This assurance in from Google. Though I personally remember visiting an orphanage in 1970s Alberta, orphanages were phased out in Canada decades ago. These institutions have been replaced by foster and group homes. In Russia orphanages are very much still to be found. For the city and region/oblast of Yaroslavl with a population of a million plus in the 1990s, I found a fairly current online list of 26 orphanages. The site is copyright from 2006 but as of 2024 is not available.
Labels
Many were simply called Baby House No.— which is a “state residential institution for orphans and children without parental care, age 4 and under”. But others got specific. There were a couple of Music and Artistic Education Baby houses. Then there were a couple of Social and Rehabilitation Center for Minors orphanages. One was for children 3 to 18. There were a couple of Sanatory Orphanages for Tuberculosis Children. Others were for hard-of-hearing or deaf children. One was labelled Agrarian Special Orphanage. Other orphanages were labelled according the word ‘Type’.
There is no explanation for the ones labelled ‘of the Type 7’ but those labelled ‘of the Type 8’ come with this piece, ‘for Mentally Defective Children’. Ten of the 26 orphanages in Yaroslavl carried the ‘of type 8’ with the ‘for Mentally Defective Children’ designation. If, as several articles I have found suggest, a high percentage of children in Russian orphanages are considered, at birth, or after time in an orphanage setting, to be ‘mentally defective’, what does the label refer to?
Designations
Most children relegated/directed to orphanages will be diagnosed/deemed to have developmental delays mentally, physically, emotionally and socially for reasons both viable and/or convenient.
Several articles and policy papers (see Orphanage Risk Factors) talk of the attitude among more traditional Russian doctors that a baby with a birth ‘defect’ is going to be a problem for the mother so she is advised to turn her baby over to the state just after birth and sometimes without even seeing or holding the newborn. A Human Rights Watch paper noted, “Many parents face pressure from healthcare workers to relinquish children with disabilities to state care, including at birth. Human Rights Watch documented a number of cases in which medical staff claimed, falsely, that children with certain types of disabilities had no potential to develop intellectually or emotionally and would pose a burden with which parents will be unable to cope”. Maybe this is true, for Will Englund wrote a piece in the Washington Post called “Russia’s orphans: government takes custody of children when parents can’t cope”. His report on the issue of children in Russian orphanages:
The children are almost certain to have at least one disability. The disabilities can be congenital or related to alcohol consumption by the mother during pregnancy — or they 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. “Every child will come with some developmental delays”.
OK, but do adopters note this when starting a family unless consciously deciding to adopt a ‘special needs’ child? Parents cannot shut down at least a little bit of magical thinking. How many times have parents wondered at the evident genius in their child, all the while wondering how it was possible for “he or she certainly didn’t get it from me?” So maybe there is a way to hope that the disability label doesn’t actually apply to our child. And when adopting in countries such as Russia that magical thinking teases out slivers of hope that may sidestep developmental problems.
But then, in another Human Rights Watchpaper,
The experts reported that Russian psychological norms are based on very strict criteria. Apart from these norms, however, factors that in the West are considered as being simple medical risks, will, in Russia, be labelled as illnesses:
*Babies born to alcoholic parents or whose mothers suffered depression during pregnancy will be labelled encephalopathic and remain so until they come of age.
*Orphans will be classed as being mentally deficient.
*Children with a single physical malformation (a harelip or speech defect…) become subnormal in the eyes of Russian doctors.
Human Rights Watch also found that these early diagnostic practices interfere with a child’s right to full development and in certain cases, to life itself. Moreover, abundant information gathered in Russia indicated several crucial incentives behind ‘over-diagnosing’ that suggest violations of basic medical ethics.
According to a former charity worker who distributed assistance to impoverished baby houses and has traveled widely in Russia since 1991, one legacy of the Soviet medical bureaucracy encourages hospital staff to avoid any risk of sanctions for errors detected under their care.
For example, she recalled the case of a child she knew well who had a medical chart with a catalogue of conditions including oligophrenia and encephalopathy.
A doctor told me that they have to cover their butts. They could lose their job, so they write many diagnoses. And you know the penal system here. It’s a “better safe than sorry” system.
A second factor that encourages exaggerated diagnoses is the Russian law which, until recently, prohibited international adoption of “healthy” children. “The doctors in the system wanted the kids adopted, so they’d say that this child has a tumor and then “wink” at you”.
Reading NeuroTribes: the legacy of autism and the future of neurodiversity [i], I could not help but see parallels between the labeling of disability in Russian orphanages with the nightmarish treatment of the disabled in Hitler’s Germany,
Finally, a widely cited incentive for over-diagnosing is the extra financial subsidy and salary increment that the state grants to institutions that care for children with disabilities. The entitlement to these subsidies was confirmed by children’s rights activists as well as by staff of state institutions.
One volunteer who worked in a Moscow baby house for a year and a half recalled to Human Rights Watch,
Once, in a rare honest moment with the acting director, she told me, “We are considered as a medical facility because more than half our children are considered to have medical defects”. So they could finagle more money for the place.
Another baby house director told Human Rights Watch, however, that the subsidy does represent the greater burden shouldered by the staff in dealing with disabled children[ii].
