I realize I'm going to take quite the contrary view on this issue today, and that's consistent with my refusal to take "progressive" or "libertarian" lines on the left or right as they appear, and as their most vocal spokespersons demand conformity.
I haven't completely made up my mind about this sensitive subject, and I'm happy to hear persuasive arguments on both sides, but I think a lot of this debate on social media takes place without a lot of the facts in front of people anymore.
The Russian Duma — an undemocratic organ that was not elected by any elections that were recognized by the regional body OSCE as sufficiently free or fair — has drafted and passed a law barring foreign adoptions of its children. That's their right, as there is no international law guaranteeing the right of other people to adopt another country's children for any reason or no reason.
While I'd prefer that they only temporarily halt adoptions while they investigate some of the tragic stories that have occurred in the United States of adopted Russian children dying of neglect or being murdered, they've decided to completely stop them, and Putin is likely to sign the measure into law.
It's important to realize that this action by the Duma not only comes from years of controversy over these American cases some Americans might not have realized, it also comes as a retaliation for the Magnitsky Act for Accountability, passed last week by the US Congress after long controversy itself. That's, of course, disgusting.
This Act sanctions Russian officials considered to be responsible for the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who died in pre-trial detention when uncoving corruption by the Russian state on a tax matter for a Western firm, and other similar cases of journalists and human rights activists assassinated for their work. Unlike other actions that only represent a sense of Congress, this is a voted piece of legislation that incorporates into US law visa denials and asset freezes for those persons found to engage in human rights violations of Russians.
Lacking any actual equivalent cases in the US of US officials that have allowed lawyers to die in pre-trial detention or journalists who have been assassinated whose cases they have not prosecuted, Russians now want to highlight "Americans who have violated Russians' rights" — and first up is the case of the orphans. They also promise "assymetrical response," which means that anyone could end up on the list — I could end up there because I blogged something critical about Russia reprinted in the Russian press, and haven't paid my library fine.
Most of the liberal intelligentsia in Russia is taking a position of appalled horror, seeing it as yet another unjustifiable action by the hated Putin. Irina Yasina, a liberal writer of the perestroika era who has maintained her civic positions today, challenges Putin and Medvedev, both of whom are wealthy and whose wives don't work and who have sufficient housing, to adopt several Russian children themselves and set a good example.
The reason the liberals in Russian — and the US — are taking this position of indignation is because they see Putin — who is rightly called a despot responsible for many human rights offenses — as harming little children by not letting Americans take them who would care for them.
The situation in Russia with the children's homes is little improved since the Soviet era, by some accounts, although by others, there are places that have become better, and NGOs who work hard to monitor them and improve them. But by and large, there are too many "orphans" in Russia who in fact have living parents who are alcoholics, drug addicts, mentally ill, or in jail. They either voluntarily give up their parental rights or have them removed by courts. This happens way more frequently than it would in ACLU America.
There's an awful lot written on all this, and one can read very well documented reports on child and infant mistreatment at the UN Committee on Child Rights, but let me try to capture it.
To understand the horror of Russians and their children, you have only have to watch the episode of a Russian reality-TV show called "Potato Peels," which contained all the horror that copying American reality-TV shticks into Russian reality could be expected to bring. Two parents responsible for the death of their toddler — who for some reason were still at large and had not been charged — a point naturally raised by the reporters on the show and some local politicians — were brought before the audience.
It seems that Mom put a huge boiling pot of potatoes on the oven and wandered away and left it to boil — all too common a scene in Russia and in the emigration as we all know. In Russia, basic safety lessons are not only not taught, they are aggressively, viciously resisted sometimes by those around the Russians who try to reason with them.
So in the cramped kitchen of the small apartment in the worker's building, a little girl playing on a bed dangerously close to the stove somehow managed to tip the huge boiling pot over on herself and fell to the ground, scalded horribly. Finally the mother noticed her little girl writhing in agony on the floor and tried to think of what to do with her. For some reason, the equivalent of calling "911" didn't immediately occur to her — this might have been because the child began to go into shock and was therefore quiet — and that may have been mistaken as seeing the problem as not so serious.
So instead, at the advice of one of the babushkas who was down the hall, she put potato peels all over the girl's body. This was thought to act as a poultice on the skin and draw the heat out as well, according to folk wisdom.
Finally, another neighbour apparently suggested that this home remedy just didn't seem to be working so well, so Mamushka called the skoraya, the ambulance, which took awhile to get to the house, and went with her daughter to the hospital. There, a doctor examined her with irritation and condescension and told her that the case wasn't serious and she should go home. Bewildered, the mother asked whether the doctors shouldn't take a second look as her skin was starting to peel, but they dismissed her.
She took her daughter home, and she died that night.
The reality TV show, narrated by a young Russian man in a colourful cravate and sprayed hair-do, involved bringing together various townspeople — the ambulance driver, himself with a medical education, various local politicians, a doctor who wasn't in the hospital, various parents and neighhours who were eyewitnesses.
And all of these people began, in collective brow-beating fashion perfected by Russians over decades of Soviet history and Russian history before that, to jam on the two hapless parents for their idiocy. The father, who appeared to be possibly one of those sullen alcoholics who will never admit any wrong, belligerently kept saying that it wasn't his fault. The mom, who herself seemed to be possibly suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome or simply years of being beaten by an alcoholic husband, kept defiantly saying that the doctor had told her to take the child home — why wasn't anyone questioning the doctor.
