The cry that came in from the cold

Will a new measure adopted by the Putin administration change who profits from Russia's lucrative baby-selling business?

By Steve Kimian

Jul 18, 2000 | Vodka, caviar, nuclear warheads, pasty men in big furry hats. Make a list of Russian exports and you're likely to come up with the preceding list. All that would be missing is babies. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, adoption -- especially in the case of children destined for homes in the United States -- is rapidly climbing up the roster.

Adoption has become a cottage industry in Russia; a back-of-the-envelope estimate suggested the country last year generated in the ballpark of $70 million in cash receipts -- equivalent to nearly 4 percent of the amount generated by Russia's growing tourism industry, according to Goskomstat, the Russian statistics agency.

This is hardly a humanitarian victory. To take a Russian child to America via adoption is to enter a world littered with Soviet-style bureaucrats in shiny green suits, many of whom make Donald Trump seem like Mother Teresa. It's a path cluttered with dank offices in labyrinthine buildings and Orwellian interlopers who prey on naive foreigners for whom "da" and "nyet" represent advanced Russian. Many adoption agencies are little more than fronts for shady child selling; conniving translators specialize in hoodwinking adoptive parents into believing that they're doing a good thing. Meanwhile, legitimate agencies devoted to child welfare suffer.

Ironically, Russia is likely to lose its position as America's most popular foreign source for adopted children this year (4,348 Russian kids joined families in the U.S. in 1999, up from just 324 in 1992, according to the U.S. State Department). A decline is likely in 2000, however, as the result of a measure implemented in April by then President-elect Vladimir Putin that seeks to draw a distinction between baby selling and legitimate adoption. Putin has decided to put on hold all foreign adoptions by requiring foreign agencies to be accredited -- via a process developed by a bureaucracy that has yet to be created. "One of the first measures the Putin administration put into force regarding adoption is also restricting Russian kids from having a better life," says an industry observer, "at least for the time being." One suspects that Putin's interest in regulating foreign adoptions means he wants a bigger piece of this big business.

Sadly, Putin's new rules -- which are in part the product of a twisted sense of xenophobic national pride about "Russia's future" (even as this part of Russia's future rots in the country's horrific orphanages) -- are likely to result in even greater headaches and expenditures for prospective adoptive parents. Worst of all, it could mean fewer Russian kids will get the chance for a better life abroad.

Indeed, getting children out of Russian orphanages and into Western homes -- no matter how dirty the process has become -- is one small step toward making the world a better place. In a 1998 report, Human Rights Watch described the "shocking levels of cruelty and neglect" Russian orphans are subjected to. Boris Altshuler, who heads a children's rights program at the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, recently estimated that of the 15,000 or so kids who leave the orphanage system upon reaching adulthood, 30 to 50 percent are homeless and/or criminals within a year, while an additional 10 percent commit suicide.

Stroll through a few of Moscow's train stations, dodging the legions of glue-sniffing kids begging for bread, and you get a sense of what befalls the children who escape Russian orphanages. But Russia has a lot more people interested in making a buck than in making the world a better place, and the process of adopting a child from Russia -- even under the old system -- had more in common with Kafka than with the Red Cross.

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