December
23, 2012 - MOSCOW — The orphans’ faces can be called up on screen, their photos
the size of postage stamps, along with a few data points and a note about their
personalities, often just a word or two.
Kirill P., age 6, from Rostov in the south — hazel
eyes, brown hair — wears a sweatshirt with dragons on it and is described
simply as “sociable.” Angelina F., 16 months, from Khabarovsk in the Far East —
gray eyes, brown hair — is actively developing an interest in her surroundings
and “responds to any caring and affection.”
Maksim N., who just turned 11, is “mobile, restless,
outgoing, likes to play games.” This is Russia’s
“federal database of orphans and children
without parental care,” a publicly available electronic repository of the
forlorn and forgotten — more than 118,000 of them.
Child-welfare advocates say that it is orphans like
these who are likely to be hurt most if Russian lawmakers succeed in banning
adoptions by Americans — a move intended as retaliation for American criticism
of Russian rights abuses. The advocates say a ban would end up further fraying
a disastrously overwhelmed foster care and orphanage system
here.
“Members of Parliament today say, ‘Russia Without
Orphans,’ ” said Boris L. Altshuler, the chairman of the advocacy group
Right of the Child who also serves on a Kremlin advisory panel, his voice
sputtering in anger as he described the incongruous slogan of a bill that would
make it harder to find homes for the children. “They know the slogan. The motto
is very good, but there is nothing in their minds behind it.”
The bill’s rapid advance, in less than a week, has
ignited an emotional debate here, with critics of the ban using the moment to
focus attention on Russia’s troubled child protection system, even as
supporters say they are trying to keep children out of foreign hands.
More than 650,000 children are living without parental
supervision in Russia, according to statistics maintained by the Ministry of
Education and Science, with more than 500,000 in foster care and more than
100,000 in orphanages — including the children in the federal database, which
is available to prospective adoptive families, even though some of the children
are not eligible for adoption.
By contrast, the
Children’s Bureau of the Department of Health and Human Services in the United
States has reported only about 400,000 living without parents, and only
about 58,000 living in institutions or group homes, in a country with a
population more than twice Russia’s.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Altshuler described the
proposed adoption ban as the latest in a long series of bad policy decisions
related to housing, education and social services, resulting in a system that
actually encourages parents in financial trouble to cede custody of their
children to the state, at least temporarily.
While more Russian children are adopted into homes in
the United States each year than any other foreign nation, the overall numbers
are relatively small — fewer than 1,000 out of 3,400 international adoptions in
2011. More than 7,400 were adopted by Russian families that year, according to
the education and science ministry.
Still, Mr. Altshuler said a ban would be devastating.
Some of Russia’s orphanages are badly overcrowded, with children
institutionalized throughout their young lives, and many are ill-equipped to
deal with the wide array of physical and mental problems common among the
children, including fetal alcohol syndrome and congenital disabilities.
“A thousand kids per year will not go to the United
States and will stay in Russian institutions with all the tragic consequences,”
he said. As for members of Parliament, he said: “They are cannibals. They kill
the country and they kill the children.”
Supporters of the ban say the United States government
has not done enough to protect adopted Russian children and has not lived up to
an agreement on heightened oversight that went into effect on Nov. 1. Though
there is a strong nationalist streak in their arguments, occasionally ugly
cases have generated international attention: including a 7-year-old boy sent back to Russia alone by his
adoptive mother in Tennessee in 2010.
Yekaterina F. Lakhova, a member of Parliament and
sponsor of the ban, said that years of working on child welfare issues led her
to conclude that the international adoption process is overly profit-driven,
and she said Russians should take care of their own.
“If the country is self-sufficient, if it believes in
itself, you have to do it here,” Ms. Lakhova said, in an interview published by
the news site PublicPost. “No normal, economically developed country gives away
their children. I am a patriot of Russia.”
In many ways the insistence by some officials that
Russia should handle its own child welfare echoes efforts by President Vladimir
V. Putin to restore Russia’s standing as a world power after the decline following
the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In September, the Kremlin ordered the United States
Agency for International Development to end its operations here after two
decades of partnership on public health campaigns, civil society initiatives
and other programs mostly paid for by American taxpayers.
In explaining the decision, Russian officials said the
country no longer needed the help, even though public health advocates said
that many programs, like those fighting tuberculosis and H.I.V., were sorely
lacking.
The Kremlin has also announced plans to end a
partnership with the United States, known as the Nunn-Lugar agreement, to
dismantle nuclear, chemical and other unconventional weapons, also largely paid
for by Americans, saying Russia would handle the effort on its own.
While relatively little public protest greeted either
of those decisions, a huge outcry followed the proposed adoption ban. The bill,
set off by a new American law punishing Russians accused of human rights
abuses, cleared the lower house of Parliament on Friday and is considered
likely to pass the upper house. Mr. Putin, who
defended the proposal at his annual news conference last week, has not yet
said whether he will support it.
But other senior officials have spoken out against the
ban, dividing the government. Public criticism has been even stronger.
The newspaper Novaya
Gazeta has collected more than 132,000 signatures online against the ban.
“Signatures are needed to protect Russian children from vile members of
Parliament,” the newspaper posted on its site.
In another newspaper, Argumenti i Fakti, the journalist
Yulia Kolesnichenko published
an article describing her experience as the parent of an adopted 3-year-old
son, Timor. “Orphanages at least in the form in which they exist in Russia now
are just evil,” she wrote.
Last week, Ms. Kolesnichenko’s husband, Aleksandr, also
a journalist, was one of eight questioners to confront Mr. Putin on the
proposed adoption ban at the annual
presidential news conference.
Noting that Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev had
called for the government to improve the child-welfare system, Mr.
Kolesnichenko asked, “Could you tell us in a little more detail what steps and
programs these will be? My personal three-year experience shows that our system
treats adoptive parents as a threat on the one hand and a burden on the other.”
Mr. Putin offered no specifics, and snapped back, “I
totally disagree with you.” At another point, he asked if Mr. Kolesnichenko
enjoyed hearing about occasional cases of adopted Russian children who became
victims of abuse or even died in the United States, which lawmakers have used
as a basis for the proposed ban. “Are you a sadomasochist?” Mr. Putin asked.
In her article, Ms. Kolesnichenko described how the
couple already had a biological teenage daughter and could have had more
children but chose to adopt a boy who did not look “Slavic,” knowing that his
chances of being welcomed into a Russian family were slim as a result. Timor
has Central Asian features — his biological mother is believed to be from the
former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan.
“We came to adoption only because at some point we
understood that all the rest was practically useless,” Ms. Kolesnichenko wrote,
describing a sense of futility visiting orphanages with gifts for children and
donations of diapers.
“Yes, Mr. President, Russian hospitals and orphanages lack Pampers, and I am afraid few think about the hygienic needs of teenage girls,” she wrote, adding, “They are absolutely an artificial model further damaging psyches of those who have already been traumatized.”