Russian Orphans, 2006. Photo by Luke Hoersten, who wrote, "This girl was hell bent on getting
adopted. She kept saying thing's like "I'm so good and
pretty" in Russian."
So Putin has everybody right where he wants them — he's taken little orphan children hostage in his "symmetrical" response to the Magnitsky Accountability Act, passed earlier this month.
In that, he's little better than the gunman in the Newtown, CT massacre, except that monster may have mental illness and pharmaceuticals for an excuse; Putin doesn't.
Except, the Russian sense of self-righteousness and American perfidy is undying. As Simon Shuster of Time says:
From Putin’s political party, United Russia, one of the main
parliamentarians behind the bill is Alexei Pushkov, the chairman of the
Duma’s foreign-affairs committee, who also hosts a popular political
talk show on one of the government’s propaganda channels. Dapper and
prim, he met me that day in his office, which is decorated with a
portrait of Putin and a little porcelain statuette of the Chinese
communist leader Mao Zedong. In explaining the need for a Russian
response to the Magnitsky Act, he claims that Washington has long
exhausted the moral authority needed to preach about rights violations
and must be taught some humility. “In Russia, not only the political
class, but the public at large has grown tired of the U.S. lecturing on
human rights,” he says. “The hypocrisy has gone through the roof. It’s
even funny sometimes,” he adds. “It’s like an alcoholic coming to you
and saying, I’ll help you get sober.”
Okay, go ahead and teach some humility, big guy. Meanwhile, there are the "baby boxes" in Russia for drop-offs. Sure, US cities have laws that women can drop off babies at police and fire stations with no questions asked, too, but usually they're in a car seat, you know? And Americans might leave their babies to die in cars, but usually it's loving parents who do this by accident (including a Russian orphan, in one case) — not crazies and drunks who leave babies to freeze at a bus stop, you know?
The good news is that there is still a strong Russian intelligentsia, and they are speaking out about this, louder than they have ever been able to before, due to the advent of social media.
Andrei Babitsky, a journalist himself once taken hostage by Chechen militants (or Russian intelligence pretending to be Chechen militants?), writes that Putin has taken children hostage because he could — they are weak. In a Facebook post titled "Calculus of Contempt" (increasingly Russians go to Facebook to publish articles), he says:
First, it is important to understand that the law passed is an act of terrorism, that is murder (the threat of murder) of innocent, unarmed people with the purpose of making a political statement. Neither the political purposes or the terroristic methods are in fact even disputed by the participants in this process. The statistical nature of the consequences of the law could provide some hope, but can't serve as a justification for terrorists. The most helpless group of citizens of Russia, most deprived of their rights, has been chose as the target of this terrorist act — which, together with snatches of news about the details of the vote — enable us to surmise that this was carefully planned.
Ilya Ponomaryev, the Russian parliamentarian who is one of four who
voted against the the adoption law and apparently the only one to speak out
formally against it, says there are 1,500 Russian children,
including 49 with serious disabilities, whose adoptions by U.S. parents
are awaiting approval in Russian courts.
"Today the State Duma for all practical purposes issued a grave verdict
for these seriously sick children, who, I am sure, will languish in
Russian orphanages for the rest of their lives without proper love and
care," Ponomaryov said in an interview after the vote. "Their last
chance is Putin's veto."
Besides Ponomaryev, Dmitry Gudkov, Sergei Petrov and Valery Zubov voted against the law; 446 others voted for it. (The Magnitsky Act also had 4 votes against it, and 92 for it in the Senate). Babitsky provides more — an anguished account of how the liberals supported nationalist Navalny's call to support the Just Russia (SR) party and Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) lists in the parliament — and now this result, and the consequent sense of betrayal by liberals.
The good news is also that even though Putin and his police, open and secret, have made short work of a lot of the protesters on the streets in the last year, people are fighting back. As Masha Lipman says in the New Yorker:
This piece of legislation, informally referred to as “anti-Magnitsky
bill,” was promptly branded by critics as a “scoundrels’ law” (zakon podletsov
remained the most popular hashtag on Russian Twitter earlier this
week). It has divided Russian society in a manner unheard of in the past
decade. Novaya Gazeta, a non-government newspaper, called for
people to sign a petition against the amendment; in just a few days,
over a hundred thousand people had signed. The outrage went far beyond
the usual suspects—liberals and what can be vaguely described as the
community of protesters. Some of the highest-ranking officials, such as
the foreign minister and the speaker of the upper house, expressed their
disagreement with, or at least doubts about, the ban on adoptions. Even
the Russian Orthodox Church is split: Archpriest Dmitry Smirnov, in
charge of the Church’s relations with the armed forces, expressed ardent support for the ban, while Bishop Panteleimon, in charge of the church’s charities, suggested that decisions having to do with children had been guided by “political opportunism.”
When people take children hostage, especially really vulnerable and fragile children who might die, people develop different points of view — reflecting the age-old conundrum of how to deal with the abusive authoritarianism of Russian leaders. Some think you should accommodate them and try to work out a deal quietly, usually by offering them something they want; others think you should confront them publicly with naming and shaming, litigation, and international action at the UN, OSCE, and so on. Usually frustrated Western governments have to use a little of both methods depending on the circumstances.
Of course, the law might not pass (although Putin has already announced this week that it is "tough, but fair"), or not pass in such a draconian form, or grandfather out cases half-way completed, and then people will think Putin is actually reasonable, even though he has to deal with troglydytes in the Duma.
