Russians

by Gregory Feifer

  Russians’ political apathy during the first decade of Putin’s rule, when, judging by Western standards of engagement, the masses appeared to support a system that worked against their interests, led some to reject the term “middle class” altogether. “Consumer class” seemed more accurate. Comparisons to the West are also misleading because many Russians’ lifestyles are made possible by enduring Soviet-era institutions and arrangements that provide stability in the face of upheaval by giving them a stake in the going system, as I’ve tried to describe. Although he doesn’t support Putin, Kolya Pavlov also doesn’t feel compelled to protest. Neither does his mother-in-law, who has often complained to me about her lot. Often tired and generally upset about having to bring up her granddaughter, whom she loves, she acquiesces nevertheless. Unlike grandfathers, who tend to be far more remote figures, grandmothers often accept their fate because it is expected of them, as it was under Soviet rule.

  In other ways, babushki are anachronisms. Every block of apartments has its phalanx of them sitting on broken benches, where they while away hours with gossip and often dispense admonitions to anyone committing what they consider to be a folly, such as not wearing a hat in the cold. Women are sometimes upbraided for sitting on cold surfaces, which is believed to freeze their ovaries. The babushki are usually ignored. Despite their hard lot in life, they get very little respect.

  The elderly have never had it easy in Russia, even when they’re not dismissed as senile and weak. In the Soviet Union, life for most included not being able to travel abroad, speak freely, or even—usually outside of Moscow—find toilet paper to buy. But all citizens could count on at least one thing then: the state would fully provide for their retirements. No longer, that support having all but vanished with the communist collapse more than two decades ago, leaving many to fend for themselves with little idea of how to get by, let alone experience at it. In the early 1990s, many thousands of elderly and very elderly people lined Moscow metro entrances, holding up clothes, household possessions and anything else they might sell, until they were banned from doing so. Although the average pension has more than doubled since 2002, many elderly are still forced to improvise.

  Seventy-two-year-old Muscovite Lydia Kuznetsova, a former defense industry engineer, supplements her $130 monthly pension by selling clothes she sews. A widow, she also grows her own vegetables at a Soviet-era garden plot outside the city and pickles them for winter. Kuznetsova says she preferred life under the Soviet Union “because we grew up under that system. What’s happening now is that prices are always rising. If pensions are raised even a little, prices for everything rise again.” Kuznetsova shops at a special market on the city’s outskirts, where prices for bruised fruit and defective goods are lower than elsewhere, a stark contrast to the conspicuous display of wealth on central Moscow’s traffic-jammed streets.

  The officials who acknowledge the discrepancy include President Putin, who occasionally gravely announces that society owes the elderly a debt. After he said that helping them was a top priority, he oversaw comprehensive pension reform in 2002, standardizing payments throughout the country and indexing them to inflation. Still, the average pension remains barely above the official subsistence level. The system, which runs at a deficit of more than forty billion dollars a year, faces crisis thanks partly to Putin’s campaign promises to continue raising payments. Although the elderly continue to scrape by, falling oil prices or another financial jolt may leave the government unable to afford even the current level of help.

  Older people aren’t the only group to suffer en masse. Like many aspects of life, much rearing of young children is governed by superstition and tradition. Most babies are still swaddled at birth without being washed, then kept tightly wrapped for weeks. Often explained as necessary for the safety of infants who would otherwise hurt themselves, the practice reflects traditional views about individuals’ harmful impulses. An old saw has it that swaddling helps explain Russia’s outbursts of frenetic activity between the long periods of submission. Whatever truth lies in that, Russian children wave their limbs for all they’re worth when the swaddling cloth is removed.

  The popularity of a recent book titled America—What a Life!, which interprets American customs for Russian readers, highlighted the insularity of Russian life together with the success of state propaganda that depicts Americans as brutish imperialists. Written by Nikolai Zlobin, a political analyst who’s provided some of the most trenchant criticism of Putin’s Russia, it tapped a rich vein of general interest by explaining the American preference for teenage babysitters instead of babushki, the relative lack of lying in polite society and the preference for seeking out professional services—from plumbers to lawyers—based on ability instead of their closeness as friends or relatives.20

  However, globalization is changing many aspects of life, including childhood. Hollywood films, American cartoon characters and pop music are helping assimilate new generations to a greater degree than ever before, at least on a superficial level. That will have a huge effect on a future Russian society that may no longer feel as alienated from Western culture (whatever its merits) as it has in the last decade. But while television and the Internet may be making that true for many children even in remote provinces, others are still suffering the consequences of a Soviet legacy that doesn’t appear to be changing very much at all: the orphanage.

  Moscow’s Internat No. 8 is an unusual place. Housed in a neatly painted four-story concrete building in a leafy, residential part of town, the state boarding school for orphans is clean, its teachers are dedicated and the children, who sleep many to a room, appear genuinely happy. It’s also open to visitors, which is why it’s one of the very few such places I was able to observe.

  Inside, every child has a heartbreaking story. A sensitive-looking thirteen-year-old boy named Sasha told me that he ran away from home at the age of six because his parents “behaved badly.”

