Lost to the State: Family Discontinuity, Social Orphanhood and Residential Care in the Russian Far East 9781845458638

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LOST TO THE STATE

LOST TO THE STATE Family Discontinuity, Social Orphanhood and Residential Care in the Russian Far East

Elena Khlinovskaya Rockhill

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

First published in 2010 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2010 Elena Khlinovskaya Rockhill All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Khlinovskaya Rockhill, Elena Lost to the state: family discontinuity, social orphanhood, and residential care in the Russian Far East / Elena Khlinovskaya Rockhill. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-84545-738-9 (alk. paper) 1. Children–Institutional care–Russia (Federation) 2. Children– Institutional care–Soviet Union. 3. Family policy–Russian (Federation) 4. Family policy–Soviet Union. I. Title. HV1215.15 .R63 362.73'209577–dc22 2010019550 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed in the United States on acid-free paper ISBN 978-1-84545-738-9 hardback

To my family

Contents

List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgements Notes on Transliteration List of Acronyms and Abbreviations

x xii xv xvi

Introduction The Scope of the Problem What is this Study About? Time Line: Soviet and Post-Soviet Notes on Methodology Theoretical and Conceptual Framework

1 1 6 7 8 13

PART I. BECOMING A SOCIAL ORPHAN Chapter 1. A Brief History of Family Policy in Russia Pre-Revolutionary Shelters and the Concept of the Child The Soviet Period: Family Discontinuity and Childrenout-of-Family

47 48

Chapter 2. The State as a Co-Parent Fieldsite: Magadan The Child Welfare Network Residential Care Institutions and their Functions Categories of the Family The Benevolent State and ‘Good’ Parents: Voluntary Placements and Cooperation

59 59 63 73 78

vii

49

80

Contents

Chapter 3. State and Family: Tilting the Balance of Power Neblagopoluchnye Parents: Tension between the State and the Family ‘Inadequate Fulfilment of Parental Duties’ Working with the Neblagopoluchnaya Family

87 89 97 99

Chapter 4. Parents Overwhelmed by the State ‘Child Appropriation’: The Case Study of Maria Court Hearings Deprivation of Voice and Disempowerment of the Parent

103 103 105 129

Chapter 5. Norms and Deviance The ‘Best Interests of the Child’: Moral Judgement of the Parent The Child’s Biological Family: The Severance of Ties and ‘Symbolic Death’ of Parents The Construction of Family by the State: A Society of Virtual Kin

135 135 143 157

PART II. BEING A SOCIAL ORPHAN Chapter 6. The State as a Sole Parent Po Etapu: The Child’s Journey through Residential Homes The Cosmology of Institutions

177 177 180

Chapter 7. The World of Social Orphans Experiencing Institutions: Narratives of Former Inmates Misha’s Signposts of Institutional Life Unpacking Parent-Child Obligations: Dispersed Responsibility and Accountability Two Worlds: Orphans and the Wider Society

211 211 215

viii

230 234

Contents

PART III. POST-SOVIET OR SOVIET? SELF-PERPETUATION OF THE SYSTEM Chapter 8. The Continuing Soviet Legacy: Paradoxes of Change and Continuity Childhood and Family Today: The Shifting Domains of Public and Private Continuity of Practices and Attitudes ‘Moral Panic’: Current Descendants of Witchcraft Accusations and Show Trials Self-Perpetuation of the System Alternative Approaches

267 276 280

Chapter 9. The Post-Soviet Case in a Wider Context Pronatalism Women's Employment and Child Socialization Concepts of Child and Childhood Belonging A Double-Edged Sword of Support and Control Motherhood Ideals

291 292 294 296 299 306

Conclusion Modes of Relatedness Power Asymmetry

313 315 317

Epilogue

325

Appendix 1. List of Documents Supplied to the Court by the Guardianship Department and the Baby Home in Maria’s Case

327

Appendix 2. Reminiscences of Two ‘Bad’ Childhoods

331

References Glossary Index

339 371 373

ix

257 257 262

List of Figures and Tables

Figures 0.1. 0.2.

The number of new cases of ‘children without parental care’ registered annually in the Russian Federation.

3

Fieldwork sites: Magadan and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, Russian Far East.

9

2.1.

Magadan child welfare network.

64

2.2.

Movement of children from birth to three years through the Magadan Baby Home (1983–99).

74

3.1.

A house of neblagopoluchnaya family A.

90

3.2.

Interior room in the house of neblagopoluchnaya family B.

90

3.3.

Interior view of kitchen in the house of neblagopoluchnaya family C.

91

6.1.

Magadan Baby Home.

180

6.2.

Baby Home’s playground.

185

6.3.

In a playpen.

186

6.4.

In the medical unit.

187

6.5.

In anticipation of food. Children waiting on their chairs for lunch to be served. 189

6.6.

A bedroom in the Baby Home. Nap time.

189

6.7.

A lesson.

192

6.8.

A teacher is conducting a lesson. A nanny is preparing for lunch. 200

6.9.

Free play.

200

6.10.

Lunch.

201

6.11.

A bedroom in internat A.

206

6.12.

Doing homework in an internat.

206

x

Tables 0.1.

Number of children without parental care and their distribution between guardianship, adoption and residential care institutions. Number of parents deprived of parental rights. 2

xi

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Piers Vitebsky at the Scott Polar Research Institute (Cambridge University) for his inspiration, advice, amazing creativity and guidance from which I have benefited for all these years. I am grateful to the Anthropology, Russian and Northern Studies Group, the Family and Psychotherapy Group and the Magic Circle Group for helping me to explore and analyse various aspects of my data. Many thanks are due to the library staff of the Scott Polar Research Institute, particularly to the late William Mills, Shirley Sawtell, Isabella Warren and Mark Gilbert for their untiring assistance in all questions relating to literature and information. Toby Benham was very helpful with technical matters. Charles Swithinbank has always been a gracious host and a good friend. At the Department of Social Anthropology (Cambridge University), my deepest thanks go to Marilyn Strathern, Alan Macfarlane, Barbara Bodenhorn, Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov, Suzanne Hoelgaard, Stephen HughJones, Caroline Humphrey and Catherine Alexander (now of Goldsmiths, University of London) for their valuable insights into different topics in my research, for the stimulating discussions that helped me to refine my ideas, and for their time, encouragement and interest in my work. Frances Pine and Julie Cruikshank from the University of British Columbia provided me with timely advice on literature; Svetlana Stephenson from London Metropolitan University helped me with contacts in Moscow. I am very thankful to Barbara Bodenhorn, Catherine Alexander, Hilary Pilkington and Frances Pine, for their very helpful suggestions and comments. Thank you to Marion Berghahn, to Jon Lloyd for his careful copyediting and Mark Stanton, at Berghahn books, for guiding the book through the production process. I am grateful to you all. I am thankful to the Parkside Counselling and Psychotherapy Group, Cambridge, for sharing their expertise in psychology and psychotherapy that was helpful in analysing my data, and particularly to Sally Wolfe for inviting me to present a paper to the group that led to very interesting discussions. I am indebted to numerous people in Magadan, PetropavlovskKamchatskiy and Moscow, who in different ways made this research possible xii

Acknowledgements

and interesting. In Moscow, Evgeniy Rybinskiy from the Institute of Childhood, Vladimir Belyakov and Larisa Ryabova from the Federal Ministry of Education, Svetlana Shcheglova from the Institute of Youth and Elena Breeva from the Institute of Sociology were most helpful in providing me with much-appreciated literature and information. I extend my gratitude to my host families. Elena Akinicheva and her family provided me with a warm friendly home in Magadan. Tatyana Kostenets and her husband Vladimir opened up their home to me in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy and helped me to make all the arrangements necessary for my work. During my field trips, my relatives and friends in Magadan and Moscow, Marina and Nadezhda Teterkin, Mark Khlynovskiy and Irina Tutova, Roman and Ludmila Tchaikovskiy, Larisa and Evgeniy Kokorev, Sergei and Alla Tokaev, Tatyana Kononova, Ludmila Popova, Valentina Sud’ina, Irina and Aleksandr Butakov, and my collegues from the Women’s Education and Information Centre helped me in many ways, providing logistics and assistance when I needed them most – I would like to thank you all. I am grateful to the regional and city administrations of both regions for allowing me access to children’s institutions and prisons, and particularly to Nadezhda Papp and Vladimir Pecheniy in Magadan, who acted not as ‘gatekeepers’, but rather as ‘gate openers’. The Guardianship Departments in both regions served as a focal point of my research and I appreciate the time and information they were willing to provide. I am particularly thankful to the Magadan Guardianship Department for sharing their office space with me and for including me into their daily work. The same goes for the administration and staff of the Baby Homes, Children’s Homes and internats, and to the City Court for allowing me to tape court hearings. I am thankful to all my informants and especially the former and current children’s homes residents for sharing their views and life stories with me; without them, this work would be pointless. I am indebted to Kim Moskovskiy, who has since passed away, for the evenings we spent talking about his life as an orphan and his work as a director of a children’s home, the fate of his ‘children’ and especially for his unpublished memoirs. Many thanks to Miron Etlis for his academic advice. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Wenner-Gren Foundation, where I held the Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship, for their generous financial support. For financial support I thank the BB Roberts Fund of the Scott Polar Research Institute, the Worts Travelling Scholarship Fund, and the Finley Bursary of Darwin College, Cambridge University. Darwin College provided me with a stimulating academic environment as xiii

Lost to the State

well as with everything my family and I needed during my studies in Cambridge. I am grateful to the Dean, Leo Howe, and to the Dean’s secretaries, Yvonne Pope and Karen Asplen. Above all, I am grateful to my family. My husband, Lawrence Khlinovskiy Rockhill, has been a bedrock of stability, love, care and devotion throughout all these years, as well as a diligent editor and a good friend. I have enjoyed the tender love, moral, editorial and secretarial support of my daughter, Sofia Khynovskaya Rockhill. I learn from her as much as she learns from me. I would like to thank my parents, Nina and Vladimir Khlynovski, and my sister, Irina Khlynovskaya, for their infinite support, encouragement and care, and for being an example to me. I owe more to them than I can express. This book is dedicated to the five generations of my family, since many of the events described here affected them along with millions of other Soviet families. It is through this book that I hope to acknowledge the previously silenced trauma that the members of my family had to live with for so many years, but also to recognize many opportunities some of them were afforded during Soviet times.

xiv

Notes on Transliteration

In my book I have used Russian sources, taped interviews and recorded court hearings. The transcription and translations into English of all these materials are mine. My comments appear in square brackets. Russian words are italicized. I have used the transliteration system as recommended by the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names in accordance with the practice of the Scott Polar Research Institute Library.

a б в г д e ё ж з и й к л м н о

п р с т у ф х ц ч ш щ ъ ы ь э ю я

a b v g d e, ye e zh z i y k l m n o

xv

p r s t u f kh ts ch sh shch y ’ e yu ya

List of Acronyms and Abbreviations

TSVINP

Tsentr Vremennoy Isolyatsii Nesovershennoletnikh Pravonarushitelei

Centre of Temporary Isolation of Juvenile Delinquents

KPDN

Komitet po Delam Nesovershennoletnikh

Committee for Juveniles

GD

Otdel Opeki i Popechitel’stva

Guardianship Department

OPPN

Otdelenie Profilaktiki Pravonarusheniy Nesovershennoletnikh

Department of Crime Prevention among Juveniles

VK

Vospitatel’naya Koloniya

Young Offenders Correctional Facility (for 14- to 18-year-olds)

IK

Ispravitel’naya Koloniya

Correctional Adult Prison Camp

SIZO

Sledstvenniy Isolyator

Pre-trial Detention Centre

xvi

Introduction

This book is based on the ethnographic study of ‘social orphanhood’ (sotsial’noe sirotstvo) in post-Soviet Russia.1 ‘Social orphans’ is an idiom describing children (individuals up to 18 years of age) who have at least one living parent, and often members of their extended family, but who were left without parental care. This term lacks a clear definition. Official discourse distinguishes between biological orphans and ‘children left without parental care’ (deti, ostavshiyesya bez popecheniya roditelei). In public discourse the term ‘social orphans’ is often conflated with ‘children left without parental care’, but both are used to describe such categories of children as unsupervised family children (beznadzorniye), street children (besprizorniye), hidden orphans (skrytye siroty), vagrant children (brodyazhki), delinquent children and youths, abandoned children and children who grow up in residential care institutions. They are ‘social’ orphans because their living parents were thought to be unwilling or unable to look after them for ‘social’ reasons: their parental rights have been terminated, they were ‘asocial’, neglectful, alcoholics, incarcerated or absent. In my study I focused on ‘social’ orphans who grew up in residential care institutions, where they comprise 80–95 per cent of the institutional child population.2

