Children for Export
In 2013, Arkady Mamontov used his Special Correspondent broadcast to screen a brief documentary called "Mama-America." For those not familiar with him, Mamontov is one of the most virulent propagandists on Russian state television; watching his appearance on Alex Jones' Infowars in 2022 was like seeing two kindred spirits find themselves at last. "Mama-America," which aired less than a month after the Dima Yakovlev law took effect, begins with a recitation of statistics about Russia's natural resource exports: wood, oil, and over 5000 children. Images of innocent toddlers repeatedly alternate with video footage of a a tree trunk being sliced by a tables saw.
There’s a point being made by this juxtaposition—what could it possibly be?
The first phase of mass-mediated opposition (or, at least, strong concern) about transnational adoption in the 1990s focused primarily on the networks of trade, influence, and bribery that complicated presentations of foreign adoption in Russia as a humanitarian and altruistic endeavor. As Lilia Khabibullina noted, the newspaper headlines on the subject were dramatic and predictable: "Deti na eksport” “Children for Export", "Prodazha detei,” [Children for sale”] "Rynok rossiksikh detei,” [The market in Russian children]. These stories of corruption easily resonated with the Russian public, given that they invoked the aforementioned anxieties over export while plugging in to the the all-too-familiar lived experience of networks of corruption in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Here I wish to draw attention not to the veracity of these reports (and a number of them are substantiated in multiple media outlets), but their essential plausibility: true or not, these acts of child-selling and bribe-taking were immediately legible. Far more legible, in fact, than narratives of selfless Westerners rescuing children for no personal gain (and acting, ironically, like the exact opposite of the rapacious denizens of capitalist countries in Soviet propaganda).
The first significant confluence of media attention and legislative action took place in 1997, when the Duma threatened to ban foreign adoption altogether. The result (over many years), was not a ban, but ongoing negotiations between Russia and adopting countries (particularly the US) aimed at regulating the adoption industry. This early wave of concern pre-dates the rise of anti-American sentiment in Russia (the NATO bombings of Serbia in 1998 were a significant turning point), and there was little political enthusiasm for an international confrontation. Moreover, the concern in Russia was not about the fate of the adopted children qua children; there was little argument that Russia's adopted orphans were not in some way individually better off being raised by families (and by families with significant means). In other words, this was not yet an argument about mistreatment and abuse, and there were few "victims" with names and faces.
But even this early round of anti-adoption sentiment contains a number of the features that would become so prominent in the years to follow. First is the aforementioned notion of children as a national resource or national treasure, often closely tied with patriotic historiography and military rhetoric. In the 1990s, "Krasnaia zvezda” [Red Star, the military newspaper] ran a series of features about modern-day orphans adopted as mascots by army regiments, thereby recapitulating the famous figure of the World War II era "syn polka.” [son of the regiment] The positive invocation of the "syn polka" suggests a native Russian/Soviet way of offering abandoned children (or at least boys) a better life, here by replacing absent parents with the discipline and comradeship of the army. Similar attempts to look to the Soviet past for positive solutions can be found throughout the media--the Mamontov documentary referenced above included a reporter standing in front of the statue of KGB-founder Felix Dzherzhinsky, proclaiming that this man who has recently been declared a criminal did one thing right: he took care of the problem of bezprizorniki without exporting Russian children abroad (as if that had even been an option on the table back then).
But the military aspect here is crucial. First, because it makes more immediate sense in the Russian context than it might elsewhere. Boys who "graduate" from the detdom lack any of the cultural capital that allows so many young men to avoid the draft, and therefore follow a well-worn path into military service. While both orphanhood and the military provide ample negative material for muckraking journalism of the chernukha variety (hazing being a life-long constant), in popular narrative, each is transformed into a model of patriotic heroism. The protagonist of Viktor Dotsenko's now all-but-forgotten "Beshennyi” [Mad Dog]series (a 1990s bestseller that I already milked for every last drop of significance in Overkill) is a military hero precisely because he is an orphan: the fictional Savely Govorkov makes the symbolic substitution of nation for family that proves far more difficult in real life. And in the furor over the so-called "Dima Yakovlev" law, proponents repeatedly return to the threat that "exported" Russian children might one day serve in foreign armies (presumably in an eventual war between the US and Russia). Such a military context is completely absent from Western discourses of transnational adoption, and this absence shows just how wide the discursive gap can be.
The other striking aspect of the debate, particularly before Dima Yakovlev, is the transformation of individual children into pure biological potential. The Soviet slogan "Beregite detstvo!” [Protect childhood!] already brought the question of child welfare to an alarming level of abstraction (as much of the work of Andrei Platonov shows, childhood can survive perfectly well without children). But the post-Soviet anxieties about children lost to the motherland take this abstraction from the macro level to the micro, indeed to the microscopic: "exported" children represent a serious blow to the vitality of the gene pool (genofond). The deployment of the notion of genofond is a fascinating and complex topic in its own right, resonating both with the still-popular ideas of Lev Gumilev and his "ethnogenesis" (which posits ethnos as a real, non-constructed entity that Gumilev treats as the true subject of history). But here ethnogenesis merges with poorly assimilated understandings of genetics: it is the Russian genome itself that becomes the most valuable and the most endangered of all the motherland's natural resources. Never mind that the children most likely to be adopted are the very children whose heredity ("nasledstvennost'") is so routinely maligned. The very fact that foreigners want these "defective" children shows their value: once again, Russia is being tricked into making a bad deal.
The discourse of genofondmay well be the most dehumanizing of all the rationales for banning transnational adoption, in that it reduces the children in question to mere phenotypical expressions of their genetic potential. Ironically, this is the reasoning that progressives in the West are usually so ready to condemn as a neoliberal recapitulation of capitalism as natural: Richard Dawkins' famous reformulation of evolution not in terms of species or individuals, but the genes who use their hosts as vehicles for survival and reproduction. But in the hands of Russian nationalists, genetic Darwinism becomes a tool for collectivist thinking: not the selfish gene, but the selfish gene pool.
Next: Adopting a Law