"I Hope the Russians Love Their Children, Too"
Chapter One:
Unfit Motherlands
"I Hope the Russians Love Their Children, Too"
When Sting released his song “Russians” in 1985, the chorus contained some of the most asinine lyrics to make the radio Top Forty : “I hope the Russians love their children, too.” [1] It was, of course, a rhetorical gesture to remind listeners of what was at stake in the event of a global nuclear war, but really: did anyone think the Russians hated their children? Or that in a millennium of existence as a culture, they still hadn’t made up their minds?
In the nearly four decades since the song's initial release, the question it poses has taken numerous ironic twists and turns, most of which involve the question of adoption. The 2012 "Dima Yakovlev" law banning the adoption of Russian children by U.S. nationals was allegedly meant to protect the country's young, but instead called attention to the dismal conditions of Russian orphanages and the fate of those children who would now be denied a home. Ten years later, after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian officials initiated a process widely recognized as a war crime: the transportation of Ukrainian children into the Russian Federation for subsequent fostering and adoption. Just a week after the invasion began (and before this latest adoption program was initiated), Sting released a video in which he performed "Russians" on Instagram, and re-recorded the song the following month to raise money for humanitarian and medical aide to Ukraine. Taken together, these two historical moments remind us of two crucial problems with Sting's question (besides the obvious one already raised): who, exactly, are the "Russians," and whose children qualify as "theirs"?
Stick to tantra, Sting
Obviously, Sting was engaging in the common Western habit of referring to the Soviet Union as "Russia"--the crucial distinction between the two was invisible to most non-specialists outside the Eastern Bloc. But this is an error that inadvertently demonstrates the imperial/colonial structure on which the USSR was founded: as a group, the decision-makers were, in fact, the "Russians" (even if key individuals in the leadership had different ethnic backgrounds). In the years since the first invasion of Ukraine, Russian talking heads have increasingly denied any distinction between Russians and Ukrainians, going as far as to deny the very existence of Ukraine as a state and Ukrainians as a people. Moving Ukrainian children to Russia is the biopolitical equivalent of the Russian Federations incursions across Ukraine's borders: a declaration that Ukrainian children are Russian children, too.
Whoever these children are--Russian orphans adopted by Westerners, Ukrainian children transported across the border without their parents' or guardians' consent, or simply the notional child in whose "defense" a flurry of restrictive laws have been adopted by the Russian legislature over the course of more than a decade--the policies and debates framing their welfare remind us how difficult it is to disentangle sincere concern for the most vulnerable members of a society from broader ideological questions and conflicts. Children, it seems, are never simply children.
Anxieties over the fate of children might seem like the opposite of melancholy, or even its remedy: the existence of the next generation can be a great consolation for the death of someone older. At the turn of the twentieth century, the comfort provided by children in the face of loss was actually condemned by an influential, but profoundly idiosyncratic Russian philosopher whose ideas influence generations of Russian and Soviet thinkers: Nikolai Fyodorov. Fyodorov believed that the acceptance of loss was a serious mistake. Instead, all of humankind's efforts should be directed towards the physical resurrection of the dead. To that end, people should reject all the things that distract them from what he called the "Common Task": sex, reproduction, and child-rearing. Though Soviet policy would almost always be pro-natalist, the romantic appeal of scientific resurrection was a significant component of early Soviet ideology, even if, at the time of this writing, every early Soviet citizen who was taken with this idea is, to quote The Wizard of Oz, quite sincerely dead. Fyodorov's philosophy does not justify questioning whether or not the Russians actually love their children, but did contain the implicit sentiment that Russians might be better off loving their children a little less.
Fyodorov's philosophy is melancholic through and through: accepting loss is inherently unacceptable, so the dead must not be allowed to remain dead. The only future that matters to him is one that brings back the past. Since the last Perestroika years, Fyodorov, like so many pre-Soviet artists, thinkers and writers, has undergone something of a renaissance. His body has not been resuscitated, but his ideas have cropped up in the strangest of places, as Anya Bernstein's work on Russian transhumanism demonstrates. If Fyodorov has exerted any influence on Russian policy makers and pundits, it is only indirectly. Indeed, official Russian rhetoric since the first invasion of Ukraine has been distinctly pro-death: men are exhorted to be willing to lay down their lives for Russia, and even if it comes to nuclear war, as Putin himself said in October 2018, "An aggressor should know that vengeance is inevitable, that he will be annihilated, and we would be the victims of the aggression. We will go to heaven as martyrs, and they will just drop dead. They will not even have time to repent for this." Two months after the full-scale invasion, top propagandist Margarita Simonyan predicted that the fighting would escalate into World War III: 'This is to my horror on one hand, but on the other hand, it is what it is. We will go to heaven, while they will simply croak... We're all going to die someday." As slogans go, "We're all going to die someday" could use some workshopping, but it makes its point: no lives matter.