  “They drank and took drugs and didn’t take care of me,” he said. That’s a common story in Russia, where many of the nearly eight hundred thousand children identified as orphans have living parents. Another student, a smiling twelve-year-old girl with long red hair named Tatyana, was abandoned at birth. She said she liked drawing and sewing and wanted to become a doctor. She has a chance: the students at Internat No. 8 are incredibly lucky compared to most orphaned and abandoned children, and they know it. By all independent accounts, most other such institutions are depressing places that provide very few opportunities.

  Despite Russia’s vast number of institutionalized children, the government has only recently begun to encourage adoption. But very few Russian families want to adopt orphans because they are often seen as sick or otherwise damaged. Half of the fifteen thousand children adopted in Russia annually have been taken in by foreigners—many of them, until recently, Americans, who have adopted more children from Russia than from any other country except China and Guatemala, despite Russian policies that have made foreign adoption very difficult. An Education Ministry official named Sergei Vitelis told me the hurdles exist because Russian children should stay in Russia. “Adoption by foreigners isn’t right,” he said. “Any normal state should create conditions for children to grow up in their own country. That’s what we’re aiming for.”

  Children’s rights advocates say such disapproval of foreign adoptions is more about national pride than any genuine concern for child welfare. In late 2012, Putin banned all adoptions by Americans as a response to President Obama’s signing of the so-called Magnitsky bill, a human rights measure that instituted travel bans and other sanctions against Russian officials connected to the prison death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in 2009. Russian legislators settled on the adoption ban—part of a series of new restrictions aimed at reducing Russian cooperation with the United States—because it was one of the few measures that would have an impact on Americans. It followed public pressure prompted by several high-profile cases of abuse and death of adopted Russian
children in the United States. There’s “no need to go out and make a tragedy out of it,” said Pavel Astakhov, a celebrity lawyer who is Russia’s child rights commissioner and a major supporter of the ban, after announcing the new law would block the departure of almost fifty children already approved for adoption by Americans.

  Although Astakhov has overseen a program to encourage foster care and adoption, the adoption ban’s many critics say the attitudes behind it are condemning a growing number of children to a system of Soviet-era institutions desperately in need of reform, where they are living—and dying—in wretched conditions. The problems begin at birth, when hospital staff often try to persuade parents of babies with disabilities to give them up to state care. Poverty and alcoholism drive many other parents to abandon their children. Sergei Koloskov, who founded the Down Syndrome Society after a daughter was born with the condition, told me that far from providing support to disadvantaged children, the state hides them. Even normal children are at serious risk, he insisted. Contrary to government figures, he said, the number of orphans in Russia is growing and overloading the state’s orphanage system.

  Koloskov elaborated: “Healthy babies are lying in hospital beds all day as if they were sick, sometimes for months or longer. They’re completely ignored. No one plays with them or provides any kind of stimulation. That happens because the orphanages where they’re supposed to go after birth are full.” I spoke to him after my son, a colicky baby, had just been born—perhaps the reason I found his testimony especially upsetting.

  Of course the lack of attention at such an early age seriously harms child development. Elena Olshanskaya, a forceful young woman who has become one of Russia’s most active children’s rights activists, started a group of volunteers to help children in hospitals after she discovered abandoned babies in a room adjoining the one where she gave birth. “I was stunned,” she told me. “They were completely alone. They were fed several times a day and that was it. After a while, they just stop crying.”

  Another new mother in a central Russian hospital happened on a room of abandoned babies who had their mouths taped shut to stop them from crying. Broadcast on national television, her mobile phone video shocked the country. Reports of babies tied down in their cots are also common. Bedsores and other wounds are ubiquitous, not least because hospital staff are seriously overworked. A veteran activist, Boris Altshuler of the group Rights of the Child, said the very few visitors who were able to trick or otherwise find their way into such places reported abandoned babies being left to “rot alive.” “First of all there’s the smell,” he said. “The smell of unchanged linens or even children lying on bare plastic. The terrible smell because nobody changes the children’s diapers, nobody cares.”

  Women give birth in maternity wards, where babies who are abandoned spend three days before being moved to nearby hospitals, which aren’t equipped or staffed to care for them but are the only option available. Healthy children are then sent to so-called baby homes, institutions where they stay until the age of four before being moved to orphanages. There, their experiences differ widely. Unlike the relatively happy children at Internat No. 8, most end in establishments that are closed to the outside world. That’s a legacy of the Soviet Union, which tried to isolate everyone not considered normal from the rest of society. “Many orphanages stand behind high walls and big gates, often somewhere on the outskirts of town,” Olshanskaya explained. “People who live in such areas and pass by every day usually have no idea what’s inside.”

  Children considered mentally or physically disabled are sent to special psychiatric institutions, where they can be twice as likely to die as children in regular orphanages, according to Human Rights Watch. Altshuler describes such places as “terrible.” Evaluations deciding children’s fates are often cursory. Misdiagnosis is common and sometimes even doled out as punishment for misbehavior. Altshuler described the recent case of a fifteen-year-old boy who began misbehaving after his divorced mother remarried. When she permitted a diagnosis of mental disability, he was taken to a psychiatric institution, “isolated from society.” Children’s rights advocates say such treatment is common and incomprehensible in a country facing a demographic crisis in which the birthrate has been decreasing for years.