The ambulance driver, a smart-mouthed educated young man, kept focusing on the idiocy of the family for believing in potato peels. The neighbours, miffed that they should be thought too folksy, claimed that they did everything to help, even pounding for half an hour on the door to try to follow up and convince the woman to take her child to the hospital, but got no response. Throughout this appalling show, the camera kept panning back to the photos of the little girl, and the cramped kitchen, with the iron cot and the colourful coarse Russian blankets, the aging stove and the giant pot. No one seemed to be able to do any kind of investigative angle involving the doctors at the hospital. Once again, you had to conclude: Russians can be awful, but their authorities are worse.
If you watched "Potato Peels," your instinct would be not only to fight the Duma's law, but to insist that Russia turn over all its children to outsiders, especially in the hinterlands, because outrageous things like this happen there. But while there are stories like this that are too common, there are many Russians who take perfectly good care of their children, and even over-protect them, and sometimes even that over-protection is the cause of their harm. Russians can be particularly prone to superstitions and New Age culty ideas about health precisely because after decades of Soviet propaganda and lies and the exposure of the false state ideology, they both have trouble trusting anything, and in that brittle state, also often become vulnerable to trusting cultish ideas. So you get perfectly educated and reasonable people doing things like feeding a toddler only turnip water, and not milk, merely because he has a rash on his face, and they believe that he must have terrible allergies that are going to give him some serious life-threatening condition, and then he develops vitamin D deficiency and gets bowed legs. Everyone knows about the over-scarifying Russians do with disease — the word for strep-throat in Russian is angina because Russians believe every sore throat case turns into a heart attack. I know adoptive parents who didn't believe the strange catch-all diagnoses on their children's charts like "oligophrenia" — and there was a widespread belief that doctors write down terrible diseases as hypotheticals, and then only remove them if they have definitively ruled them out.
That this could happen in a modern, supposedly non-third-world country has confounded many a visitor, but it has to do with lack of trust in the state and in the media.
What's important to realize is that awful stories that Russians know to be true of their own homeland have repeated on our shores, and that is what the Duma is reacting to — it's part reality, and part mirroring.
o an American mother is reponsible for murdering her adopted Russian child — this is a story that sent chills through the hearts of many Russians, already angry at Americans for other things incited in them by state propaganda — there are multiple cases like this in fact.
o an American father is responsible for leaving his son, an adopted Russian child, in the back seat of a car and forgetting about him there, so that he died of overheat and exhaustion — something that all too often is tragically the case as we learn from the Washington Post — the context for the case of Dima Yakovlev.
o an American mother, unable to cope with her adopted Russian son, put him on a plane back to Russia, although there was no one but police to receive him on the other end. How she was able to do that with airport authorities is a mystery, but it's obviously a stark and vivid case.
In response to this crisis as it is now perceived, Russians are passing around Facebook touching stories about how American parents so love their Russian adopted children, that even at great expense and trouble, they have them stay fluent in Russian. One tear-jerking mother is described as wanting — selflessly, as a hero-parent — to enable her child to speak Russian to his birth mother and decide with whom he wants to live, when he is old enough to make the choice.
I've known a number of families with adopted Russian kids — in this line of work where I am a Russian translator and consultant, naturally I see a lot of them. I see hero-parents, and not-hero-parents (as I wrote about a similar, and not unrelated problem of hero-parents around Aspergers). Russian children can have profound problems induced not only by their stays in abusive institutions, but from their heritage — usually fetal alcohol syndrome, but sometimes greater environmental stresses than even American experiences, i.e. Chernobyl, toxic factory waste.
I know parents that keep up the Russian, and I know some that don't. I remember one afternoon looking at my daughter, whose father is Russian, and who is fluent in Russian because our relatives kept her up in it, playing with her friend from an adoptive family, who didn't ensure their child kept up her Russian because they couldn't see any reason to. There was kind of a wordless, sad silence around the two as the girl said she didn't remember any Russian — and it made me sad, although she has gone on to a well-adjusted and successful life in good schools.
At Russian parties, one hears about the parents who adopted Russian kids and had horrible problems with them, but don't really want to talk about it; or those who do want to talk about their adopted children with profound disabilities that they had not expected, and wear you out. Like I said, not every parent is a hero, nor should they be; society has to help.
Which society could help better? I have no doubt that it's America, not Russia, but American families can become very isolated in their problems, and Russians, while more prone to abuse, look out for each other more.
"Russia can be cold," the writer Russian Zinovy Zenik once said to me. "But America is colder."
Russian sentimentality about children and their cruelty to children can be two sides of the same coin. Some of their problems in adequately addressing this issue involve the inability to prosecute and address the crimes of Lenin and Stalin and other atrocities of their past.
Yes, it's a terrible time, when NGOs are being forced to reject foreign funding to avoid being called foreign agents, and adoptions are halted. Yet Russia is a member of the G8 and the WTO. It has the oil riches to take care of the vulnerable in its society. NGOs still allowed to operate will increasingly have to confront their government with its neglect, and address their other societal problems, such as drug addiction that led to 30,000 deaths last year.
Repealing the Magnitsky act isn't the answer, as that law directly confronts the impunity and failure to prosecute human rights crimes that in fact was operative in the case of the girl treated with potato peels and disdained by a doctor.
The greatest advocates of foreign adoptions are the educated intelligentsia in America whose work takes them to foreign countries. Journalists have gone in orphanages and had their hearts so moved that they adopted children on the spot. It's a very emotional issue, and an emotional issue that intellectual people bring endless scientific facts to, in vary laboured debates. I'm aware of all that.
Even so, when there are a number of very serious cases of neglect among these adoptees in America, when the children themselves require more care than either Russian authorities or American adoptive parents seem prepared to admit, it's a question that should be debated more openly and thoughtfully than it is. Even if Putin is outrageously exploiting this issue for the worst retaliatory reasons, we should ask whether foreign adoption is in the best interests of the child.
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