The Scope of the Problem There is no single source for the official statistics regarding such children, but the numbers that appear in different sources are usually similar. In the 2000s the number of children without parental care stood at 776,000, with 250,000 in residential care (Trostanetskaya, cited in Lukashina 2003)3 and the rest placed in adoptive families or family substitutes, such as opeka (guardianship), patronat and priemnaya sem’ya (types of foster care). Dronova (2007) cites 867,000 children without parental care.4 Lakhova (2006) refers to 820,000, with 220,000 living in residential care institutions; other sources named 260,000 residential care children.5 According to Kachurovskaya there are 735,000 children without parental care, with 190,000 children in residential care institutions.6 Having done my own 1

Lost to the State

calculations for one city, I realized that the actual number of social orphans is difficult to estimate because of the fluid boundaries between different statuses of children. Throughout the 1990s the number of children without parental care had been growing (Table 0.1). If in 1998 approximately 1.8 per cent of all Russia’s children were cared for outside their nuclear family,7 in 2003 the number rose to 3 per cent.8 The number of children’s homes increased from 900 in 1991 to 2,100 in 2005 (Korsakova 2005). According to other sources, the number of children’s homes is higher: 2203 children’s homes and internats, with additional 1952 remedial children’s homes but not including baby homes (Ministry of Education and Science 2005). In the period between 1994 and 2006, over 100,000 new cases of ‘children without parental care’ were discovered annually (Figure 0.1). Generally, over one-third of these children were placed in residential care institutions,9 over a half were placed in family substitutes10 and only about 6 per cent were returned to their birth families.11, 12 The latter is of special interest to us, for along with fewer children having been returned to

Year

1965

1992

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

60,00070,000**

67,286

102,682

113,296

113,243

105,534

110,930

Children without parental care

496,273

533,137

572,362

596,852

620,115

Placed under guardianship

225,456

252,540

278,051

293,546

303,865

Adopted

114,495

139,827

141,136

144,825

146,812

Raised in institutions

112,600

140,800

153,200

158,500

169,400

1,119

1,252

1,279

24,359

27,640

31,790

New cases of children without parental care per year

Number of institutions Parents deprived of parental rights

1,761 6,700*

16,997

19,846

2003

776,000*

250,000*

Table 0.1. Number of children without parental care and their distribution between guardianship, adoption and residential care institutions. Number of parents deprived of parental rights. (Source: Karelova 2000, *Trostanetskaya cited in Lukashina 2003, **Rybinskiy 1990)

2

Introduction

14000 127096

133034

132505

127090

128075

113913

110930

7000

81441

8000

105534

9000

113234

102682

10000

113262

11000

123204

12000

128951

13000

1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

Figure 0.1. The number of new cases of ‘children without parental care’ registered annually in the Russian Federation. http://www.usynovite.ru/statistics/2006/ammount

their birth families, the number of parents whose parental rights have been terminated has jumped tenfold in the post-Soviet period, from 6,700 cases in 1992 (Table 0.1) to 70,000 in 2005 (Lakhova 2006). All these statistics indicate a trend: an increase in the numbers of children left without parental care, of children’s homes, and of parents deprived of parental rights (as compared to the post-War Soviet period). Social orphanhood is not a new phenomenon; these children existed in Soviet times, but it was in the post-Soviet period that their numbers started to swell and solidified into a category, becoming an issue of heightened concern. From the mid 1980s a massive wave of publications described the poor state of childhood, in sharp contrast with the positive image of Soviet childhood more familiar to the majority of people during Soviet times, or at least as far as childhood representation in the media goes. The issue had moved into the public domain of open media discussions, research interests, conferences and social policy, attracting attention of educators, psychologists, practitioners working in residential care institutions, and the emerging field of social work. My analysis of public discourse reveals three major problem areas, corresponding to the three stages in the family’s and children’s relationship to the state: I call these pre-institutional, institutional and post-institutional. Discussions related to the pre-institutional stage consider the problems of children in danger of institutionalization, viewed as a part of the larger pool of children in need (Rybinskiy 1997). The ever-increasing number and 3

Lost to the State

visibility of children without parental care became a significant point of reference for illustrating the devastating effect that post-Soviet transformations exerted on the family. Along with deprived childhood, the family assumed a place in the spotlight, including a particular kind of family called neblagopoluchnaya (or ‘problem’ family),13 another category that crossed over the threshold separating Soviet from post-Soviet society. The media is saturated with examples illustrating observations that ‘problem’ families raise ‘problem’ children, that children in these families have a deprived childhood, and that the increasing number of ‘problem’ families and their children suggests a process of individual psychological, social and demographic disintegration, that is, an illness in the whole society.14 Research and scholarly discussion support many of these claims in a more nuanced way. They document the following issues: the family in crisis (Antonov et al. 1999, Podgornov 1996); family transformations that include the nuclearization of the family, increasing divorce rates, the increasing number of single parent families and the decreasing number of children, along with changing family roles (Gurko 1995); a changing value system that accompanies transition from ideological monism to ideological pluralism (Sillaste 1995); the considerable worsening of economic situations in families (Darmodekhin and Elizarov 1994, Osadchaya 1997); the disintegration of moral values; and the rise in alcoholism and drug use (Bezlepkina 1995). Gor’kovaya (1994) studied teenage delinquency and found that in 92 per cent of her cases, children’s families had pronounced neblagopoluchiye, a concept we shall examine in detail later, while Romanova and Petrakova (1992) studied how children assimilate family alcoholic tradition. Many of these studies also point to a link between the availability of state support and family welfare, including issues of responsibility (Varga 1996, Darmodekhin and Elizarov 1994, Antonov et al. 1999, Sillaste 1995). Thus, the problem of children without parental care was seen as a consequence of the family crisis in general and of ‘problem’ families in particular. Economic devastation is considered as a contributing factor, but many refuse to accept it as a definitive one as, they argue, there were fewer orphans (680,000) after the Second World War (Kachurovskaya 2007) and many people raised orphans as their own children in conditions no less challenging than the current ones. In most cases the blame is securely attached to ‘bad’ mothers (Kobets 1995, Burenkova 1995) and socalled ‘cuckoo mothers’, another Soviet idiom that describes women who give birth to children and leave them for other people to raise.15 Children of such mothers were seen as being better off elsewhere, including Russian 4

Introduction

and foreign adoptive families and residential care institutions, of which post-Soviet Russia inherited a whole network. In the discourse pertaining to the institutional stage, throughout the 1990s state residential childcare institutions were generally viewed as a good alternative to such families. But increasingly in the 2000s, media stories revealed the poor state of institutions and incidents of child abuse by the institutional staff, in hospitals where abandoned children often live for years,16 and by some Russian17 or foreign18 adoptive parents. Although some were still advocating preservation and improvement of the institutional system (Ivanova and Barabanova 1999), the emphasis now shifted to citizens helping residential childcare institutions with material goods, and the government began to develop foster care programmes. Instead of the feeling of horror and disbelief that accompanied this avalanche of information, a less emotional and more pragmatic approach was adopted, leading to the creation of numerous websites, religious and non-governmental organizations and civil initiatives that aimed at assisting children in need, efforts to promote adoption and the creation of familytype residential care, among others. Finally, the discourse on the post-institutional stage reflects an awareness that former residents leave institutions ill prepared to live in the wider society, becoming increasingly visible through their unemployment, homelessness and criminal involvement, and thus posing a threat to societal stability (Grigor’eva 1995a, Grigor’eva 1995b, Belikova 1991). This pointed to a need for programmes that would facilitate their social adaptation. Many initiatives outlined above were aimed at improving institutions and creating more family substitutes. Yet the main player in this drama, the ‘bad’ birth mother, is taken for granted and is the subject of considerable prejudice. Although it is still unclear who this quintessential ‘bad’ mother is, outside of the oft-used cliché image of alcoholic, single, unemployed or young irresponsible women, many agreed that their children should not remain in such families. Indeed, as shown above, 94 per cent of the children taken from such mothers ended up either in a family substitute or in residential care. This distribution is an exclusive right and responsibility of the state (regulation). The wave of publications in the 1990s calling for awareness and recognition of the problem had passed, yet the problems outlined there remained. The number of social orphans is increasing but the reasons for that are still unclear, except for the general nods towards falling moral standards, families in crisis, ‘problem’ families, and occasionally economics and unemployment. 5

Lost to the State

What is this Study About? Answering the question ‘Why there are so many children without parental care, and why their numbers are growing?’ entailed a study of social orphans not as an isolated phenomenon, but within the context of what led up to them becoming social orphans, analysing the circumstances surrounding the process of separation, its consequences for the parents and the child, and the actors involved in this process. The problem of social orphanhood is located in the nexus between the state, the family and the child seen from the vantage point of the child welfare system, where all three actors meet. I was interested in exploring a set of practices in the area of child welfare, as well as concepts, attitudes and values that guide them in their everyday occurrences. The study is also an attempt to understand these practices as being the result of a historical process that shaped the existing family policies and attitudes. Signs of potential problems in children may signal an unfavourable family environment, raising a suspicion that the family in question may be neblagopoluchnaya, a suspicion that may quickly become a certainty. Parents will then be placed in the category of a neblagopoluchnaya and their children become ‘social orphans’. From that time on, public opinion operates with these categories without making extensive efforts to look beyond the labels; this is where a category makes individuals. In professional and public discourse, the cliché reference to social orphans often does not indicate an agent, using the passive voice: children left without parental care, immediately leading to the question, ‘who left them without parental care?’ Most commonly, mothers are implied as being responsible for leaving their children. As I shall explain, the trope of a ‘bad mother’ in Soviet culture is one of the worst that can happen to a woman. I sought to examine who is conceptualized as a ‘bad mother’ and what constitutes her ‘badness’. Children who grow up in institutions are put into the fluid category of ‘social orphans’. I endeavoured to understand what it means to live as a social orphan. How and where are they brought up? Being removed from their birth families, what are family and home for them? What are their life paths after leaving children’s homes? What is the role of residential care institutions in society? As we shall see in Chapter 7, these children have an ambiguous status, being simultaneously viewed as marginalized and privileged. Therefore, this is a study of the social construction of ‘unfit’ parents, of ‘social orphans’, and of the relationship between these categories and the individuals comprising them, and the 6

Introduction

state in a post-Soviet context. The aims of my study were (1) to examine the process of social orphaning19 of children from an institutional, parental and child’s perspective, and its conceptual foundation, and (2) to explore social orphanhood as a state of being. Termination of parental rights is a blatant instrument that finalizes what had been seen as the process of breakdown in the family. Examining real or constructed breakdowns via welfare mechanisms is a way of understanding childhood, family, individuals and their relationships to the state. I believe that the crisis points of family breakdown, whether actual or as imagined by the state, form highly productive points for considering what it is that constitutes the good family, and the sharp changes in the relationship between family, parenting and state. Such a focus entails an examination of shifting ideas and practices of public/private, state and society, power and agency, and notions of what it is that makes a person. The rationale for examining this particular branch of the welfare system is that it acts as an index of the health of the whole society, for this is indeed how the issue of social orphans is perceived by various actors.