These kids will enter adulthood, work their ways through life with a host of papers labelling them mentally defective like a lifelong albatross around their necks. And we come back to the question, aside from globally respected diagnoses, what do the labels really mean? And even with an appropriate diagnosis, what concrete prognosis does the label offer?
Expectations
Maia Szalavitz and Dr. Bruce Perry[iii] offer a general picture of what to expect when a child spends his or her early childhood in an orphanage, for reasons generational, prenatal, environmental. There are always exceptions and progress is always being made but what I have read from a variety of sources would corroborate this chapter. I Love Russia: reporting from a lost country[iv] , published in 2023, weaves stories through the book of “internats’, institutions for the mentally disabled, describing conditions like the orphanages housing children given the same designations.
With no verification to the contrary, we assume that Yasik remained in a baby house though he had turned four because, I think it was Julia who told us, Yasik was held at a home he was aging out of for the powers that were felt he was still adoptable. The largest number of children adopted out is from the baby houses. I guess there is no surprise there – it seems to me, we humans deeply believe in the wonder of having a baby as the picture-perfect way to establish a family and we just as deeply believe that we have the best chance of molding the little bitty baby into our likeness if the little bit comes to us ‘tabula rasa’. This belief system resists challenges to other options in ways that may be well below our conscious level of dealing with our lives.
In any case, when I look at what paper work we have, the orphanage name is Yaroslavl Orphanage. There is no such plain name on the listing I found so this was merely a sufficient name for the paperwork. We do not know what ‘Type’ it was. We do know there wasn’t enough land surrounding the building for it to be an ‘Agrarian Special’ orphanage; with ‘scruffy grass and bare spots, not far from lots of other buildings’, it was hardly worthy of the stimulation a playground should offer children, let alone allowing for even a garden. It put me in mind of how Tony describes the playground at his orphanage in 1930s Saskatchewan (A Canadian story of Adoption from the 1930s, Becoming Family).
Inside, the orphanage looked quite small from what we could see in our very limited guided tour. Staff led us via the straightest route to a receiving room. We did pass through a play room with a child-size piano which he must have played, so ….. maybe this was a ‘Music and Artistic’ Baby house. Yet, from the picture we have of the children assembled to wave good-bye to Yasik when we came to collect him into our family, there is at least one child with the markers for Down’s Syndrome. Perhaps it was a “Type 8 ” home.
davevincent.com
We were taken to the head person’s office, a sweet looking, grandmotherly doctor. There was another woman at a desk who never once looked up at us, at least when I noticed. Was she now immune to these emotional tableaus about to unfold once again. Yes, hindsight could suggest a wide range of possibilities; in the journal I was simply struck by her disinterest but so caught up in the emotions I was enjoying that I could not ask questions. Maybe she had a stiff neck.
Have I answered the question specific to Yasik? How did he arrive at this orphanage?
Yasik was moved to the orphanage before his second birthday. We were given to understand the orphanage did not know when he was taken to the hospital. When we connected with Yasik’s sister and adoptive mother later, we found out that in his first year of life, in the care of his bio-parents, he was found by the social services alone in bed un-cared for and then taken to a hospital where he remained for about a year. There appears to have been little loving response to his physical and emotional needs and desires.
For many years I told Yasik and myself that Yasik’s mother cared 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. This is a line likely used maybe a tad too often when trying to help a child understand why he or she was adopted. When this line, because “her birth mom loved her so much”, was offered to one young girl to explain being given up for adoption, the young girl[v] was not as grateful as her adoptive parents hoped. “‘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. I will add here another thought. “You have to reach a certain brain mass before you can [walk]“[vi]. Given his parents’ lack of care, we can assume that Yasik’s development was delayed.
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 from school one day because of Yasik’s father’s brutal abuse.
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.
Lest it sounds like I see only the negative perspective I cannot ignore that there is always another perspective. In balance to the generally negative perspective the West has toward the care provided by Russian orphanages, I would insert a study of two orphanages in St. Petersburg[vii]. This study makes it evident that not all orphanages were damaging to children in their care. 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 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 the need to be pragmatic in difficult circumstances.
Footnotes
[i] Silberman, Steve NeuroTribes: the legacy of autism and the future of neurodiversity Avery, 2016, 82-139
[ii] Hunt, Kathleen “The “Gilded Cage” of the Dom Rebenka: infancy to four years”, Abandoned to the State: Cruelty and Neglect in Russian Orphanage Human Rights Watch. 1998, 116
[iii] Perry, Bruce MD., Ph.D. and Maia Szalavitz Born for Love: why empathy is essential — and endangered Mariner Books, 2011, 45-71
[iv] Kostyuchenko, Elena I Love Russia: reporting from a lost country Random House, 2023
[v] Tucker, Angela You Should Be Grateful: stories of race, identity, and transracial adoptionPenguin Random House Canada, 2023
[vi] Traig, Jennifer Act Natural: a cultural history of misadventure in parenting, Harper Collins, 2020, 116.
[vii] Muhamedrahimov R.J., Arintcina I.A., Solodunova M. Y., Anikina V. O., Vasilyeva M. J., Chernego D. I., Tsvetkova L. A., Grigorenko E. L. “Psychology in Russia: State of the Art”, 9(3), 103-112. Structural characteristics of the institutional environment for young children, 2016.
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