the model for the fictionalised Siberian city where Dr Zhivago ended up in Boris Pasternak’s novel, a museum has been built by local historians on the site of a former camp. We have to wait for a new generation of leaders to rise up.”. Wimar Witoelar, an author and columnist, said: “Under Suharto, all the outstanding civilians were killed or persecuted or marginalised. They say this would be a grave setback for the young democracy.Some observers attribute the appeal of the two former generals to a desire for strong leadership Others blame the limited talent pool. Recently he declared that democracy and human rights “cannot become absolute goals, because pursuing them as such will not be good for the country”.Mr Wiranto, meanwhile, has a bedrock of support despite being indicted by a United Nations-backed tribunal for crimes against humanity in East Timor in 1999.Activists who risked their lives to topple Suharto are horrified that the democratic process now looks likely to yield a president with a military background.

Last year Mr Yudhoyono helped to plan the military crackdown on separatists in Aceh. But human rights groups note that he was one of Suharto’s hand-picked generals, and accuse him of responsibility for an army-backed assault on the offices of an opposition party in 1996, which left five people dead At the time, he was military chief in Jakarta. Western countries like him too, thanks to his robust stance on tackling terrorism in Indonesia, a hotbed of Islamist extremism.Despite distrust of the military by Indonesians who suffered for 32 years under the dictatorship of Suharto, who was brought down in 1998, Mr Yudhoyono’s past does not appear to be a handicap. So ardently is he being wooed by businessmen, intellectuals and religious leaders that the Jakarta Post described him as “the new cute girl at school”.