Time Line: Soviet and Post-Soviet The time line is an important factor in this study for two reasons. The first concerns the issues of change and continuity. Since the beginning of perestroika in 1985, post-Soviet Russian society continues to be in a permanent state of flux, with profound changes affecting social, economic and political spheres. It felt as if 1991, when the Soviet Union fell apart, constituted a temporal and spatial break separating the (old) Soviet from the (new) post-Soviet periods.20 Specifically, in the 1990s, the overall feeling was that of overwhelming change. The perceived certainty and immutability of social order and most institutions were gone, leaving open a question of how to interpret new social reality and what to do next. As a popular saying went, ‘one night we went to bed in one country and woke up in another’. Although political dramas unfolding on the TV screens attracted genuine interest and hopes for positive changes, the life of an ordinary citizen was more closely affected by changes in the domains of economic and social policies, with unemployment, unpaid wages and decreased benefits, the emergence of the private sector and ownership, and changing infrastructures becoming new realities. Through this material I wish to explore whether or not, due to the disruptions in multiple spheres during this ‘transitional’ time, there was indeed such a ‘clean break’ and if so, in which domains. 7

Lost to the State

The second reason why the time frame is important is because, although my fieldwork was conducted in the post-Soviet period, the Soviet Union continued coming up in interviews with my informants, in child welfare practices or in the archaeology of some current common concepts. Most of my informants were socialized via Soviet institutions and, as we shall see, the current child welfare infrastructure turned out to be a modified Soviet model. Thus, it was necessary to consider the Soviet Union in depth, which explains the considerable emphasis that is placed on Soviet practices. Yet the relationship between things Soviet and things post-Soviet is not the only one that seems illuminating. Throughout Soviet history and into post-Soviet times, Russia was seen as being different in kind from Western democracies. Likewise, Russia considered capitalist countries its ultimate ‘other’. Differences were to be found everywhere, in the political structure, economics and social welfare, and in a formation of the subject. However, the interpretation of the Soviet subject as a product of power (the ‘diffused’ model; see below) revealed many similarities with ideological practices in contemporary Western democracies (Dobrenko 2007). I arrived at the same conclusion. My first hunch as to possible similarities in child welfare practices between such presumably radically different systems as in (post-) Soviet Russia, the UK and the USA was that much of my data corresponded to the interpretative framework of French social philosophers Foucault and Bourdieu, whose theoretical frameworks were developed for non-Soviet society. There were other telling instances, such as when scholars from the UK and the USA commented on my conference papers, ‘We have plenty of this in my country’. Eventually I decided to place my material in a comparative framework, based on the literature of child welfare practices in Western Europe, the UK and the USA, and the results were no less illuminating than the Soviet/post-Soviet parallel.

Notes on Methodology Entering the Bureaucratic Maze Originally I planned to conduct my study in two cities, Magadan and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy (Figure 0.2), allowing me to make comparisons and see whether or not processes observed in one city were peculiar to a particular place or whether they were representative of the wider society. I knew that in order to obtain permission to work in institutions I had to start from the ‘top’, and this is where a few informal contacts proved 8

9

Vologda

Konosha

Pechora

Vorkuta

Nar'yan-Mar

Salekhard

Astrakhan'

Orenburg

Kurgan Omsk

Novyy Urengoy

Novokuznetsk Bamaul

Novosibirsk

Kemerovo

Tomsk

Bratsk

Kyzyl

Abakan

Krasnoyarsk

Kansk

Lesosibirsk

RU SSI A

Noril'sk Igarka

Dikson

Nizhnevartovsk

Surgut

Nadym

Ivenovo Tula Vladimir Ryazan' Nizhniy-Novgorod Lipesk Khanty-Mansiysk Tambov Kazan Izhevsk Perm' Penza Ul'yanovsk Yekaterinburg Tobol'sk Ufa Saratov Tyumen' Samara Chelyabinsk Volgograd

Kostroma

Kotlas

Arkhangel'sk

Novaya Zemlya

Irkutsk

Anadyr'

Provideniya

Birobidzhan

Urgal

Vladivostok

Khabarovsk

Berezovyy Sovetskaya Gavan

Kuril Islands

Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk

Sakhalin Island

Okha

Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy P e ropavlovsk-Kamc et amc mchatskiyy mc

Magadan M aga n agadan

Pevek

Okhotsk O khotsk

Blagoveshchensk

Tynda Never

Neryungri

Aldan

Borzya

Yakutsk

Chita

Nizhneangarsk

Lensk

Vilyuysk

Tiksi

New Siberian Islands

Ulan-Ude

Ust'-Ilimsk Ust'-Kut

Severnaya Zemlya

Figure 0.2. Fieldwork sites: Magadan and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, Russian Far East. © Map Resources.

Rostov

Voronezh

Kursk

Bryansk Orel

Tver'

Novgorod

St. Petersburg

Moscow Yaroslavl'

Kaluga

Smolensk

Pskov

Murmansk

Franz Josef Land

Wrangel Island

Introduction

Lost to the State

themselves useful. To study social orphans is to deal with a sensitive issue, but the problem was perceived to be of such magnitude that researching the topic seemed like a good idea to some key personnel in the city administration. A few telephone calls by Nadezhda Papp, then Vice-Mayor for Social Issues, to the directors of the Baby Home, a school for low-income families, and the Guardianship Department, all in the jurisdiction of the various departments of the city administration, opened doors to these institutions. Later additions were the Committee for Juvenile Affairs (KPDN) and the Centre for Temporary Isolation of Juvenile Delinquents (TSVINP). I could make my observations at any time and for however long it took. However, we made a strategic mistake. Among others, we called the director of the Children’s Home, notifying her about my coming and asking her to assist me. Yet, the next day I was informed that before I could visit the Children’s Home and the internats (residential homes/schools), I must secure permission from their immediate superiors, the regional Department of Education. Apparently, the director of the Children’s Home informed them about my coming, and was not permitted to see me until I received clearance from Georgiy, the Head of the Department. From now on, the negotiation of my access to the institutions was more structured and formal; I had to make my way through the bureaucratic edifice in descending order. The atmosphere and requirements here were very different from that of the city administration. Georgiy interrogated me on my purposes and intentions, and required me to notify him as to the dates and duration of my studies in each institution so that he could issue an official prikaz (order) and make it public in the Department. He also insisted that I produce a report of my findings and deliver this report to the meeting of regional educational officials directly after my observation. No arguments to the effect that I first must analyse my data deterred him from this demand. Later I found out that I was not treated differently from other visitors to the Children’s Home, as the Guardianship Department, although having the right to check on the city children residing in this regional Children’s Home, had an experience similar to mine. The Department of Education seemed to justify the name ‘gatekeeper’ quite literally, as their controlling hand was firmly planted in the Children’s Home’s and the internats’ affairs. I heard later that the Department keeps the directors of these institutions on a tight leash; indeed, within a year, three directors had been fired. Georgiy sent me to discuss particulars of my study with his Vice-Head Maxim, to whom I had to explain my reasons for research again and who put forth another set of limitations on my work. He said: ‘We shall not 10

Introduction

permit you to work with the children, only to observe.’ I was quietly wondering how in other cities volunteers were allowed to work with children, but during this meeting he was determined to show me who was in charge and these issues were non-negotiable. Later it emerged that he forbade the directors of the Children’s Home and internats from showing me any documentation. In both Magadan and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, the question of access to documents was an issue. A social scientist doing applied research was a novelty, and I think there was no regulation as to which documents they could allow me to see and which were a liability. They all solved this problem differently: I was able to convince Maxim to allow me to work with the children’s files, but he forbade the institutional staff from showing me any other documents, such as journals of teacher’s observations. The Guardianship Department did not make it a problem: after a short deliberation I was allowed to see all the documents and journals held on the shelves. The Baby Home also permitted me to see many documents, the children’s files and journals of teachers’ observations. Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy’s Department of Health firmly prevented my access to any documents. In Magadan’s Department of Education I met with Arianna, who oversees the work of the Children’s Home and internats. She also served as a member of the Psychological-Medical-Pedagogical Committee (PMPC) that evaluates children’s mental development and is responsible for placements to remedial schools and classes. At first she took me for a government official from ‘above’ in Moscow who was making an unannounced inspection of the Department of Education’s residential care facilities. Her face reflected a wave of extreme anxiety as they were not prepared for it. When I explained that I was there to do research, she was visibly relieved and from that moment, nuances in her behaviour changed, she became more self-assured and perhaps even boorish. She behaved more modestly around her superiors (Georgiy and Maxim), yet as soon as she was around people who were ‘nobody’ (in her own words), like myself and her subordinates, she came across as a person who enjoyed and used power, and was quick to point to where she was (higher) in relation to them. These others included government officials from other departments and institutions, including the Guardianship Department. Fears and anxieties did not stop there. A concern for doing something wrong or saying something wrong, a sentiment that was perhaps inevitable in such a prescriptive environment as an institution, permeated the attitude of many institutional staff members during the initial moments of 11

Lost to the State

encounters. This fear subsided once it became clear that I was not judging or pointing out faults. But anxieties were not unfounded, as ‘confidentiality’ turned out to be an interesting concept. During my observations in the Baby Home I guaranteed that my notes would be confidential, except to the person being observed. However, in a few days the Senior Upbringer, in the presence of another teacher, requested to see my notes from the previous day. I politely refused, to the displeasure of the Senior Upbringer and to the relief of the teacher present in the room. The next day, everyone knew about the incident. After being cleared at official regional and city administration levels, I was sent to meet with the directors of the institutions, who then allowed me to start my work in children’s groups. I began my work at the chosen sites, but other organizations started to present themselves as playing an important role in the child welfare network. I had to obtain separate permissions to observe the work of the PMPC, the court and prisons, but my initial anchoring with the city and regional administrations helped. Eventually I decided to conduct the bulk of my work in Magadan. However, because the issue of confidentiality in a small city presented a particular problem, I still used data collected in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy in that part where it reflected similar attitudes, concepts and practices. The names of all the individuals have been changed. Having listened to so many stories, observed various procedures and processes, there was a question of what should be included in the book. While emerging categories, concepts and themes started to form patterns, I looked for prevalence that constituted a mainstream tendency. These are the tendencies which determine the increasing number of social orphans. I chose to portray at length only those processes that I found to be most typical and reflective of a greater number of similar cases. At times I thought that if only the state agents gave a particular mother a chance, a helping hand, assistance crucial for that moment, so many lives, both the child’s and the parent’s, would not have been altered to such a significant degree, so many bonds would not have been broken to substitute a known evil for an unknown evil. However, this was beyond the capability and responsibility of the state agents I studied. I became aware of the responsibility I bear for a call to turn a humane face towards these mothers. After all, there are children abused, neglected, hungry and cold. However, I argue that the present pool of families whose children are in institutions is made up of all kinds of families, and if a network of family assistance was available, a substantial number of the children would return home or never be placed in a children’s home in the first place.

12

Introduction

Theoretical and Conceptual Framework In studying the realms of the state, the family and the child, I used a number of concepts and ethnographic categories in the Soviet period, as well as their shifting meanings in the post-Soviet period. This was done in order to trace some causes of contemporary practices and their role in the formation of the actor’s subjectivity. This helps to substantiate my point that many practices are based on values and norms shaped in Soviet times, and are carried across the threshold of a timeline that separates the old Soviet society from a new post-Soviet society, despite the shifting meanings and changing conditions. One issue addressed in this book is the positionality of childhood and family within the society. I shall demonstrate that the state agents exercise a high degree of control over many ‘failing’ families and their children that come to their attention. Chapter 4 exemplifies the state agents’ expectations of what a family should be and what kind of childcare and upbringing it should provide, outlining the norms and conditions under which the state allows the parents to care for their children. This raises questions of the autonomy of the family and childhood belonging. In Chapter 5 I argue that the family was constructed in Soviet times as a semi-autonomous unit, with childhood being positioned halfway between the family and the state, making children’s welfare a concern for all people and leading to a lack of clarity in issues of authority, responsibility and accountability. This view of childhood obliges us to consider this positionality in the context of boundaries between the realms of public and private.

