Stranger Danger
Very little of what I have described in previous posts could have been characterized as “news,” since it was all fairly well-known years before the passage of the “Dima Yakovlev” adoption ban. Moreover, the few bits of information that are genuinely new only reached public consciousness in the year after the ban took effect. So it is difficult to see the timing of this particular law as anything other than opportunistic at best, cynical at worst. Along with the trial of Pussy Riot, the imprisonment of “Bolotny” protesters, the charges against Alexei Navalny, the laws reclassifying any NGO that receives money from abroad as a “foreign agent,” and, of course, the “gay propaganda” law, the ban on adoption by Americans looks like simply one of many examples of Russia’s central government crackdown on dissent. But the very fact that this list is so extensive only begs the question: why bring orphans into all this?
The bill was rushed through as a punitive response to the US Congress’s “Magnitsky List,” a law banning entry to the US for people implicated in the death of a lawyer imprisoned on what are widely regarded as trumped-up charges. Opponents of the adoption ban refused to call it the “Dima Yakovlev” Law, preferring instead the “Anti-Magnitsky Law,” the “Anti-Orphan Law,” or, more generally, “that cannibalistic (liudoedskii) law.” But the Magnitsky scandal confuses more than it explains: after all, what does transnational adoption have to do with forbidding Russian legislators entry into the US?
Viewed in the most cynical light, the adoption ban seems to be a recognition that the complications in recent Russian-American relations can be boiled down to biopolitics: which Russian bodies can leave the Russian Federation and cross American borders? American critics of the Magnitsky Act point out that it replicates a Cold War paradigm, always translating our bilateral disputes into matters of emigration and immigration.
But the problem is more than one of biopolitics: the choice of orphans as the bodies in question immediately demands a politics of sentimentality and humanism, even if the principles of humanism are arguably being violated. In Tourists of History, Marita Sturken argues that America’s response to any large-scale calamity (the Oklahoma bombing, 9/11) is to invoke the rhetoric of a nation’s lost innocence. In my own work on catastrophe, I assert that such a rhetoric is rarely claimed in similar circumstances by and for Russia: that is, discursively, Russia does not insist on its innocence; unlike America, it does not have the luxury of pretending that previous tragedies are irrelevant, since, on the contrary, their relevance is stressed and reinforced on an almost daily basis.
The orphan, however, is bound up in a network of innocence. While any baby or small child works as a symbol of innocence, the orphan is particularly powerful because he or she is not just innocent, but is always already an innocent victim. Victimhood is a powerful discursive strategy in postsocialist Russia: the people are the victims of the politicians and the rich, while the country itself is often represented as the object of exploitation and disdain on the part of Europe and (especially) the United States.
The innocent child is also a figure that demands protection, and in whose name a great many otherwise questionable policies can be justified. Russia is hardly alone in using the rhetoric of child protection as a fig leaf for encroaching on individual liberties; what is noteworthy is how recent this tactic is in the Russian Federation, as well as how widespread it has become. Since 2012, the Russian legislature has passed a string of laws whose ostensible purpose is to protect children, but whose effects appear to critics to be much less, well, innocent: smoking bans in public places and cartoons, bans on violence in cartoons, bans on a whole range of subject matter on television before 10:00, restrictions on Internet content (the final frontier of free speech), and, most notably, the “gay propaganda” law, which, while framed as protecting minors, effectively makes it illegal to say anything positive about gays and lesbians in public.
I’ll take a demon child instead, if that’s ok
Thus the Dima Yakovlev law is not just the culmination of years of nationalist rhetoric about the country’s resources and pride, but part of an extremely clever reappropriation of the liberal/sentimental tropes that have long served to critique Russian government policy. Institutionalized children are often seen as victims of an uncaring state, but now they are being doubly victimized: the suffering Russian orphan has become a powerful weapon of state. Children are not being protected, but the rhetoric of child protection allows the government to inflate its own reputation while clamping down on dissent. The actual children are still “raised” by the same state that deploys them as a tool to ensure that concerted opposition will be either stillborn or aborted.
Next: Think of the Children!