Post #3 The Adoption Procedure in ’90s Russia
After playing tourist for a couple of days in Moscow, we were taken about 250 km. north-east of Moscow to the city of Yaroslavl. It appeared more attractive than Moscow and full of the look of things ancient – over 1000 years old. Yasik has very old blood in his veins.
Although we had been driving for several hours we were taken to a variety of offices before heading to the orphanage. In each office, we were left to wait while our facilitator conducted the business required in each office. Our only contribution was to offer the gifts we had brought from Canada to whomever was handling the issue at hand, basically the removal of Yasik from the files of Russia. Otherwise we sat to the side while each transaction took place. In one office where we waited in the outer office on wooden benches while the interpreter talked to the staff in an inner office, we watched an inch worm work its way across the floor. Dave tried to help the little thing and it freaked in terror.
Once we had stopped at several registries to begin the process of removing Yasik’s Russian footprint, our driver turned the van in the direction of the orphanage for our introduction to our son-to-be. Perhaps knowing her time with us was limited, the interpreter suggested we use this short drive to write down questions we might have for the orphanage staff but that turned out to be a bit useless. When I pulled out my questions later, translator or no translator, I got blank but respectful stares. I would have loved to know why. Subtext: careful control of the flow of information?
While I was naively writing down some questions, the translator, a school teacher possibly conversant in several different languages, came up with an even better way to use five or ten minutes. She began to teach us some phrases she thought would be helpful in communicating with Yasik. Monolingual Dave started mimicking her without hesitation. I have worked in a couple of foreign languages and know what a nightmare language learning can be so just wanted to throw up — I was going to one of the truly important moments of my life and being pushed on the way there into doing something which has given me some of the most stressful experiences of my life. I get it, if books written to guide people through the adoption process are merely suggesting adoptors primed to prove how perfect they will be as parents learn a few tourist-level phrases, but some of these books sound like they are suggesting adopters learn their child-to-be’s language by ordering an app from Amazon. Do they have any idea what that means? It is doubtful though even they would dare to suggest language learning be all wrapped in a few minutes. I thank Yasik for learning English so quickly.
The amazing expectations of those few minutes did not end there. The translator also managed to tuck in some information about Yasik’s history. Yasik’s mother visited him in the hospital where he lived for the first two years but “she moved around a lot”, whatever that meant. I did not question the comment at the time. Did Elvira expect a show of concern or some awareness of that oblique FYI? Now I wonder if my blasé reaction was because my mind was pre-set to an assumption against this mother’s care of her children. I have since learned much more about how many Russians saw adoption at the time. Somewhere I cannot currently validate, I was either told or read parents left their children at a state-run orphanage or what was also called a boarding school (often a more literal label than the boarding school as private school) while they attended to commitments like education or work away from home. One source I did manage to secure is Russian Babies, Russian Babes: Economic and Demographic Implications of International Adoption and International Trafficking for Russia written by J.R. McKinney. She writes of how the Soviets in the early years of their regime decided the raising of children would best be done by the state. In time the costs to the state measured against desired results of producing the ideal Soviet citizen led to backtracking to the tradition of the family-raised child. The children being raised by the state were generally weaker intellectually, physically and socially than family-raised children. Moving away from the Soviet aspiration to the tried and true was likely done with as little fanfare as possible, leaving Russian society with a stronger acceptance of placing a child in state care than would have been true in other cultures. If Yasik’s mother “moved around a lot” then state care may have been an obvious choice not only for someone struggling with drugs or alcohol but perhaps someone struggling with other pressures of poverty. Yasik was, after all, born in the decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I have no journal entries referring to the role of the father in Yasik’s life because it appears no one told us anything about him. Was this because only recently has research begun to look at the impact of the father on prenatal and infant development? J.R. McKinney in Lone mothers in Russia: Soviet and Post-Soviet policy (now an article appearing to need access) notes in Post-Soviet Russia, 70% of Russian children lived in households where needs exceeded income. The article points to the demographic called ‘Lone Mothers’ as very specifically mothers who never married and therefore could look to no one else for support of any kind.
Added to the difficulties Russian parents faced in those years was the negative attitude in Russian society toward domestic adoption, seemingly still prevalent but actively countered for Russians were concerned about the population drain, even though, again at that time, Russia was open to the money foreign adoptions brought to the country. These ‘on the one hand’ but then ‘on the other hand’ considerations demand that we understand we cannot simply assume a child in state care arrived there because someone else was willfully negligent or no longer living.
Things changed dramatically a few years later as adoption got dragged into Russian-American politics, but this was the environment in which we were adopting. Children who had either been dropped off or placed in care were designated ‘social orphans’ when they had living biological parents who had the right to return for their children. Numbers from 70% to 90% are offered to account for ‘social orphans’ in the state system at the time. Yasik was a ‘social orphan’. Adoption was not on the table if Russians had just dropped kids off at the boarding school-cum-orphanage while other issues are being worked out.