Public and Private In a socialist society, the boundaries between public and private were meant to change if, according to Marx, means of production were owned and controlled communally, and private property was not to exceed personal property for immediate use. These boundaries affected not only the economy but also the social world, embracing understanding of ownership, family and space (Humphrey 1998, Pine 1998). The typology of the state, political society, civil society and the private sphere of ‘personal’ life, which is useful to describe the institutional differentiation of Western modernity, is less applicable for Soviet-type society (Garcelon 1997). Rather, new specifically Soviet spheres were established where public and private mutually penetrated one another. I shall argue that family life was positioned in this hybrid sphere. Garcelon suggests a tripartite system of 13

Lost to the State

‘officialdom’, ‘social’ and ‘domestic’ realms. In the social realm of work and officially recognized associations, both formal and informal networks operated. The domestic realm of family and friends (see also Nielsen 2003), based on intimacy and shared value commitments, although serving as a refuge from official authoritarianism, was in close proximity to and under the mutual surveillance of neighbours, lacked privacy and was based on the mutual dependency of family members and friends for comfort and aid. The official order marginalized the familial ‘privatism’ of the domestic realm, insofar as it neither respected individual rights nor limited the penetration of families and informal social circles by the state apparatus. By contrast, Western models recognize ‘private’ as personal and domestic, implying a certain degree of autonomy and privacy, giving rise to a distinctly non-Soviet language of ‘intrusion’ and ‘intervention’ into private autonomy by the collective authority. Kharkhordin has analysed the genealogy of private life in Soviet Russia, showing that the Revolution swept away the distinction between public and private and replaced it with a division between the ‘social’, consisting of transparent ‘public’ and ‘personal’ lives, and an unseen, unrecognized private, not going beyond the most intimate. He maintains that Soviet society formed a ‘social’ sphere, a hybrid between public and private, where private had retreated into the intimate, but private life did not shrink to intimacy in the sense of a legitimate and protected sphere of privacy. Privacy was completely ‘stamped out by the hybrid “social” for there was no recognised sphere left, which was not, in principle, a part of the social’ (Kharkhordin 1997: 359). Kharkhordin distinguishes between lichnaya zhizn’ (personal life) and chastnaya zhizn’ (private life), which together constitute what is commonly referred to as ‘private’ life in everyday English usage, life involving family and friends, and more generally life outside the realm of public duties and public organizations. Lichnaya zhizn’, fostered by the regime, was the subject of the ever-present public gaze facilitating the fusion of private and public (private became public, or lichnoe stalo gosudarstvennym). Chastnaya zshizn’, a way of life connected with private property, was fading away because starting in the 1930s, treating life away from the work site as ‘private life’ was associated with corrupt moral behaviour. Kharkhordin identified dissimulation (pritvorstvo), translated both as hypocrisy and as closing oneself off, as a central practice that constituted the split between public and private (obshchestvennoe and chastnoe). Thus, the hybrid of ‘social’ was to allocate and regulate both the quasi-public (the world of work) and quasi-private (the world of personal life, of lichnaya zshizn’). Chastnaya zshizn’ became invisible, hidden not only 14

Introduction

from the leaders, but also from the pervasive surveillance of surrounding comrades. Within this hybrid sphere, new terminology sprang up to delineate public/private boundaries. Gerasimova (2002) calls the use of public facilities and public goods for private needs ‘private publicness’. Utekhin (2001) examines everyday life in a communal apartment, showing public and private merging into one another. The exposure of private matters to neighbours made the private semi-public. He demonstrates that the semi-publicness of private acts, i.e., intimate sexual relations, family conflicts, child punishment, childcare and hygiene, created a domain which he calls ‘quasi-family’. In this domain, private matters became public, and public was expanded into private because conflicts in an apartment were often solved in a collective way by calling a meeting of the whole apartment. The close proximity of neighbours created a feeling of involvement in other people’s business and made people feel connected to each other. Many years of such semi-public existence, Utekhin argues, formed an individual in such a way that he or she transferred these quasi-family relationships with semi-strangers (neighbours) onto complete strangers. Therefore, the close proximity of neighbours created both a feeling of connection to people and a desire to close oneself off from mutual surveillance, compelling people to develop a complex sense of navigating through nuances in regulating distance. This sort of relationship, whether with private individuals or the state, always has two sides: that of support but also, as a result of too close involvement, control. The positioning of the family in this hybrid sphere had far-reaching consequences for the inter-penetration between the state and the family, resulting in (never fully completed) processes of familialization of the state and etatization of the family. Although the private sphere of the family served as a site of resistance to the state (Shlapentokh 1989, Yurchak 1997), it still constituted a medium through which the state’s causes were perpetuated. Some scholars see the state as being ‘privatized’ (Creed 1998, Ledeneva 1998), while others see it as an extended family (Verdery 1996). Taking these concepts of the (Soviet) state further, I shall argue that this construction of socialist society as an extended family led to the development of a new type of kinship, ‘social kinship through institutions and ideology’. This, together with the unresolved question of childhood belonging, still contributes today to the production of social orphans, for many people still act on the internalized image of a state that is there to help them. Important to this idea of social kinship within the Soviet ‘social’ hybrid is Michael Warner’s concept of ‘a public’, seen as a ‘space of discourse 15

Lost to the State

organised by nothing other than discourse itself ’ (2002: 50). Warner’s public is a complex metaphorical social space where strangers are united through the circulation of discourse, thus creating relationality and interactivity between them, and where ‘strangerhood’ and ‘intimacy’ are not mutually exclusive. Although Warner’s public is a concept developed for the ‘West’, I could see that a single pan-Soviet discourse on equality, comradery and country-as-family created Warner’s ‘social imaginary of publics’, ensuring social belonging by placing strangers on a shared footing and offering its members direct and active membership through language, which was no less effective under a seemingly different political regime. However, in Western societies the notion of ‘private’ is also problematized (Habermas 1989, Bhattacharjee 2006). As Peletz argues, in most societies the forces of market and state constrict and devalue private lives, and polity is posited on compliance that transcends feelings. Even when projects of modernity do not involve ethnic cleansing or racial purification, their achievements engender profound ambivalence since they presuppose appropriating certain sentiments and discourses of kinship, while simultaneously delegitimizing or deforming other modalities of relatedness in which people still feel morally or materially invested (2001: 432–34). Warner (2002) maintains that the private space is a myth, since private spaces are constituted and regulated by public spaces. Perhaps it is within this mythology of the private sphere in different political systems that we find parallels between the (post-) Soviet contradiction in family policy, where family is sacred but separation is the norm, and liberal democracies, where the family is both the site of intervention by the state and held up as inviolable (see Chapters 8 and 9).

State and Society One permanent yet elusive actor in this book is ‘the state’. My aim is to depict the state as it is culturally constituted. Ethnographically, in the Soviet context, the state assumed situational duality, for citizens had at their disposal two concepts of the state: ‘the state is them’ and ‘the state is us’. On the one hand it came to be seen and experienced as a social fact, an imposing reified entity. The reified Soviet/Russian state is habitually invoked in the local state agents’ conversations with residential care-leavers: ‘the state has given you everything’, ‘the state takes care of you’, and in the wider discourse, as in ‘the state cheats us’21 and ‘it is the state’s fault’.22 ‘The state is them’ when one speaks about state bureaucracy and elite Party rulers, and this state was treated with caution and cynicism (see Yurchak 16

Introduction

1997). Thus, numerous strategies counteracting state official policies have been employed including samizdat, informal economies, blat, underground movements, etc. Here the ‘state’ was a ‘clearly bounded institution that is distinct from society’, as many state-centred theories have described it (Sharma and Gupta 2006: 8). But the reified state was not the only one of its faces, using NavaroYashin’s (2002) vocabulary. Seen as ‘the state is us’, the state was indicative of a social body where the boundaries between ‘state’ and ‘society’ were blurred. This is a generative point upon which many questions regarding the working of state agencies in (post-) Soviet times are based. In the Soviet context, the state (gosudarstvo) should be understood as having a wider, more inclusive meaning than its English language equivalent, which is closer to the idea of government. It included virtually every aspect of what we might call ‘society’ (obshchestvo). In other words, there was no aspect of ‘society’ which was not controlled and pervaded by the state. The Soviet political system consisted of a state bureaucratic vertical edifice duplicated by the Party, governed by ideology and ruled by Party directives, permeating social, economic and cultural spheres (Pavlova 1993). However, mechanisms of power also rested with ordinary people through mutual surveillance, self-identification and self-indoctrination (Kharkhordin 1999), existing ‘alongside the state machinery on a much more ordinary level, to sustain the state just as effectively as its primary institutions, including the police’ (Kotkin 1995: 23). The power of the state was based on the characteristics and behaviour of people, and the period of Stalinism that lasted until the beginning of the 1950s ‘was not just a political system, but a set of values, a social identity, a way of life’ (ibid.: 23). Indeed, the state was set up with two characteristics and ensuing functions in mind. In 1917, Lenin (1992) stated that in a capitalist society the state, an oppressive and overarching force, was used by the ruling classes to suppress and subjugate the ruled. After taking political power, he continued, the Bolsheviks would organize the new state into the proletariat state, that is, a dictatorship of the proletariat organized into a ruling class, which necessarily had to be oppressive since there was an expectation of the continuing class struggle with the former bourgeoisie exploiters. With time, this dictatorship would become the all-people’s (vsenarodnoe gosudarstvo) or democratic state. Consequently, there would be no need for oppression, because people would get used to consciously following the rules of socialist communal living without the special apparatus of coercion. During the development of socialist society and the disappearance of the classes, the 17

Lost to the State

state would become the representative of the whole society, and its oppressive function would ‘wither away’. The second characteristic of the state was its welfare nature. The state proclaimed that it existed exclusively as a guarantor of social interests. Its first and foremost duty was the welfare of the population in all matters (Kotkin 1995). Therefore, while the oppressive state was supposed to wither away, a classless self-governing society would be based on total welfare, continuing to attend to people’s needs. This meant that because social welfare was built into the structure of society, professional individualized family-oriented social services were less developed. What shall become clear is that in post-Soviet time it was the welfare that was ‘withering away’, while the development of newly emerging individualized family and child welfare social services, so necessary in the new socio-economic environment, is still in its infancy; this cripples the family and facilitates the increase in the number of social orphans. Analytically, arguing against the assumption that ‘the state’ is a priori empirical object, Abrams proposed that the state is not ‘a reality, which stands behind the mask of political practice. It is itself the mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is’ (1988: 58, see also Taussig 2002), concealing ‘relations of unequal power between social individuals’ (NavaroYashin 2002: 157). Abrams wrote that ‘It starts its life as an implicit construct; it is then reified … and acquires an overt symbolic identity progressively divorced from practice’ (1988: 82). Taussig asserts that reification leads to fetishism (2002: 482), where ‘the signifier depends upon yet erases its signification’ (1992: 118). He argues that modern societies replaced the idea of God with the idea of the state and, as such, it is revered.23 Abrams maintains that in a modern world, the idea of the state that ‘excuses force and convinces the rest of us that the fate of the victims is just and necessary’ is critical for connecting with the repressive instruments (Taussig 1992: 113). For the state to come into being, it must have a point of application. Indeed, it could be argued that the state is not an essential but a relational category; it resides in relations, in my case between the state agents and neblagopoluchnaya families. Looking at the effects of state-family encounter, I saw that the state is experienced not as a nonentity, ephemeral, symbolic, or an abstraction (as in Poulantzas 1980), but as perfectly existing and real. This is where for me the idea of the state meets with the tangible outcomes of its social life. The intermediary between the two is a multiplicity I refer to as ‘the state’ or, more narrowly, the state child welfare network – a combination of staff working in child welfare state institutions (i.e., the Guardianship Department, residential care institutions, the Committee for 18

Introduction

Underage Children, schools and kindergartens), the institutions themselves, whose work is governed by laws and policies, and the content of regulations and guidelines that embody values, give meaning, outlines and structures to the state’s observance of proper parenting. All this constitutes a network of human and non-human actors and shapes an order, that, as actor-network theory (ANT) would have it, ‘is an effect generated by heterogeneous means’ (Law 1992: 3, Latour 1999). This material attempts to bridge the two mainstream models of Soviet state and society, the ‘totalitarian’ and the ‘diffused’, for it seems that there could not have been one without the other. The first model views fear, terror and forced ideological indoctrination as main integrative mechanisms in Soviet society. In the last decade, a ‘diffused’ model called ‘new revisionism’ was created by social historians such as Steven Kotkin, Igal Halfin, Oleg Kharkhordin, Sheila Fitzpatrick and Jochen Hellbeck. This model reconceptualized the Soviet subject, refuting the previous view on Soviet personhood that postulated that Soviet ideology was imposed on subjects from ‘above’. In this change of paradigm, these authors proposed to see the Soviet subject not so much as an object of repression but as a product of power (Dobrenko 2007). This process comprised negotiations and compromises on multiple levels between the state and society, and their mutual adjustment to each other (Kotkin 1995, Volkov 1997). Part of this mutual adjustment in Soviet times was engaging with ideology, which set ways for developing parts of the contemporary multiplicity I call ‘the state’. We can further problematize distinctions between ‘state’ and ‘society’ if we look at the intersection of not only two visualizations of the state, oppressive vs. welfare, but Soviet and post-Soviet at the time of rupture. One of the aims of this book is to demonstrate that the field of child welfare in post-Soviet Magadan is a field of reproduction not only of the state, but of elements of the Soviet state. We see it in institutional, legal and conceptual frameworks, in everyday practices of the child welfare network, but also in the traces of statist thinking regarding the neblagopoluchnaya family in the attitudes of some citizens, non-governmental organizations and state agents themselves, doctors, residential care staff, judges and the Guardianship Department, culminating in court hearings for the termination of parental rights. I was struck by the sheer force of accusations concerning inadequacy of mothers whose fault, in my opinion, lay in not being able to provide for their children to the level stipulated by state policies. They were blamed for not having jobs, adequate accommodation, enough money, food and clothes for their children. However, these state 19