  Valentina Pavlova, who heads the Moscow office of Kidsave, an American organization that runs foster-care programs in Russia, told me that even in standard orphanages, the lack of contact with the rest of the world leaves children utterly unprepared for adult life. “When children leave those institutions,” Pavlova said, “they enter another world they’ve seen only on television. Very few are able to cope because they’ve never owned anything of their own or experienced normal relationships. Above all, they’ve been deprived of love.”

  Many teenagers run away to live on the streets. “They don’t like the life of hunger and starvation, boredom and cruelty,” Altshuler said, adding that many still feel they have little choice. Most Russians’ interaction with those children is limited to seeing them begging at train stations. Orphans who have children also tend to abandon their own offspring. Little surprise that the suicide rate for children, led by those who pass through orphanages and internat schools, is Europe’s highest. Pavlova agrees with most other experts who say the only way to help abandoned children break out of lifelong cycles of isolation and lack of education is to put them in the care of adoptive or foster families.

  But Altshuler believes officials in charge of the country’s state orphanages are obstructing new foster-care programs because they want to keep their state funding. “They don’t use the best-known practices because institutions aren’t interested in losing children.” He describes the current system as an “orphan industry.”

  “We know only the tip of the iceberg because there’s no government inspectorate for orphanages,” he said, adding that the situation won’t improve without public pressure. As long as the state keeps hiding orphans from society, he continued, attitudes about them won’t change. “We know who Russia’s real master is: the selfish, greedy bureaucracy, which is killing our country because it wants to make money from everything. From children’s tragedies, orphans, anything.”

  As countless parentless children remain mired in lives of misery, the Kremlin is busy with other concerns, including indoctrinating young Russians to become loyal supporters of the government. For that, as for so much else, it looks to the Soviet past for inspiration. There has been no more visible, or absurd, example than a summer camp for thousands of teenagers and young adults located five hours northwest of Moscow. Situated on large, beautiful Lake Seliger in the Tver region, amid pristine pine and birch forests, it was started in 2007 by a pro-Kremlin youth group known as Nashi, or “Ours,” which until then was best known for staging loud demonstrations outside foreign embassies. Under an earlier name, the group had conducted public book burnings.

  The camp is a hive of activity on a typical day: campers kayak, play volleyball and sit around campfires at night, but there’s a big difference from similar camps in the West. When I visited, large propaganda posters lambasting opposition figures hung from tree branches between campers’ tents. One display compared the US president to Saddam Hussein. Some of the claims were clearly false, including one condemning European democracy by asserting that German police had killed eighty antiglobalization protesters during a G8 summit in 2007. In fact, one protester was injured. Elsewhere, slogans proclaimed Russia’s greatness, some printed below pictures of intercontinental ballistic missiles. In another part of the camp, the faces of Russian opposition leaders had been superimposed over lingerie-clad female bodies and dubbed “political prostitutes.” The whole affair would have smacked of the Soviet Union’s Young Pioneer camps except that those much-loved institutions actually imparted relatively little ideology. In any case, the tactic appeared to be working on at least some participants, among them a baby-faced nineteen-year-old camper named Kostya Kudinov, who informed me with no trace of irony that the
government’s critics are “fascists.”

  “These people are against our Motherland. They’re ready to do anything to cheat our country. We’re against that. We’re here to show our concern for Russia and discuss what we can do to improve its future.”

  But as campers drank tea around their campfires under the tall pines and posters celebrating Putin’s manliness, it became clear many others weren’t buying the messages. Twenty-three-year-old Irina Chechikova complained about the cult of personality the camp’s mandatory political lectures were helping build around Russia’s “national leader,” Putin. Campers were also obliged to make career plans; state-controlled companies had set up tents where recruiters offered internships to the politically loyal teenagers. The camp organizers pushed a social message, too: alcohol was banned, and some displays exhorted campers to counteract Russia’s alarming population decline by propagating.

  That was the only message that appeared to be seriously taken to heart. Some of the campers described nights of promiscuous sex between participants who almost tripped over each other during their visits to various tents. The following year, Nashi’s leader failed to dispel rumors that he had taken part in the escapades. But despite the camp’s comic amateurishness, it was no isolated, crackpot endeavor. Although the same leader insisted it was solely the creation of his group, it had substantial government backing and no doubt funding as well. Putin, Medvedev and a host of other leaders paid visits.

  Their laughable attempt to create an updated model of a Soviet-era institution for instilling values in young Russians reflects life under Putin, some of it a hollow shell. Despite his recent divorce, the president presents himself as an honest family man of action, a teetotaler in the mold of the young Soviet men communist propaganda upheld as models for an empire of huge drinkers. However, the camp was truer to its precedents than it would seem. Just as it did under communism, its propaganda masked a radically different reality: in Russia, corruption is the rule and mere lip service is paid to the notion of family values.