Then they will have fallen for a common KGB-style trick, which we saw recently at WCIT, the telecommunications conference on the Internet, where the Russians larded up the Western media with claims that they were backing down from a harsher version of an agreement to control the Internet and were going to settler for a weaker version. They didn't, in fact. Or like how they recently rolled out a deputy foreign minister to say that Russia conceded that Assad's days were numbered and maybe the opposition had to be helped, but then doubled back a few days later, already AFTER talks on these complex issues, and claimed, oh, no, they didn't really mean that.
BTW, aside from being an old KGB method, it's a Silicon Valley technique with a name, as I've just learned from David Opolon on TechCrunch.
He replies to many people who think it was just poor publication relations, or a "blunder" in drafting the new TOS that has Instagram grab all the rights to sell your photos:
This is not a blunder, rather skillful use of a negotiation technique
called "anchoring". FB/Instagram are effectively negotiating with their
users over "fair" ToS. They release outrageous ToS to generate an
outcry, then roll back to something more reasonable but harsher than
would have been accepted in the first place. When people criticize the
2nd version, the press has moved on and they can say "we've listened to
our users".
Actually, anchoring is not just a negotiation technique (although it is that, too) but a "cognitive bias".
If this bad law persists, however, and the 1,500 cases are not grandfathered, what we will inevitably see, and from Carl Levin (D-MI) and others who favour more the accommodationist approach in negotiating with Russia, is an "I told you so" and then ultimately, vocal peace activists and anguished parents half-way through a halted adoption process will appear and say that Magnitsky should be rolled back or altered.
The reality is, the same criminality and the same impunity that leads Putin to preside over this awful process of the new orphans law with his hand-picked Duma in his controlled elections is what led US law-makers to pass the Magnitsky Act, and its ultimately part of what we have to put in place to roll back the thuggishness of the Russian mafia-state.
But given this awfulness, why am I not really so four-square behind having Russian adoptions in the first place? I actually tend to sympathize a bit with some of these outraged "Ya, kak mat' i zhenshchina i patriot" types featured in the Russian media now actually think that developed countries should take care of their own children and not export them.
First, I point again to the deaths of the children in America that the Duma can rightfully exploit. We're told that there are 60,000 adoptions so far (other counts put it at 45,000 — I wonder if there is a confusion between "Russia" and "Ukraine" or "Uzbekistan" or something). And out of these many tens of thousands of adoptions, there are "only" 19 deaths. Well, .03% or .04% is still a large number, especially because every individual counts.
To be sure, some of them would have likely died in Russia, too — and we'd possibly see more deaths out of the group of 60,000.
Because there's another statement to make, of course, and that is that lots and lots of babies and children die in Russia every year from neglect, disease, accident and murder at the hands of their parents. And we should care about all of them, not just those fortunate to get adopted by more affluent foreigners.
Even so, shouldn't we try everything possible to adopt children out of this terrible place?
I simply feel ambivalent about this because I think the task with Russia is to make it the kind of place where so many children don't get put up for adoption, and don't get harmed. It might seem as if tackling the smaller piece of this problem is better than tackling the big undoable piece, but I have a challenge to all those Russian intellectuals screaming about this law now: what are you doing to make sure Putin funds the civil society groups that already work to help children, and helps create even more? Why are there more orphans now than in war-time, and how and who is inspecting the orphanages? Why aren't more foster families being organized? "Children" is a topic that even draconian Putin will let you work on if you don't do it with foreign funds, so go ahead. Get some of the oligarchs to spend more money, too. It's your problem.
I see this as a bit like Jackson-Vanik, which basically only dealt with the question of emigration as a solution to the problem of Soviet totalitarianism, and then wound up able to accommodate only Soviet Jewry, and a few other groups like Pentecostals and Volga Germans. The task of trying to make it safer for Jews to remain in Russia and be accepted at university and be free of antisemitism was a lot, lot harder — but still needed to be tackled. Wouldn't Russia have been better off with a half million Soviet Jews in it now, bringing their creativity and values to the task of rebuilding Russia?
Does that mean you tell people to wait 10 years until things get better, or don't leave because they owe it to build a country that has been so nasty and brutal to them? Of course not. I'm all for people voting for their feet. Fortunately, people in Russia can do this now. But not if they are under 18 or disabled, so we have to help. And I think that starts not only by pressuring Putin to resume adoptions, but getting the Russian intelligentsia to take care of Russian children.
People develop these solutions of adoption or emigration in good faith thinking it's better to save some people rather than leave all of them to suffer, but then it does inevitably delay reform and accountability.
The Russians created this situation — by having so many sick and orphaned children, by suspending the adoption of them. We can try to get them to change, but they need to change themselves.
Recently, I heard someone raptuously describe the alleged story of the brave Soviet submarine officer who prevented his boss from pulling the trigger that would have started a nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis. I believe this story to be significantly wrenched from context and manipulated by propagandists starting with Oliver Stone, because it does not appear in the memoirs of Gen. Gribkov, Operation Anadyr, a book I translated — although it easily could have, as he described what he knew as a direct participant in the events.This person telling me the story nearly wept with gratitude at the wise and gentle Khrushchev and his brave and compassionate submariner, who was able to stop this nuclear war before it started. The Americans, meanwhile, were bumblers.
I had to gently remind the racconteur that…the Russians themselves had created the Cuban Missile Crisis by indeed bringing nuclear-tipped tactical missiles to Cuba, which Gribkov outlines in great detail, as have other scholars now. Yes, there was a tit-for-tat involving the US Patriot missiles in Turkey which were then quietly withdrawn in the deal with the Kremlin then, but they aren't morally or technically equivalent. The Soviets brought the missiles 90 miles from the US coast to up the ante; if they ratcheted down then, in their usual "anchoring" active measure, that's great, but let's not confuse the anchor for the real position.
So here we all are again with a Russian anchor. Let's not cling to it. It's the Russians' fault. They need to fix it. We can help by reminding them of that.
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