Lost to the State

agents go to the same stores as the mothers do and see the (high) prices of food and clothes, they are aware of the high level of unemployment (particularly among women), they know of closures of state enterprises and the perils of working for private businesses that offer no social benefits to working mothers. Who are these state agents: women from the Guardianship Department and judges? Do they represent the state or society? They come armed with the weapons of the state but speak on behalf of respectable citizens. A psychologist might point to this as a case where respectable society is reassuring itself of its respectability by pointing at deviance; this suggests that the repression of those defined as deviants was internalized as moral and proper by actual individual people, and not only in the explicitly ideological and seemingly irrelevant Code of the Builders of Communism. The state could be reproduced through various venues, such as practices, i.e., bureaucratic practices, its routine and repetitive procedures, and mundane activities such as daily routines of proceduralism, through which the state’s primacy and superiority over other social institutions are reproduced, and social inequalities are maintained (Sharma and Gupta 2006: 13), through cynicism (Navaro-Yashin 2002: 4), acceptance and participation in rituals (Rappaport 2002) and belief (Žižek 2001). We can find many of these elements in the workings of the child welfare system, which was set in motion in Soviet times. But what is it that they reproduce? Written into these practices are certain values, both believed and performed, many of which are Soviet in character. The diffused job of reproduction rested with many agents, an ANT network of human and non-human actors. Structurally, the Magadan child welfare system could be seen as an assemblage, or a whole whose properties emerge from interaction between its heterogeneous parts (DeLanda 2006: 5), and a fractal (Green 2005, Strathern 2005) of the differently scaled entity, the state. In the seemingly comprehensive ‘whole’, that is, the Magadan child welfare network, its ‘parts’ are only loosely coordinated. Moreover, this network consists of a series of gaps and islands, where the state’s presence is intermittent with its absence. Thus, we see that once a family or a child comes to the attention of the authorities, there is a big chance that the child may end up in an institution. If a family and/or children stay invisible, their problems remain unattended, which may lead to cases of child neglect and abuse. As such, this fragmentation prevents us from seeing this system as a monolithic whole. Yet as an assemblage, it is still subject to the process of territorialization, which sets special 20

Introduction

boundaries for the group, increases its homogeneity and the solidarity of its members, and stabilizes the identity of the assemblage through the process of habitual repetition (DeLanda 2006: 50),24 where routinization is a crucial territorializing process in authority structures (ibid.: 74). One source of territorialization is the existence of conflict between different communities, which has the effect of exaggerating the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’, that is, it sharpens the boundaries between the insiders and outsiders (ibid.: 58). As we shall see, the linguistic component also plays an important role in assemblages as a territorializing force. The main effect of language at a personal level, argues DeLanda, is the shaping of beliefs, and shared stories and categories play the role of ‘rigidifying the identities of the conflicting parties, the narratives being part of a process of group boundary construction’ (ibid.: 59). However, does this make my state agents robotic mouthpieces for the state? Not so, for these ‘statist’ values are a part of ‘the state’ as a multiplicity (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Thus, family policy is embodying values and practices that are heterogeneous and multi-rooted. Some strands, reflective of their times and current thinking, were initiated in the early post-Revolutionary time and were abandoned (for example, the free sexuality of the 1920s). Others persisted, becoming absorbed into society and turning into cultural values (the mandatory entering of women into the workforce); thus, Alexandra Kollontai’s gender contract of a working mother laid the foundation not only for the Soviet state policies, but shaped the contemporary view on the role of motherhood in Russian society (Kozlova 2003). Some developments only appeared as radical change without radically affecting their substance. Indeed, it could be even argued that the continuities were strengthened because they changed their form, constituting modified practices, such as Kharkhordin’s pattern ‘reveal, admonish, excommunicate’ (see Chapter 8). Others reflect old cultural values becoming intertwined with new ones, such as (post-) Soviet family gender roles which, having stemmed from pre-revolutionary traditional Russian cultural elements (for example, the patriarchal gender role division in families) and Soviet political and social ideology (for example, the demolition of the old family and bringing up all children in state care), still bear traces of a patriarchal past. Still others were instituted only in the 1990s (for example, the recognition of the father’s role). All were developing in what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) called a ‘rhizomatic’ – and not only genealogical – way, forming an ideoscape (Appadurai 1996) of child welfare. This ideoscape now looks like a bounded object embodying the set of ideas (such as gender relations, the value and place of the child, attitudes towards abortion), practices 21

Lost to the State

and philosophies. Some were dropped, others transformed, while still others continued almost unchanged. Their origins and initial rationale for existence may have been lost in the past, with ambiguous cause-and-effect relationships, but those that are left all weave together, culminating in a particular document/practice/value having a distinctly contemporary singular face. This relationship between multiplicity and singularity shall play an important role in our understanding of the encounter between the state agents and those on the receiving end. I shall come back to this point in the Conclusion. The state as a multiplicity becomes a collective moral agent and a part of the culture: as such, traces of the statist thinking could be found in what appear as segments of society that have nothing to do with the government – think not only of the Baby Home administration that makes decisions regarding child placement, but also of staff, nurses, teachers and nannies, many of whom share prejudices against mothers whose children they have in their charge. That is why I do not tend to see the state agents as a simple ‘mouthpiece’ for the state, as many of the implicit understandings on which they build their view of and attitude towards their contextual ‘other’, the neblagopoluchnaya family, are characteristic not only of the state but also of the culture. Given the body of scholarship on dissimulation, cynicism, resistance, resilience and opposition in the Soviet context, in the post-Soviet period, when officially enforced pressure to conform had been removed, it was fascinating to see that part of the official ideology being performed (externalized) in the country that no longer requires it, indicating that ideology had unnoticeably penetrated individual consciousness, resulting in its partial etatization. This could not have been done without an explicit idea that the Soviet cultural values were to be perpetuated through every member of society, permeating the social structure all the way to an individual’s consciousness. To achieve that, the concept of Soviet vospitanie (upbringing, moral development, forming one’s character) was further developed from its pre-revolutionary predecessor. This was the time when the organizational framework of the child welfare system had been set, furthering the partnership of the state and the family in child rearing.

Upbringing and Education These two concepts are ubiquitous in Soviet and post-Soviet educational systems. Pedagogy is the science of bringing up children by giving them education (obrazovanie) and upbringing (vospitanie), that is, purposeful intellectual, cultural and moral development, the moulding of their personality, 22

Introduction

character and worldview in accordance with particular values. Along with teachers, a vospitatel’ (an upbringer) is an important figure in residential care, for they are responsible for the comprehensive development of a child. The content and methods of education and upbringing in Soviet times were developed by the state at ministry level and supported by research, employed by all educational establishments, and disseminated and enforced by the respective bureaucracies. Although the importance of combined public and family upbringing has been recognized in Russian pedagogy since at least the mid nineteenth century, at that time the relative weight was initially put on the family, and only then on public upbringing (Egorov 2000: 149). In Soviet times the opposite was true: public (obshchestvennoye) upbringing was considered to be superior to family upbringing because it was more scientifically developed, conscious, purposeful and planned (Kulikova 1999). The highest compliment to a teacher is that he or she is not only an educator but also a pedagogue. The main message of this vospitanie was the absolute primacy of public interests over private, and collective over individual (Kharkhordin 1999), and the main goal was to raise a person in whom ‘the norms of Communist morals turned into personal beliefs, and formed the basis of everyday behaviour. Society and individual life were considered to be not two, extraneous to each other, but an inseparable one’ (Bol’shaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopedia 1970). Thus, the formation of an individual was envisioned to become completely identified with, and inseparable from, societal goals, with the state existing not only outside but also inside of each individual. My data highlights the power of vospitanie (upbringing) in inculcating these values. Teachers and upbringers trained in teachers’ institutes were the mediums of transmission of state-approved knowledge to students, their pedagogic authority underpinning what Bourdieu has called ‘symbolic violence’, the imposition of systems of symbolism and meaning (i.e., culture) upon groups or classes in such a way that they are felt to be legitimate. Their pedagogic work facilitated a process of inculcation, producing what Bourdieu called a habitus, or ‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions,25 structured functions predisposed to function as structuring structures’ (Bourdieu 1977: 72), through which people perceive and understand the social world, and which individuals acquire through experience and explicit socialization in early life (Ritzer 2000). According to Bourdieu, habitus is irreversible and cumulative. Bourdieu has been criticized for his determinism in seeing a person as a cultural and historical construction, leaving little to chance or autonomous agency (Jones 1996, McNay 2002), although in his later works he allowed for agency to emerge from the 23

Lost to the State

margins of discourse and from the disjunction between habitus and fields (Bourdieu 1990). In post-Soviet society, with its massive and ongoing transformations, the problem is the opposite of that postulated by the critics of Bourdieu: it is not where human agency arises from if an individual’s practices are determined by habitus, but why the alternative thoughts and possibilities are not acted upon when this possibility exists. We shall see the effects of the fact that most state agents working in the system of child welfare today were brought up in Soviet times. Moreover, many of them are teachers themselves. It is significant that in the chain of state residential care institutions that typically include baby homes, children’s homes and internats, the latter two belong to the Ministry of Education26.

A Soviet View of the Person In the course of this book we shall encounter two themes permeating local practices and discourses: that of the biological and the social, which played out on three different levels, and that of the individual, kinship and the state vs. family. Analytically I distinguish between two models of kinship, blood ties and social ties, with the third model, which I call ‘social kinship through institutions and ideology’, being a variation of the social model. I examine the interplay between these models and circumstances under which each is deployed. The social model, which serves as a basis for removing/retaining children from so-called neblagopoluchnaya families, is rooted in Marxist ideology, which ‘takes great pride in seeing man as the sum total of his social relations, rather than as constrained by some essence ascribed to him by this or that social ideology’ (Gellner 1988: 37), emphasising the potential for human nature to change and become perfected. Early works were quite radical, such as Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution, where he insisted that the future Soviet man will not just be the new social, but also a higher social biologic type, quite literally, a superman. To achieve this, he would make himself undergo radical transformation, learning to regulate his own physiological processes, such as digestion, blood circulation and reproduction, making them subject to collective experiments and becoming in his own hands an object of artificial selection and psychophysical training. He would subordinate his biology to the control of reason and will: ‘The human race will not cease to crawl on all fours before God, kings and capital, in order later to submit humbly before the dark laws of heredity and a blind sexual selection!’ (1980: 255). Indeed, the person was viewed as a ‘meeting place in which biological and sociological factors work out their relationships’ (Madison 1968: 26). 24

