Children of the Counter-Revolution
The Russian drama of transnational adoption is a puzzling one to American-born observers. The long tradition of adopting children in the United States is anomalous, and neatly jibes with national myths about immigration, adaptation, and reinvention. Indeed, in the hands of a Horatio Alger, orphanhood is tantamount to opportunity: like the country itself, the American orphan is rootless and ingenious. Little Orphan Annie survives numerous trials and tribulations, only to be adopted by a capitalist sugar daddy who admires her pluck. She doesn't mind that he's old and bald, and Daddy Warbucks doesn't mind that she travels with an obnoxious mutt and lacks any visible pupils in her apparently empty eye sockets.
The hills have eyes. Orphans, apparently, do not.
As one of the key nodes in the network of transnational adoption, the United States has produced a great deal of scholarship on the subject in recent years. These studies span a variety of disciplines, from sociology to anthropology, from history to literature. Many of the authors are themselves either transnational adoptees or parents of children adopted from other countries. Add in the ever-growing genre of transnational adoption memoirs (again, by both parents and adult children), and it is safe to say that the last few decades have seen something of a baby boom in adoption studies. Many of these works focus on questions of race, which is both a real issue in the lived experience of adoptees and the “go-to” category of alterity in contemporary America. Adoptions from Russia and the former Soviet Union, while providing material for numerous memoirs, have not received as much attention as adoptions from China and Latin America, in part due to relatively smaller numbers, and in part due to the fact that many of the babies adopted from the Russian Federation can safely be assimilated to the American category of “whiteness.”
Transnational adoption is also a complicated subject for American Slavists, and not only because it implicates many of us personally.[1] Regardless of our individual political views, we are transnational by profession. Studying another culture does not only mean trying to adopt it--at times, it means begging to be adopted by it. We study abroad and stay in host families, accumulating local mamas and papas with an alarming filial promiscuity. Both our country and our profession encourage an individualist (some might say neoliberal) approach to family ties and national identity. This is why, for all our expertise, we're never really trusted by the American State Department, whose foreign service arm is so afraid that their officers might "go native" that they have devised a system of rotation guaranteed to prevent the accumulation of real local knowledge, let alone linguistic proficiency.
There is no neutral position to be occupied here; if anything, the local knowledge as Russianists may well be an obstacle. No one engaged in the debate over Russian transnational adoption occupies a privileged position; even those with direct experience of Russian orphanages and Russian adoption are often trapped in a particular perspective, that of humanitarian sympathy and desperation. We have all heard the horror stories about Russian orphanages, and those who've paid closer attention know about the stalled attempts in the past twenty years to establish alternatives.
But if the Russian Federation's efforts to provide a physical habitat for its abandoned children cannot be considered a success, the Russian orphan's place in the national consciousness is equally vexed. The recurring debates about transnational adoption in the Russian Federation unintentionally highlight the ambiguous status of orphaned children: they are, by definition, "unwanted," but when foreign couples express an interest in adopting them, the Russian media and government succumb to a moralistic fit of mimetic desire, and will not let them go. Wanted and unwanted at the same time, these children are Schrodinger's orphans, trapped in a perverse superposition that is no place like home. The dilemma appears irreconcilable by definition: what do we do with such a child? Solomon advises us to take disputed babies and chop them in half, gambling that maternal love will trump maternal desire. But affect does not provide a way out of this particular dispute, since both sides use sentiment as their main weapon,
The plight of orphaned and institutionalized children in Russia is a serious, painful subject. The lives of real children are at stake. But their role as putative real children in the discourse in itself obscures the actual lived experience of the children and their caretakers: they are described in such a way as to score rhetorical points. So I will start with what might seem to be the most inappropriate way to talk about orphans: a joke.
—Кто твой отец? спрашивает учительница Вовочку.
—Товарищ Сталин!
—А кто твоя мать?
—Советская родина!
—А кем ты хочешь стать?
—Сиротой!
“Who is your father,” the teacher asks Vovochka.
“Comrade Stalin!”
“And who is your mother?”
“The Soviet Motherland!”
“And who do you want to be when you grow up?”
“An orphan!"
There are multiple versions of this joke, of course--I first heard it as an army joke about Russia’s all-purpose anecdotal Jew, Rabinovich, wishing to be rid of the “beloved communist part of the USSR” (the mother) and Leonid Ilich Brezhnev (the father). The military variation will have some resonance below, but Vovochka is really the ideal subject: the never-aging scamp of Soviet jokelore is impervious to all attempts at education and refinement. His reflexive disregard for everything his parents and teachers tell him suggests a picaresque hero who effectively orphans himself in each telling of the tale.
This particular Vovochka joke, with its revolving cast of characters and infinite adaptability to the changing times, indirectly reminds us that the history of Russia in the twentieth century is also the history of wave after wave of orphans, the sadly predictable result of war and displacement. Easily the most studied orphan population (or at least orphan phenomenon) was the bezprizorniki (street children) who were repeatedly invoked as a social ill in the wake of the October Revolution and ensuing Civil War. Alan Ball’s And Now My Soul Is Hardened provides a scholarly, but heartrending account of the lives of these children, and of the government’s attempts either to help them or to solve them as a problem. By the 1930s, bezprizorniki had been replaced by the orphans and wayward youth as raw material for reforging, as seen in the book and ever-popular film The Republic of SHKID, and formalized into a pedagogy of moral education through labor by Makarenko in his book,The Pedagogical Poem (itself turned into that Soviet classic film, The Road to Life). In a series of detailed and insightful articles, Laurie Bernstein shows the complicated legal entanglements involved in sorting out the status of children orphaned in the Great Patriotic War, as well as examining the functioning of the post-Stalin child welfare system. But for most of the twentieth century, the Soviet orphan was, as one might expect, an internal problem.
But the Vovochka joke also connects the loss of parents with the loss of nation, a motif that resurfaces at short, regular intervals throughout the two-decade-long adoption debate. And by using the word "orphan" as the metaphorical answer to a metaphorical question, it even encodes the problem of definition that complicates both the liberal/humanitarian construction of transnational adoption (domestically and in the West) and the nationalist/anti-commodity-capitalist response: what, exactly, constitutes an orphan? As in many countries that supply children to the transnational adoption network, Russia has long supported a network of orphanages whose inhabitants occupy any one of a surprisingly wide range of familial statuses. Indeed, the English term "orphanage" is deceptive; the Russian "detskii dom" or "detdom” or “dom rebenka” says nothing about orphans per se. These "children's homes" (or, as some of the American adoption memoirs put it, "baby houses") contain not only children of unknown parentage and children whose birth mothers have waved their parental rights, but a large number of “social orphans,” children whose parents are alive and, if not well, at least possible to locate. Like American children in foster care, these children live in the limbo of a temporary status that all too often becomes a permanent ontological state. I use the term "orphan" for the sake of convenience, while nevertheless recognizing the inadequacy of the term.
Next: American Dad (and Mom)
Note
[1] I don't have the stats, but I would guess that the number of Russian children adopted by American-born Russianists is exceeded only by the number of Russian spouses married (and possibly divorced) by American-born Russianists.