While I walk our dog, Brodie, on the Log Train trail I listen to books. Listening to From the Ashes by Jesse Thistle, about when he and his brothers were taken from their addicted father by Children’s Aid Society, I am struck by some similarities with the time he spent there in early childhood. As the brothers settle into a housing situation that sounds fairly institutional but is clean and provides regular meals, the oldest brother explains to other kids residing there that their “‘dad was away and that we’d be going home as soon as the police found him. “I used to think that, too,” one kid said. “But we’re orphans now – don’t cha know? I didn’t know what that meant.”‘ This young kid thought that his parents dropped him off at the Children’s Aid Society because he wanted Cheerios and they had none. He saw it as his fault that he was now an orphan. Jesse Thistle thought that his parents too were gone from his life because he had “asked for food too often“.
Kids were questioned, checked over for infections and parasites and some afterwards “never came back. That was the scariest. It was like they had been eaten by monsters. No one knew what happened to them, but the older kids said they were the lucky ones because someone wanted them. I didn’t understand that; our mom and dad wanted us, why didn’t theirs want them, too?” A few weeks later a foster home that would take all three of them was found. They were told they were lucky. They were “cleaned up” … and … “packed up“(39-42). So wouldn’t this too be a Canadian version of ‘social orphan’ with a family somewhere, government intervention and children confused and frightened.
However, as we later found out, while Yasik would have been labelled a ‘social orphan’ with living family, a copy of the court papers given to Yasik’s sister and adoptive family show that the state took away Yasik’s biological parents’ rights. Yasik was not boarding at the orphanage while his parents were working away from home. He was in process of becoming available for adoption though the actual court decision came a year later. Yet because at the time of our adoption, Dave and I were given no assurances that the parents had either relinquished or had their rights removed, when I came across articles of illegal adoptions a few years later, I did worry. I read that a number of Russian adoptions involved illegally obtained children, lacking parental surrender. I googled this issue and found articles that say, yes, Russia is as haunted by trafficking in children as many, many other countries. And Russia’s response is not to turn a blind eye, being faced with shorter life expectancy and distaste for the idea that Russians are being taken from Mother Russia. In fact, “In 2008, an amendment to the Russian law on human trafficking re-established that the activity of buying and/or selling a person constituted trafficking regardless of whether it was done for an exploitative purpose” (Transaction Costs: Prosecuting child trafficking for illegal adoption in Russia Lauren A. McCarthy– this article now needs access). One article questioned the money laid out by people from wealthier countries in the quest of adopting a child even for the most wonderful of reasons, family making. This money alone likely out weighed the cost of raising that child in his or her social setting. Does this constitute “regardless of whether it was done for exploitative purpose” with the phrase ‘or not’ left unsaid? LUMOS and other organizations like Human Rights Watch make the contention that orphanages can be big business. The desire to help solve a problem can sometimes be turned by others into something hurtful to society. It is an aspect of adoption I only wanted to turn away from as too sickening to contemplate before we read the copy of the court decision.
In balance to the generally negative perspective the West has toward the care provided by Russian orphanages I would insert this research article (see Orphanage Risk Factors): Psychology in Russia: State of the Art, 9(3), 103-112). Structural characteristics of the institutional environment for young children ( Muhamedrahimov R.J., Arintcina I.A., Solodunova M. Y., Anikina V. O., Vasilyeva M. J., Chernego D. I., Tsvetkova L. A., Grigorenko E. L. (2016). Two orphanages in St.Petersburg were studied, making it evident that not all orphanages were damaging to children in their care. Although because we are ultimately talking about human beings with as much love as any the world around, it should be a given and unnecessary to say again here that there are in Russia, as anywhere, people working in orphanages who actively seek to do their best for the children in their care despite given the need to be pragmatic in difficult circumstances. The care-givers at the first orphanage were working on changes that show these Russian people were as aware as Dr. Bruce Perry who writes,
Now, of course, we know that an infant’s early attachment to a small number of consistent caregivers is critical to emotional health and even to physical development….While we don’t know whether there is a fixed “sensitive period” for the development of normal attachment the way there appears to be for language and sight, research does suggest that …[when] children are not allowed the change to develop permanent relationships with one or two primary caregivers during their first three years of life, [they will] have lasting effects on people’ ability to relate normally and affectionately to each other.
Children who don’t get consistent, physical affection or the chance to build loving bonds simply don’t receive the patterned, repetitive stimulation necessary to properly build the systems in the brain that connect reward, pleasure, and human-to-human interactions (The Boy who Was Raised as a Dog 90, 92, 93).