Introduction

Madison maintains that both desirable and undesirable behaviour were seen as socially determined, so that breaking the old order would eliminate the basis of undesirable behaviour. However, by the 1930s, when the ‘Soviet way’ had failed to curtail such behaviours, it became necessary to hold individuals rather than the system responsible. The person was now viewed not as a passive object of the influences of his surroundings, but as an active participant in creating the conditions of life, a conscious individual, disciplined, in control of and responsible for his behaviour. Soviet psychology held that man was not dominated by instincts, or the unconscious, but rather by reason. The unconscious was not denied, but was assigned a subordinate position in the explanation of human behaviour. His changing himself and his environment was a conscious and rational process, hence the reliance of society (or a group within a society) on his being conscientious (soznatel’nost’). If a person is seen as in need of change, a person or a group of people who are responsible for influencing him/her should appeal to his/her rationality, not probing into ‘deeper’ causes, i.e., into the emotional quality of interpersonal relationships (Madison 1968). This stress on soznatel’nost’ still plays an important role in the state agents’ expectations of correct behaviour on the part of parents in post-Soviet times. We shall see how the major technique for changing personality is still considered to be rational, persuading and sharpening awareness. Vygotsky’s influential developmental theory maintains that a child has a potential for development, and this potential depends not upon what a child brings into the world, but what society makes of him. The mental abilities of a child, wrote Vygotsky (see Sutton 1980), are developing during the child’s purposeful interaction with adults, especially obuchenie, a concept involving an active double process of teaching by an adult and learning by the child. Of the three factors determining mental development (heredity, environment and social interaction), the latter is potentially able to override the influence of the first two, thus permitting the malleability and potentiality of human mental development. From the late 1950s, the psychology of education and the psychology of upbringing had been synthesized, and the teacher became a major influence on a child, because the leading activity of educators and parents was to maximize the child’s development (ibid.). Therefore, in education the view of person and of the child are heavily weighted towards environmental character, serving as a foundation for the important concepts of the ‘best interests of the child’ and ‘conditions’ which govern the practice of child welfare agencies even today, in which a constant, purposeful interaction with ‘good’ adults is seen as essential for realizing a child’s 25

Lost to the State

potential for habit formation and development of moral characteristics. This consideration serves as a powerful incentive for retaining a child in residential care and the termination of parental rights. Few voices openly and effectively question the validity of these practices and concepts in their everyday application. The interplay between the biological and social is a Soviet form of a widespread dichotomy between nature and nurture in the development of an individual; however, it also holds, if we elevate the unit of analysis, for models of kinship where the state is inherent. In post-Soviet times, we find a split between the legislative and decision-making level dominated by environmental determinism, while the collective consciousness is deeply imbued with the superiority of blood kinship and biological immutability; ‘real’ kinship resides in the biological family. The socialist state, although partially succeeding in restructuring the family and developing infrastructures designed to put into action the proposed ‘kinship through institutions and ideology’, still could not find itself without its partner, the family.

Power, Agency and Structure I went to my first fieldwork open-minded, letting my ethnographic data guide the choice for the theoretical framework. While in the field I observed a conspicuous combative relationship between the state and the family in relation to children; the lack of (or ineffective) resistance on the part of the family; the discrepancy between new social and economic realities of postSoviet society and seemingly old values applied by many state agents while evaluating and judging the family; the ease with which children were moved between institutions as the state agents saw fit; and the attitude on the part of state agents towards what is categorized as an ‘unfit’ family – as if it was of no consequence. The emerging issues therefore seemed to me to be those of power (struggle), agency and structure; of social change and cultural continuity; and of a genealogy of state-family relationships in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. In interpreting my findings I adopted Bourdieu’s approach where social theorists are ‘resources to be used as, and if appropriate’, because ‘each thinker offers the means to transcend the limitations of the others’ (Jenkins 1992: 19). Although being aware of warnings against treating the Foucauldian paradigm as a universal order (Ssorin-Chaikov 2003), it seemed appropriate to borrow from Foucault’s analysis of the modern state, with its raison d’etat political rationality of modern forms of power (biopower and biopolitics), or Weber’s bureaucratic rationality without subscribing to the respective theories in their entirety. Bakhtin illustrates how power is asserted through language. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus provides an 26

Introduction

explanation for the observed social reproduction. Giddens’s theory of structuration is useful in examining the concept of agency. Situating the main actors within the larger context of society governed by Foucault’s ‘modern power’, one cannot fail to see its three distinctive characteristics in the area of child welfare: categorization, compartmentalization, and normalizing judgement. The child welfare network is comprised of institutions and agencies belonging to and governed by different ministries and departments: children are sorted and placed correctly according to age, health, family circumstances, educational level, physical and intellectual abilities, etc. Within an institution they are distributed between groups/classes according to age and/or gender. Their placement, care and movement between institutions are done for their ‘best interests’. The state pays close attention to the maintenance of the health and wellbeing of the child by the family, with particular requirements for the parents’ home environment, their moral values and lifestyle. The state agents and other citizens have at their disposal a particular ordering and a number of categories with which they operate, i.e., classifying parents into ‘fit’ and ‘unfit’ families, children into parents’ children, ‘social orphans’ or state children, the specific requirements for family ‘home conditions’, and ‘adequacy of parenting’, each having a scale ranging from ‘good’ to ‘bad’ and all serving as a basis for a future decision regarding inclusion or exclusion. The labelling of a parent as ‘unfit’ helps to put him/her into an appropriate ‘compartment’ and treat him/her accordingly. The meaning and significance of these categories have been devised, regulated and controlled by the state, and the state agents are necessarily involved in using and acting on these categories for the good of the children from these families. But as I shall demonstrate, although the Soviet state envisioned itself as a welfare state concerned primarily with the wellbeing of the population, family and childhood will be shown to serve the needs of the state, specifically in raising a particular kind of loyal individual and a worker, rather than being an end in themselves.27 This type of modern power Foucault called self-governing productive biopower, which emerged together with the ‘reason of the state’28 with man being the true object of the state’s power. Biopower is characterized by the increased ordering and organization of the population for the sake of increased force and productivity, but under the guise of improving the welfare of the individual and the population (Foucault 1976, 1994). According to Foucault, biopower centres around two poles: the body as an object to ‘disciplinary techniques’ to increase its usefulness and docility, and the fecundity, hygiene and moral 27

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health of national populations (Minson 1986). The supervision of the latter was effected through entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: Foucault’s biopolitics of population, a technique of power utilized by the state institutions: The management of this population required a health policy capable of diminishing infant mortality, preventing epidemics, of intervening in living conditions in order to alter them and impose standards on them (whether this involved nutrition, housing, or urban planning), and of ensuring adequate medical facilities and services (Foucault 1994: 71). Since the population was nothing more than for which the state cared for its own sake, the state was entitled to relocate the population, or even slaughter them if it served the state’s interests to do so (Foucault 1982: 138). The authorities treating children and parents as objects of policy, without regard to their individual wishes, problems, and reasons, particularly moving children between numerous institutions for their ‘best interests’ without taking into account what they themselves may think about their best interests, is indeed conducting biopolitics, ‘guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of hegemony’ (Foucault 1976: 141). In this way I see them as possessing governmentality, or the way in which the behaviour of a set of individuals became involved in the exercise of sovereign power. Subscribing to the use of these categories will be shown to be widespread among state agents and citizens (i.e., neighbours) and form part of my view of a cultural disposition. It is also through this discourse that the notion of the inadequate maternal person is produced. To address the inadequacy in parenting, the state agents operate on a repertoire of options given to them by the state: they have to measure, evaluate and hierarchize the observed social aspects of parenting against the norms developed and re-enforced through the state medical, educational and child welfare institutions. Normalizing judgement was omnipresent in Soviet society. I shall demonstrate what constitutes these norms and how this technology of normalization acts in two key areas: the relationship between the state and the ‘unfit’ parent (Chapters 3, 4 and 5) and in residential care (Chapters 6 and 7). The spatial and temporal management of children’s bodies is described in Chapter 6. Parents who fail to correspond to the norm are disciplined. Foucault maintains that disciplinary technology imposed its own standard of normalization as the only acceptable one. An essential component of 28

Introduction

technologies of normalization is that they are themselves an integral part of the systematic creation, classification and control of anomalies in the social body. By identifying the anomalies scientifically, the technologies of biopower are in a perfect position to supervise and administer them (Foucault 1977). As a normalizing power it succeeds even when it is only partially successful: children leave institutions in need of further ‘reformation’, and in a very Foucauldian sense, this order reveals itself to be a strategy, with no one directing it and everyone increasingly enmeshed in it, the only end being the increase of power and order itself (ibid.).

Power Struggle and Agency In the area of child welfare, state agents working in predominantly governmental structures interact with the families of children who are viewed to be at risk and deprived. The point of all action on the part of both parties is to achieve a particular objective with a clear and tangible outcome: the ability for themselves to retain and bring up children. This is the baseline against which we shall measure the effects of action and its properties, power and domination, as well as resistance and agency. In this book I demonstrate first the power balance between the state and the family, which presupposes the ability to act and social action of both parties, and then the gradual tipping of the balance until the family becomes completely overwhelmed by the state, powerless and having little agency. According to Foucault, power relations are rooted in the social nexus and are not reconstituted ‘above’ society as a supplementary structure. Power is a ‘way of acting upon an acting subject by virtue of their acting or being capable of action’ (Foucault 1982: 220); therefore, power exists only when it is put into action and is exercised over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free. This view of power does not negate the agency of a subject. In a struggle between the state agents and parents, my data shows a severe imbalance of power. Although Foucault allows for this imbalance, stating that power is immanent to state institutions, the mechanisms, conditions and circumstances under which the domination takes place are less developed in his work. This is where I find it helpful to employ Giddens’s theory of structuration, where he explicitly ties power to agency. The work of government officials in the state infrastructure is guided by various policies, formal and informal rules, constituting structure in Giddens’s meaning. This social structure facilitates action by virtue of what it makes available and constrains action by virtue of what it lacks. Action involves the 29

Lost to the State

application of means to achieve outcomes; power represents the capacity of the agent to mobilize resources that constitute those means (Ritzer and Smart 2001). ‘Power’ refers to the transforming capacity of human action, in that action depends on the capability of the individuals to ‘make a difference’, that is, to exercise power. This, as we shall see, is a view of agency and power that describes the outcome of action for the state agents, but is not applicable to all parents. Archer argues that Giddens writes as if action is always creative and transformative (Craib 1992). This is clearly not the case with many families, which despite their efforts to follow or subvert the state’s action often lose their battle over a child. If power is a transformative capability and agency is an ability to make a difference, then many mothers do not have either, while the state has both. Yet I shall demonstrate that parents do have some power and that they do act, sometimes by collaborating, withdrawing or resisting. However, for them, their action is often ineffective and therefore not transformative. For Foucault, power is a modification of action by the action of essentially free actors; he maintains that ‘where there is power, there is resistance’ (1976). For Weber, power is the ‘probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance’ (1968: 53), while for Giddens it is a transformative capability. Foucault’s concept of power accurately describes the initial relationship after the state/family encounter as depicted in Chapters 2–4, where for a parent there are still possibilities to retain their child. As the book progresses, I follow the development of a power imbalance where it acquires Weberian and Giddens’s character, but describe the position of one actor, state agents and those few families that are capable of meeting the state requirements and retain their child. The rest, however, start to lose out very quickly. Here two factors are important: access to resources and effectiveness of action. To achieve their objective, parents’ responses to the demands of the state range from compliance (indeed, often they start with compliance) to rebellion (as a resistance reactive to power), and often neither reaction brings them closer to their goal. The state insists on criteria which the parents cannot easily meet: to overcome obstacles and difficulties, to turn their life around and comply with the view of the state on how parenthood is supposed to be. Therefore, unless the parents’ actions will make a difference in the direction outlined by the state or unless a parent would break all these stipulations (i.e., steal a child and change the place of residence to become invisible), they are in danger of losing their child. In the case of state/family interaction regarding children perceived as at risk, 30

Introduction

some strategies conceptualized elsewhere as agency, such as expressing people’s positions and influencing one’s environment in an act of silence and non-participation (Wilson 2002), would be futile. Withholding the mother’s voice and participation as a way of non-engagement with the state will only prove that she is a bad mother, making deprivation of parental rights even easier. Neither the everyday resistance by foot-dragging, desertion or false compliance (Scott 1985), nor cynicism and pretence (Yurchak 1997), nor dissimulation (Kharkhordin 1999) characteristic of the Soviet response to state dominance are effective in the power battle between the post-Soviet state and the family, because parents fail to achieve their objective and bring the desirable result: keeping the child. The ‘weapons of the weak’ described by Scott are usually portrayed as a positive tactic. Here an expression of agency is a negative tactic often aimed at selfdestruction; the resources and motivation to conduct other acts are miniscule at best. Ahearn (2001) proposes a broad definition of agency as the socioculturally mediated capacity to act. In the Chambers Dictionary, ability is defined as ‘the power, skill or knowledge to do something’, while capacity is defined as ‘the ability or power to achieve something’. The difference here is in being able to achieve, rather than just to act. Many mothers are capable of acting as regards the mental and physical ability to act, but there are constraints that seriously limit this capacity (i.e., lack of resources); therefore, they may be capable of acting but unable to do so, or their action may be ineffective. Some of them act and achieve their goal, but a great many act and cannot achieve it. Therefore, I shall adopt a fairly narrow working definition of agency as the capacity to achieve an objective. This definition distinguishes between actor and agent and shows that for these families, resistance in whatever forms it comes, from an open rebellion to withdrawal, may not amount to agency. The preconditions for achieving the goal are that there must be access to resources and the family must have its own legal authority. This is exactly what I shall demonstrate they lack as a result of ideological and historical developments in the relationship between the state and the family, and the concentration of power with the state institutions. Giddens stipulates one condition for effectiveness of action and a necessary prerequisite for the exercise of power, the access to ‘resources’, a concept which is relatively underdeveloped by Giddens (Craib 1992). Bourdieu provides us with a concept of a ‘field’ that views power in its relationship to capital, or any resource effective in a given social arena, enabling one to appropriate the specific profits arising out of participation 31