On February 19, 2023, few days before the first anniversary of the invasion, a video by an apparently drunk "patriotic Russian mother" made the rounds of Russian and Ukrainian social media. Addressing an imaginary Ukrainian audience, she declares, "I'm the mom of four sons...I'll give all four of them to you. Like fuck you'll break Russia. I'll just have more." In another video just a few months earlier, an older "patriotic" mother argues with a young woman about the war. The young one asks, "Do you have a son?" She does. "And you'll send him off to die?" "Sure, if I have to." "Aren't you sorry for him?" "Sure, but what else can I do? " In another video, posted just a day before the anniversary, a different mother made the case of sacrificing her children. This one has already buried one son, and is ready to offer up her two younger ones: "There's a profession: defending the motherland" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5uaprygzPk_ ). Some of the commenters voice suspicions that this video is a "fake;" they claim an actress is reading a script for propaganda purposes. That may be the case, but the veracity of the video is not the point. With frequent appeals to the Soviet Union's sacrifices in World War II, such videos complicate Sting's decades old sentiment. In this framework, yes, Russian love their children, too, but they are supposed to love the Motherland more, as evidenced by Russian mothers who are ready for their sons to die.
In times of war, mothers have always sent their sons to their possible deaths; this is a basic condition of war. The willingness to make this sacrifice (and to sacrifice one's self) is predicated either on the conviction that there is something greater or more important than one's individual life, or on the understanding that there is no choice (situations in which not fighting is tantamount to death). In the case of Russia's war in Ukraine, the reality on the ground starkly diverges from the rhetoric used both in these video and on state television: the exodus of thousands of draft-age men, often with the assistance of their moths and wives, demonstrates the limits of the "Z" narrative of resurgent Nazism. In World War II, Soviet men did, indeed, sign up in droves to protect their country from the Nazi invasion, just as Ukrainian men and women are doing in order to fight off the invaders from Russia. But today's Russian men are treating this war not as an existential threat to Russia, but as an existential threat to themselves.
These videos, along with the constant haranguing by Kremlin propagandas, implicitly accept that "the Russians" love their children, but are asking them to love their country more. Or rather, not their country (in which case, there would be less draft-dodging), but the narrative about their country and its place in the world. It is a narrative in which the hero of history, and the protagonist of story, is Russia itself, that is, Russia's collective body (and not the individuals who make up the country's population). The regime needs Russia to be Mayakovsky's giant Ivan, ready to engage in single combat with a multi-headed hydra of Biden, Soros, and Zelensky.
By this point, it should be clear that the word "children" is doing a lot of work here. In Sting's song, and in the various adoption controversies, "children" are assumed to be young and helpless. In the context of the war, the "children" (or, more often, "sons") have reached (young) adulthood thanks to the love and care of the parents who are willing to let them go. But in both cases, children and sons are placed within a framework that, while acknowledging the value of their personal pain and suffering, considers them in terms of the national collective body. And not just any body, but a militarized, potentially mobilized body; within the sentimental discourse of the plight of the orphan is the fear that the internationally adopted child will become a soldier in a war against his own motherland.
Orphans, adoption, and the rhetoric of child protection since 1991 situate the national collective body in a strange web of overlapping temporalities. Orphanhood involves loss by definition (although the question is complicated by the phenomenon of "social orphans," discussed below) and therefore points to the past; adoption should function as a compensatory measure, a remedy in the present for a wound of the past, but international adoption involves past, present, and future at once, replicating orphanhood as not just the loss of a parent or parents, but the removal of a child from the motherland, thereby depriving the child of a Russian future (in the case of the Dima Yakovlev controversy) or supplying a Russian future to a child who never wanted one (the seizure of Ukrainian children). Moreover, these questions must be understood against the backdrop of demographic anxieties (the Russian Federation's shrinking population and the falling ratio of ethnic Russians to non-Russians in the RF), concerns about the Russian-speaking populations in other former Soviet states, and the overall sense that Russia, as the latest iteration of forms of statehood that included the USSR, is, quite simply, much smaller than it used to be.
All of which brings us back to melancholy. The adoption question is rooted in the ongoing sense of Soviet loss--of territory, of prestige, of population, and the fears that Russia is selling off its natural resources as a prelude to the total dismantlement of the state. Internationally adopted children are both fear and loss, a variation on the endless melancholy of the post-Soviet Russian condition. And as a vehicle for anxieties about the future (state collapse, adopted orphans joining foreign armies), it is an expression of melancholy projected onto the future, a proleptic melancholy: loss will continue, and it can be mourned in advance.
Next: Children of the Counter-Revolution
Notes
[1] And keep in mind that this was during the reign of Duran Duran, so there was stiff competition.