"Little Russians:" Ukrainian "Orphans" and Their Russian Guardians

The explosive mixture of post-Soviet melancholy, imperial revanchism, and the rhetoric of child protection found its ideal expression in the Russian policy of transporting children from Ukraine to the Russian Federation.  Widely considered a war crime, the placement of Ukrainian minors in foster care, children's homes and reeducation camps, along with a law passed to facilitate their adoption by Russian citizens, is not only an act of cultural genocide (as if that were not bad enough), but it is also the logical conclusion of a decade of repressive policies carried out in the name of children as a step on the road to further repression.  To add to the irony, it is a glaringly obvious example of the Russian state's knee-jerk habit of projection:  accusations of crime on the part of the "enemy" often reflect the actions or the intent of the state itself.

The campaign against foreign adoption that led to the passage of the Dima Yakovlev law was accompanied by a broader campaign against what in Russian is called "iuvenal'naia iustitsiia." The term's literal translation as "juvenile justice" is misleading, since the legal punishment of minors for crimes and misdemeanors is only a small part of the debate.  What is really at stake is what Americans would call the child welfare system: the set of laws, institutions, and officials who have the capacity to intervene when a child may be in danger. 

I wrote about the child welfare controversy at some length in Plots against Russia, so I will confine myself to the highlights here. In response to discussions and proposals in the early years of the twenty-first century about establishing new Russian legal child welfare structures, hard-liners resorted to the sort of fear-mongering that presaged the turn towards "traditional values" after 2012.  According to traditionalists, the entire project is designed to weaken or even destroy the Russian family by undermining parental authority and allowing the state to seize children from their homes. This rhetoric was a fascinating synthesis of retrograde patriarchy, the liberal critique of totalitarianism, and an inversion of the early Bolshevik hostility to the family. For Cold War liberals and Soviet dissidents, the hallmark of an overreaching state disdainful of personal freedom is interference with the family.  For the early Bolsheviks, the traditional family was an antiquated ideological obstacle to the better education of the next generation of Soviet citizens. For the defenders of patriarchy (particularly Russian Orthodox activists), the traditional family is a natural and even holy social unit that should be immune to the vicissitudes of politics and social change.

The fight against "juvenile justice" was, like the struggle against "gay propaganda," one of many conservative social movements that started in local, church, and non-governmental circles in the Oughts before becoming coopted as part of the state's nascent official ideology in the Teens. In particular, it was a useful instrument in the propaganda campaign to show that Europe and the United States had become dystopian, politically correct hell scapes, populated by queers, migrants, rapists, feminists, and, eventually, Satanists. Many of these are the same groups that Russian propaganda claim dominate in Zelensky's Ukraine.

Relocating Ukrainian orphans to Russia is logically consistent with Russia's presentation of its conflict with Ukraine, but at the same time, if taken to its logical extreme, it undermines the very notion of ethnos that has come to dominate Putin-era Russian discourse. The official media had long found it difficult to take most of the newly independent states all that seriously,  particularly when either the borders of a given state were considered "artificial" or "cobbled together" (as with Moldova) or the country in question shared a great deal of linguistic and cultural commonality with Russian (as with Belarus).  Ukraine, whose population for years included Russian speakers and Ukrainian speakers, not to mention speakers of a Russian/Ukrainian creole, and whose legally-recognized territory reflects the outcomes of the last two World Wars, falls into both categories. What began as condescension about the very notion of Ukrainian statehood turned into the demonization of Ukrainian "nationalists," before taking on its most extreme form in the wake of the 2014 invasion:  denying that Ukraine and Ukrainians as such even exist.  Ukrainians, in this model, are simply Russians who refuse to admit that they are Russian, and who speak a language whose resemblance to Russian renders it slightly hilarious.  If they actually believe in their own existence, it is because they have been brainwashed by bad actors.

Yup, this is what stock photos gives me for “child welfare system”

Russian propaganda on the "Ukrainian Question" is, of course, consistently inconsistent. If Ukrainians and Russians really are the same, then how are we to take seriously the allegation of Ukrainian bioweapons labs developing virus to target specifically Russians?  And if they are not all the same, what, exactly, is Russia doing with these Ukrainian children?  We should not expect consistency, of course. The messages about Ukrainian genetic warfare and Russian/Ukrainian ethnic solidarity are not being issued by the same people at the same time, or included in the same document or broadcast.   But the lack of recognition of their incompatibility is not just about disorganization, or about the (reasonable) assumption that audiences are not following the messaging that carefully.  It is about the fundamental incoherence underlying the current Russian discourse of nationhood, ethnicity, and identity.  Are people born Russian, or are they made Russian, either by social forces or personal choice?

Throughout the entire Soviet period, Russian social sciences have taken a path diametrically opposed to mainstream Western scholarship.   Where the overwhelming majority of European and North American scholarly works on nationhood and identity operate under the assumption that ethnicity, race, and identity are social constructs, Russian scholarship has leaned heavily towards primordialism.  Much of this has to do with the canonization of the aforementioned theories of Lev Gumilev.

Next: Naming Names