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in it (Wacquant 1992). He classifies resources into economic (material and financial assets), cultural (knowledge, intellectual skills, i.e., education), social (social network, group belonging), and symbolic (prestige and honour) capitals. Bourdieu’s field is a social arena of struggle over specific resources. It is a structured system of social positions, occupied either by individuals or institutions, and the nature of these positions defines the situation for their occupants. Positions stand in relationships of domination, subordination and equivalence by virtue of this access to capital, and agents in dominant positions strive for the preservation and improvement of their positions with respect to the defining capital of the field. Thus, specifically through the concepts of cultural capital, dominance – a special form of power according to Weber – is seen as directly connected with the unequal distribution of, and access to, resources. This proves to be a crucial variable in the power relationship between the two actors, the state and the family, serving to illustrate the mechanism of turning the initial open power balance into one of state domination. The state agents’ and the institutions’ legal and moral authority, high social position, their education and access to information, access to other state institutions authorized to use force legitimately, i.e., police and courts, the concentration of financial resources in these sites all constitute resources for the state. The limitations in what state agents can do come from the absence of other kinds of structure, particularly infrastructure and resources for assisting the family and former residents, lack of information and indeed peoples’ own habitus, which partly facilitates the self-perpetuation of the system. As far as the family is concerned, there are considerable limitations placed on access to power for those families who fail to have access to adequate resources. Those parents who find themselves in difficult situations, but have access to other resources, are able to retain their children. This is not true for those who are caught in the cycle of poverty, lack of education and of material assets, whose access to capital is severely impeded by their current position, which many of them are unable to change; they (slowly) lose their children to the state. Perhaps by taking these children away and placing them into institutions, the state agents try to ‘write in’ these children into the state structure that provides them with material support and education, something that their parents lack. However, without being ‘written in’ to a family structure, these children remain at a disadvantage. The power relations then often become that of state domination in the Weberian and Foucauldian sense of ‘the possibility of imposing one’s own 32

Introduction

will upon the behaviour of other persons’ (Weber 1968: 942). This is all the more surprising when one considers that the post-Soviet state is anything but monolithic: ‘the fluid and fragmented character of state forms is a classic theme in Russian/Soviet historiography, the theme of the weak state, which seems paradoxically in contrast to the endurance of statehood as a culture and an identity’ (Ssorin-Chaikov 2003: 5). Yet this weak state articulates itself most forcefully through its state agents. If the reader can feel how monolithic the state can seem to be, this is because I show it as an impenetrable wall, as seen through the eyes of those whom it dominates.

Language as Social Action One of the tools available to the state is the authoritative use of language. In considering power asymmetry, I find Bakhtin’s theory of language in its relationship to culture useful, particularly his concept of dialogue, to demonstrate power dynamics in language use, i.e., how language is used to exclude. In analysing court hearings, I drew on Bakhtin’s idea of the dialogic nature of truth that assumes possession of voice by both parties, the state agents and the parents. I treat voice as the metaphor for having one’s opinions and reasons heard and acknowledged. Deprivation of voice is the exercise of power that renders the possibility of agency ineffective and, by depriving mothers of voice, the state agents deprive them of agency. Bakhtin viewed the cultural world and language as consisting of ‘official’ (or monoglossic) and ‘unofficial’ (or heteroglossic) forces. Heteroglossia, or ‘differentiated speech’, describes the variety of different languages which occur in everyday life, such as register (discourse belonging to the lawyer, the doctor, the politician) and sociolect (discourse determined by different social groups according to age, gender, economic position, kinship) (Vice 1997). A monoglossic ‘unitary language’ refers to forces of regulation, an official normative discourse that he called ‘official monologism’ (Morson and Emerson 1990). The idea of a dogmatic ‘official monologism’ with its ‘ready-made’ truth is the opposite of the open-ended, creative and dialogic nature of truth that could emerge only through language as a ‘coconstruction of meaning’. In the court hearing described in Chapter 4, we shall observe exactly Bakhtin’s point, how ‘official discourse in its most radical form resists communication: everyone is compelled to speak the same language … Extreme versions of official discourse are totalitarian precisely to the degree that they assume no other selves beyond the one they posit as normative’ (Holquist 1990: 52). The imposition of an official language precludes dialogue, because in ‘dialogism, life is expression. 33

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Expression means to make meaning, and meaning comes about only through the medium of signs. This is true at all levels of existence: something exists only if it means’ (ibid.: 49). In the court hearings that took place between the state agents and the mother was an exchange of utterances, but not a dialogue in the Bakhtinian sense. For Bakhtin, official discourse privileges oneness, while in a dialogue there is no one meaning being striven for. The refusal or inability of the state agents to see and accept other meanings precludes communication between the sides, leading to and resulting from a dogma, ‘a sealed-off and impermeable monoglossia’. Dogma is a result of a sociolect constructing its own social reality, beyond which the person imaginatively cannot go. Only polyglossia, a contestation of languages that acquire equal rights, and heteroglossia allow such transformation of language, and consequently a set of meanings and understandings into a working hypothesis for comprehending and expressing reality (Bakhtin 1981). However, this is not what happens when normative language takes over, as in the court hearing. Through subversion, silencing and selective listening, the exchange of meaning was turned into the imposition of the official language, with the heteroglossic meanings coming from the mother being effectively lost. It is as if her reasons, now meaningless, ceased to exist. This constitutes a finalization of all attempts at relation of mutuality, open-endedness, constructive creation of truth and, most importantly, potentiality: part of any idea, or any person, is its potentialities, and precisely this potential is of the utmost importance for life itself (Morson and Emerson 1990).

The State and an ‘Unfit’ Family At a first glance, the neblagopoluchnaya family, as indeed social orphans themselves, could be considered marginal groups, because in post-Soviet society they are often defined by a lack of work and income, poor household and clothing, or unkempt appearance, yet the use of this concept is problematic in the (post-) Soviet context. In Western social science, marginality is seen through such categories as class, poverty or race. Morris defines ‘underclass’ as ‘a group, which is excluded, or has withdrawn, from mainstream society in terms of both style of life and the dominant system of morality’, viewed as ‘dangerous classes’ and a threat to societal values (Morris, L 1994: 4). Morris demonstrated that in the British social welfare state, the distinction has constantly been made between worthy and unworthy poor. As a counterpart to ‘underclass’, a notion of social citizenship was proposed that would guarantee social inclusion for 34

Introduction

all, yet this notion did not eliminate marginalized and excluded groups, but rather created a culture of dependency. The bases for social stratification, the existence of lower classes and their exclusion are often rooted in inequalities related to a social class system, race, gender and poverty. Valentine defines poverty as a relative deprivation, showing it as inequality in material wealth. Although American ideological values assign great importance to equality, the poor are nonetheless disadvantaged in a number of other areas agreed to be of value, including education, occupation and political power (Valentine 1968). Howe (1998) maintains that if the poor in the USA have been seen as constituting a delinquent subculture separate and distinct from the rest of the population, in the UK in recent years the poor were treated as part of mainstream society, but viewed as suffering from inadequate socialization experience, leaving them ill-equipped to succeed. In academic discourse, poverty had been linked to ‘culture’. Oscar Lewis (1976) developed the concept of ‘culture of poverty’ among poor Mexican families, with the main features of this ‘culture’ being personal and family disorganization, resignation and fatalism, the use of violence and alcoholism. In the UK, Willis demonstrated the acquisition among young, non-academic, disaffected males of working-class identity and the ‘continuous regeneration of working class cultural forms’, which have ‘an important function in the overall reproduction of social totality and especially in relation to reproducing the social conditions for a certain kind of production’ (1977: 2– 3, see also Evans 2007). Carol Stack (1974) in her study of urban black families in the USA found that they developed a highly adaptive structural system of co-residence and a kinship-based exchange network. This network comprises a resilient response to the social and economic conditions of poverty, the inexorable unemployment of black males and females, and the access to scarce economic resources of a mother and her children as recipients of state benefits. Strong loyalty to kin precluded upward mobility. But notions of the culture of poverty have been contested. Valentine (1971) found that cultural values of the poor may be much the same as middle-class values, merely being modified in practice because of situational stresses. Howe (1998) considered that the theories of the cultural explanations of poverty and disadvantage are mostly social science elaborations of middle-class descriptions of poor, and called for connecting the supposed cultural characteristics of the poor to wider economic and political processes. Echoing his approach, Perlman reveals the ‘myth of marginality’ with regards to the residents of Brazilian favelas, showing that contrary to popular belief: 35

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They are not marginal but inexorably integrated into society … They are not separate from being on the margins of the system, but are tightly bound to it in a severely asymmetrical form. They contribute their hard work, their high hopes, and their loyalties, but do not benefit from the goods and services of the system. They are not economically or politically marginal, but are exploited, manipulated and repressed; they are not socially or culturally marginal, but stigmatized and excluded from a closed class system (1976: 195). Revisiting favelas 30 years later, she found much the same or even worse, because over these years, the myth of marginality transformed into reality of marginality (Perlman 2005). However, these models have a limited application with regards to the neblagopoluchnaya family. This concept was developed within a particular socio-economic environment where ‘marginality’ was not a part of the Soviet discourse to the degree it became common in post-Soviet society, as a result of economic stratification and post-Soviet moral degradation (Pilkington 1996). Marginality was not normally rooted in unemployment, class distinctions and culture, poverty or race, for in the Soviet discourse there was no unemployment and poverty that was peculiar to a particular type of a social group,29 as indeed there were no essentialized distinctions between classes, and no recognized ruling or dominant class30 that would create a lower class. In addition, there was no territorial segregation, as a neblagopoluchnaya family could be found anywhere in the city, even in more prestigious centrally located buildings; such special segregation is peculiar to post-Soviet towns. The neblagopoluchnaya family is not a group of people: they do not act as one and individuals resist being categorized as such; it is a diffused and virtual category. It is important to stress that Soviet society was a stratified society with inequalities, constraints and possibilities for different groups. There was a hierarchy of privileges tied to the access to scarce goods through formal and informal networks, and these privileges (or, importantly, an absence thereof) were often reproduced, ‘inherited’ by children, contributing to the inequality between children from different strata. However, a number of mediating institutions, such as education or the military, provided a ladder for social mobility, allowing a move from being dispossessed to being more privileged. There was, however, also a downward mobility. Representatives of different classes were neither necessarily locked into their cultures, as in Willis’s study, nor into racial and economic disadvantage, as in Stack’s 36