And in our particular adoption, whether we were on our game or not, our adoption agency was doing due diligence. They were adhering to The Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption which came into force in Canada on April 1, 1997. As the Fact Sheet handout given to us says, “The convention is an international law created to prevent abuses from occurring in intercountry adoptions“. The Fact sheet does go on to say, “The adoptive family is responsible to ensure that the child they plan to adopt is legally free for adoption and that all legal requirements of both countries have been met, including adoption consents, validity of adoption order and immigration requirements”. Ooh, with a squeegied up face, I might admit that I don’t remember doing that sort of due diligence personally.
Yet here is an article showing these concerns remain:
Former WA Rep. Matt Shea, accused of domestic terrorism, working to secure adoptions for Ukrainian children in Poland March 16, 2022 at 6:00 am Updated March 16, 2022 at 7:55 am By David Gutman Seattle Times staff reporter
Summary
Former Washington state Rep. Matt Shea’ group, Loving Families and Homes for Orphans, is not registered as an adoption agency with the Texas Department of Health and Human Services or with the Intercountry Adoption Accreditation and Maintenance Entity.
Now is not an appropriate time for international adoptions from Ukraine because there will be uncertainty around the situation of the children’s parents. Even if the children are in orphanages, they may be there as ‘social orphans’.
“‘The United Nations High Commission on Refugees and UNICEF put out a joint statement calling for temporary and foster care for children but saying “Adoption should not occur during or immediately after emergencies.”’
So yes concern re: adoption remains viable. Marion Crook in Thicker Than Blood says this about the urge to adopt based on the need to ‘save the children’:
In the early 2000s, evangelical groups began to advocate for a Christian mission to rescue orphans by adoption. They cited scripture to support the notion that Christians were called to bring orphans into their homes as a way of both advancing the role of Christianity in the work and ensuring their own salvation…. Some adoptive parents were grateful for the addition to their family and truly had wanted to adopt. Others paraded their mixed-race children as proof of their Christian faith…. If God willed that a family must adopt, then any obstacles to that adoption — laws, agency oversight, the best interests of the adoptee, and consideration for birth parents — were against God’s will …. the underlying philosophy of the Orphan Crisis Movement…(53).
Yasik didn’t become available for adoption until just before we applied, presumably because the court case was by then being considered. A short time before we left for Russia, we were given the heads up that a Russian family or two were considering adopting Yasik and that another packet of money would secure our position in first place. We laid the money down immediately. Jessica O’Dwyer in Mamalita: an adoption memoir writes more extensively about the issue of bribery in adoption in Chapter 16, “The Fix”. Nonetheless, whiff of a money grab aside, it may well be some Russian families were interested for the UN publication Child Adoption: Trends and Policies (https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/pdf/policy/child-adoption.pdf) provides a graph showing 75% of adoptions were domestic in the early 2000s, and somewhere I cannot locate at this writing, I saw the same breakdown for the year 1997. As noted above, Russians, for all the writing about their antipathy to domestic adoption because they do not want a child not of family blood, did process far more domestic adoptions than international at that time.
Yasik was moved to the orphanage before his second birthday the translator told us. We were given to understand the orphanage did not know when he was taken to the hospital. For many years I told Yasik and myself that a small window was opened onto the care Yasik’s mother had for him for as the translator told us, his mother came to visit him at the hospital a number of times. At the time I told Yasik that this signified her love for him but that she may have felt it was in his best interest that he be put in an orphanage. The response of a young girl in the book, You Should Be Grateful: stories of race, identity, and transracial adoption (Angela Tucker, Beacon Press, 2022, 41) (the title alone is telling) was hardly grateful when she was told that she was placed for adoption because “her birth mom loved her so much”. This 12 year-old girl “notes with sincerity“, “‘I was placed for adoption when I was a baby. My parents never even met my birth mom,” … “so how do they know that she loved me?“‘ Connecting with Yasik’s older sister also disabused me of that sentimental notion. Yasik’s bio mother apparently came only to see if she could get a hold of the money the state provided for Yasik’s care. Even at the time, the translator’s mention that Yasik had rickets in those first two years should have ignited some reflection either on the care his mother gave him or the care and attention he got during his time at the hospital. He had rickets and he could not walk until the orphanage took over his care. Now we have to assume that his parents were responsible for his rickets. Did she not care? Did she feel too cowed by authority and her own inability to care for him? What about the father’s responsibility? The six-year-old brother did not want to return to the home because of Yasik’s father’s brutal abuse. I will add here another thought. In Act Natural: a cultural history of misadventure in parenting, Jennifer Traig tucks in this note when discussing crawling and walking: “You have to reach a certain brain mass before you can [walk]“(116). Given his parents lack of care, we can assume that Yasik’s development was delayed. Yasik caught up physically in the orphanage to the extent that when our doctor gave him a medical just after we brought him to Canada, he surmised Yasik had built up a strong immune system in the orphanage and he was then meeting the developmental markers for his age. We adopted a child who simply weathered every illness common to kids with barely a sneeze. Even when it was his turn to get chicken pox, he and his little buddies spent their “sick” week playing in the park across from their school.
