Russian orphans: Govt takes custody when parents can't cope
PECHORY, Russia: Dima Yakovlev lived at the orphanage here and so did Maxim Kuzmin. Both were adopted by American parents, and, five years apart, both died in the United States. Two little boys from this out- of-the-way town, they became symbols for those who successfully agitated to stop the flow of Russian children into American homes.
Something must be deeply wrong if two defenceless children from the same small orphanage both die within months of their move to America, said Pavel Astakhov, Russia’s children’s ombudsman and the country’s primary opponent of international adoption.
And, in a country where someone can always be blamed, prosecutors here in the Pskov region, along the border with Estonia, have opened an investigation into employees of the local child- custody agency. Criminal charges, possibly trumped up, could result, but they won’t get at the heart of what really ails Russia’s Sovietlegacy child-welfare system, critics say.
“The system does not work,” said Yulia Yudina, who runs the Moscow-based adoptionadvocacy group Change One Life. Looking for scapegoats in Pechory will ruin innocent people’s lives and won’t solve the problem, she said. “It’s doubly disgusting.”
Russia has 600,000 “orphans,” although 70 to 90 per cent of them have living birth parents. This is Russia’s third great wave of orphans, the first two coming on the heels of the two world wars.
A number of factors are at work, but central to all of them is the lack of assistance to families under stress. Russia traditionally has one approach when dealing with disabled children and children of parents who cannot cope: The state takes custody.
A majority of orphans end up living with relatives, but the orphanages are also full. Children’s advocates stress two points: The country must do much more to try to keep children with their families, and when that fails, it should concentrate on promoting adoption and foster care for toddlers and older children.
“But the system doesn’t want to be transformed,” said Boris Altshuler, a longtime advocate for dissidents and children. “It doesn’t want to let children out. The people who run it are protecting a system that destroys Russian families.”
Children in Russian orphanages are almost certain to have at least one disability. They can be congenital or related to alcohol consumption by the mother during pregnancy — or have arisen because of the loss of emotional contact that comes with life in a state orphanage.
Every month in an institutional setting has a physical impact on the brain, said Chuck Johnson, head of the National Council for Adoption, in an interview in Alexandria, Virginia. “Every child will come with some developmental delays.”
Adoptive parents, he said, need to know they can get help after the adoption, because they will need it. In Russia, there is scarcely any. As many as 10,000 Russian orphans are returned to orphanages every year by frustrated adoptive parents, according to Lev Shlosberg, an opposition politician in the city of Pskov, the regional centre.
About 60 children, all under the age of four, live at the orphanage here in Pechory. (After their fourth birthday, they move to a different institution.) Closed to the media, it was described by volunteers and local child advocates as being in good repair, with decent physical equipment and a caring, if lowpaid, staff.
Natalia Vishnevskaya, the orphanage director for the past 30 years, knows that is not enough. “Children suffer from an insufficiency of attention, of individual attention,” she said in an interview. There aren’t enough teachers here to provide that. So she has become a strong advocate for adoption and that distinguishes her from many of her counterparts in the country. It’s one reason that international adoption agencies, working through the childcustody agency, found several hundred matches in Pechory over the years, including Dima and Maxim.
Dima, renamed Chase Harrison, was left in a car in a Virginia parking lot and died in 2008; Maxim, by then known as Max Shatto, died this year while playing in his backyard in Texas.
Their deaths, according to those who are familiar with the orphanage here and the system of adoption, were nothing more than a horrible coincidence. They haven’t shaken Vishnevskaya’s commitment to adoption.
“The main thing is that our children will have loving families,” Vishnevskaya said. “It doesn’t matter what country they go to.”
But now, in Russia, it does matter. American adoptions have been prohibited since January, and Astakhov said that all foreign adoptions should be banned. Russia, he said, should stop “selling” its babies.
“That’s an absolutely irresponsible statement,” Vishnevskaya said, “especially on such a painful issue.”
Even Astakhov’s representative in the Pskov region, Dmitri Shakhov, cast doubt on the accusation of babyselling. “That would be an international crime,” he said. “If there are any facts — well, we don’t comment on statements by federal officials.”
( The United States has barred adoptions from Guatemala and Vietnam over allegations of babyselling, but no Russian case has aroused suspicions, according to an American government official.)
Alina Chernova, a Pskov journalist who writes about children’s issues — and volunteers at the Pechory orphanage — said that the upsurge in Russian orphans stems from the Soviet collapse but is handled by a system that is still largely Soviet in its outlook. — WP-Bloomberg