Introduction

population of black urban Americans, let alone developing a resilient response to the socio-economic conditions of poverty and unemployment. It was thought that decisions and possibilities of moving upward depended on an individual, rather than on their economic status, class or other conditions. With free education, guaranteed income and mandatory employment (unemployment for more than six months was a criminal offence), in less prosperous families their inability to provide a more comfortable life for themselves was therefore attributed not to any structural feature of the system but to a personal failure, a deviancy. Western social science has developed a conceptual apparatus that makes it possible to see marginality through the lenses of subcultures, poverty, unemployment, race and class. This includes systematic knowledge about who makes up groups and categories of people affected by unemployment and poverty, and their social and psychological consequences. Although in post-Soviet Russia we deal with rapid economic and social stratification, unemployment and poverty, the dearth of reflexive analysis of this kind makes these groups look indistinguishable from mainstream society, the effects of the translocation of the concept developed for one system, into another with starkly different socio-economic realities. Precisely for this reason, individuals comprising these groups are viewed as deviant: their marginality is seen as rooted not in poverty or unemployment but in their moral deviancy, and therefore their individual inadequacy is a continuation of the (Soviet) trend to treat social problems as individual pathology. If in Soviet times deviance referred to the departure from mostly moral norms, in post-Soviet times it is increasingly acquiring socio-economic characteristics, yet often without leaving morality aside, thus conflating materiality and morality. So, we see the emerging cycles of poverty and decreased opportunities. There are already ‘dynasties’ of former residents whose children reside in institutions. When unemployment and poverty entered post-Soviet discourse, there was an emergence of a subtle, still without a vocabulary (i.e., deserving and undeserving poor), understanding of different kinds of poor – those who are good people and those who are morally flawed with regard to mothers whose children reside in institutions31 – this being a transformation of the previously existing understanding of the neblagopoluchnaya family as a temporary effect of circumstances and as a way of life (such as bomzhi32 (tramps) and ‘asocial, immoral alcoholics’). But while some people do not know how to be poor, others do not know how to treat them and what to make of them. Often evaluating a family that does not have the right ‘conditions’ for bringing up 37

Lost to the State

a child, the state agents have no choice but to treat it as a neblagopoluchnaya, attributing their failures to personal inadequacies. In post-Soviet times the proportion of those who the state views as unable to properly care for their children only increases, leading to an increase in the number of termination of parental rights. These families are excluded (‘excommunicated’) from the moral parental community and their children are placed in institutions. They are excluded but hardly known, for the neblagopoluchnaya family as (now) a marginalized group constitutes a double unknown: as a family and as a marginalized family. This exclusion, however, is not a purely (post-) Soviet phenomenon and serves a number of functions described within the framework of witchcraft accusations (Douglas 1999, Macfarlane 1970, La Fontaine 1998). As I shall argue, witchcraft-type accusations are a process of scapegoating that provide a mechanism of social exclusion to help maintain the boundaries between ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’.

Quite Weberian Bureaucracy In Magadan, child welfare is a state prerogative and a part of the state bureaucratic system. This means that at the time of my study, there were no private, non-governmental or religious organizations that had a legal right to provide care for social orphans. Most of the state agents worked for the state organizations established in Soviet times, governed and controlled by the state’s federal laws and regulations, disseminated through respective bureaucracies from a ministry to a local community administration down to a particular institution. During my observations in the Guardianship Department I saw how carefully the staff studied these documents, implementing what was relevant to their work into their practice. I observed how readily staff members reached for the official explanations of what to consider adequate or inadequate care, and to what extent their requirement for this care in practice corresponded to what was required by the state policies. These laws and regulations are therefore not a formality, but this does not mean that the state agents do not violate laws when they see fit. If found, violations or problems were highlighted in official reports; perpetrators were issued reprimands or punished in other ways – a scenario to be avoided. The post-Soviet bureaucratic system corresponds to many of Weber’s key characteristics of a rational bureaucracy of the modern state: (1) it consists of a continuous organization of official functions bound by rules; (2) each office has a specified sphere of competence with a set of obligations to perform various functions, the authority to carry out these functions, and the means of compulsion required to do the job; (3) the offices are organized 38

Introduction

into a hierarchical system; (4) administrative acts, decisions and rules are formulated and recorded in writing (Ritzer 2000). In bureaucratic administration, one finds the concentration of resources, power and administrative secrecy (Weber 1968). For a (post-) Soviet official, officeholding is a ‘vocation’: he or she was appointed by a superior authority, may hold this position for many years, received a fixed salary and a pension, and enjoyed a social esteem as compared with the governed (ibid.: 958–63). But of course, the Soviet and post-Soviet bureaucracies were not ‘ideal types’. The staff of the Guardianship Department did not acquire specialized training prior to taking up the job; rather, they were trained on the job. Weber’s depiction of the ‘iron cage’ of bureaucracy, where formal rationality is associated with a certain lack of individual freedom, holds only partially true. Although bureaucracy enveloped all aspects of life in a totalitarian society (Arendt 1973), far from being impartial and committed to the rule of law, it was characterized by a certain arbitrariness, a monopoly on assessing administrative performance and the possibility to enforce and pursue aims of their own, rather than trying to implement targets determined by social expectations and social demands (Hirszowicz, cited in Smith 1988: 106). The bureaucratic system of today is not transparent and does not answer to anyone but higher authorities, using regulations and laws received from them. Higher authorities often appoint a governmental official from the circle of people they know. It was also characterized, as it is today, by entrepreneurial initiative, informal relationships, pragmatism and instrumentalism (Smith 1988). Ledeneva shows how the bureaucratic system was personalized through blat, ‘an exchange of “favours of access” under conditions of shortages and a state system of privileges’ (1998: 37). She maintains that besides formal laws there were ministerial or government orders for internal use that did not have the status of a formal law. Blat allowed manipulations with law that would turn the bureaucratic indifference towards those who did not belong, to the possibility of being treated ‘humanely’, ensuring a positive decision for those involved in a blat relationship. Yurchak (2002) describes a hybrid model of the state in post-socialist Russia, distinguishing within it officialized-public and personalized-public spheres. He maintains that some state officials have a hybrid identity, whereby they could act in an officialized public sphere as state guardians, while at the same time, having a unique access to state power, information and protection, they could act in a personalized public sphere for their own personal gain. They follow in earnest those state laws that they see as meaningful, while the types of laws 39

Lost to the State

that they perceive as meaningless and counterproductive they treat as a formality and follow them only in the officialized public sphere. Therefore, in the Soviet and post-Soviet context, formal rationality of a bureaucracy governed by rules was and still is overrun by personal considerations, contacts and informal rules, often in favour of those who constitute a resource for the members of bureaucracy, or at times applied merely arbitrarily. This means that, depending on the circumstances, members of the bureaucracy can use laws creatively, having a choice of adhering strictly to or finding ways of getting around the rules. On a few occasions I observed how the government officials could manipulate some regulations, interpreting them to suit their goals. For example, one clause in the Federal Register of Children without Parental Care requires the listing of all relatives of age and the reasons why they cannot look after a child (most often poverty, alcoholism and mental illness are indicated). It is recommended that family placement is preferred, or at least relatives should be consulted if a child was freed for adoption. Yet in the case of Anna, a 20-year-old single mother with limited financial and material means, we see how the Guardianship Department consistently gave preference to the future adoptive parents, a well-to-do couple who wanted to adopt Anna’s youngest sister residing in the Children’s Home. Anna’s continuous attempts to secure custody of her sister failed and her wishes and opinions were ignored. Yet a Guardianship Department staff member admitted that ‘according to law, we have to ask the opinion of any siblings of legal age’. Even if there was no material gain, personal satisfaction was quite evident, stemming from the feeling of doing what she felt was right for the child, and perhaps from the feeling of being in control. Her choice was most revealing of her understanding of the ‘best interest of the child’ and the attitude towards Anna as a representative of the ‘underclass’. Likewise, within residential care institutions, there are possibilities and incentives to bend rules,33 but impoverished mothers, who are useless as far as constituting a resource, often encounter most forcefully an indifferent side of the bureaucratic system. Thus, there is a combination of constraints put forth by legal obligations, requirements and laws that guide the work of government officials and personal creativity in interpreting and manipulating governmental policies. However, in accordance with Weber’s model, in a well-developed bureaucratic system, the rules of the institution have taken on a life of their own. The stamp of Foucauldian rationality of government was visible not only in the work of the state government officials but also, and very 40

Introduction

strongly, in the work of residential care institutions for small children, where the rationalization of the life of children, with the imposition of adult time concept, discipline and regimental requirements, was over-emphasized at the expense of motherly care. In Chapter 1 I shall describe the archaeology of family policy. Chapter 2 describes the child welfare network, the role and functions of residential care institutions and two case studies reflecting the state-family relationship of cooperation and benevolence. Chapter 3 gives examples of arising tension between the state and the family, and outlines the concepts of ‘inadequate fulfilment of parental duties’ and ‘working with the family’. Chapter 4 exemplifies at length the state agents’ expectations of what a family should be, and what kind of childcare and upbringing it should provide, outlining the norms and conditions under which the state allows the parents to care for their children. In Chapter 5 I propose a concept of ‘social kinship through institutions and ideology’, which enables the practice of cutting off of birth families and the use of institutions as an extended arm of the state. Chapter 6 describes institutional settings, while Chapter 7 is based on interviews with former residential care inmates regarding their experiences in these settings. Chapter 8 returns to the themes of continuity amidst rampant change, and Chapter 9 argues that despite apparent differences in political, social and economic structures of (post-) Soviet Russia and countries with liberal democracies, there are pronounced similarities in child welfare practices.

Notes 1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

The study included the three-month feasibility study (April–June 2000), followed by the main study (July 2000–January 2001) and two follow-up studies (June– August 2002 and August–October 2008). This number migrates from one published piece to another, but I was unable to find a reference to an official source. I suspect that this is a ‘folk’ number or the way to say that the majority of children in residential care institutions are children from what is known as ‘problem’ families. According to the Ministry of Education (Lukashina 2003), http://www.gazeta.ru/ 2003/01/21/minobrazovan.shtml. According to the Main Control Administration attached to the President of the Russian Federation, http://www.comstol.ru/Ob/83.html. http://www.childrens.fatal.ru/res/detdom_stat.htm. According to the Russian Statistic Bureau, http://demoscope.ru/weekly/ 2007/0305/gazeta027.php. 41

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7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

As compared to 0.5 per cent of children looked after by local authorities in the UK in 2000 (National Statistics, Department of Health, http://www.doh.gov.uk/ public/sb0024.htm) and 0.8 per cent of children in foster care in the USA (America’s Children 2002, US Department of Health and Human Services, Administration of Children and Families, http://www.childstats.gov/ americaschildren). Calculated from numbers given in http://www.comstol.ru/Ob/83.html. 38.57 per cent in 2004, 37.8 per cent in 2005 and 34.5 per cent in 2006. 52.79 per cent in 2004, 53.41 per cent in 2005 and 55.52 per cent in 2006. 5.85 per cent in 2004, 6.01 per cent in 2005 and 6.63 per cent in 2006. I calculated these percentages from data published on the official site of the Ministry of Education and Science of the RF, http://www.usynovite.ru/ statistics/2006/ammount. In Russian language there is no equivalent to the English term ‘unfit’ parent. It is assumed that if parental rights are terminated, the parent is neblagopoluchniy and ‘unfit’. A Google search on neblagopoluchnaya family produced nearly 79,000 articles. See, for example, http://topmedicina.ru/news/detail/?item_id=454, http://www.academy.edu.by/sites/logoped/family.htm, http://revolution.allbest.ru/ pedagogics/00009359_0.html. Analogous to the behaviour of the cuckoo bird, which lays her egg in nests of other birds to hatch. See http://palm.newsru.com/russia/16mar2007/children.html, http://www.ombudsman.gov.ru/dad_2008/dad09/dad888/05.doc, http://www.gazeta.ru/news/lastnews/2007/02/02/n_1031173.shtml, http://www.ug.ru/ug/?action=topic&toid=10472&i_id=121. http://www.newsru.com/russia/23apr2009/obvinili.html. http://www.newsru.com/crime/04may2005/deti_5.html. Thanks to Hilary Pilkington for suggesting this term. Being the second such disruption in twentieth century Russia after the 1917 Revolution that separated (old) Imperial Russia from (new) socialist Russia. http://radiomv.ru/news/?mode=view&id=1365. http://radiomv.ru/news/?mode=view&id=1365. The strong connection between the idea of the state and God has a long history in Russian state-craft. Etymologically, gosudarstvo (state) shares the same root with gosudar’ (sovereign), the modified derivative of Gospod’ (God) (Fasmer 1996). DeLanda points out that for Hume, habit is a more powerful force sustaining the association of ideas than a conscious reflection, and personal identity is stable only to the extent that habitual or routine associations are constantly maintained (2006: 50–51). Bourdieu calls dispositions a past which survives in the present and tends to perpetuate itself in the future (Bourdieu 1977). 42

Introduction

26. Baby homes belong to the Ministry of Health and Social Development (the Ministry of Health in Soviet times). 27. Soviet and post-Soviet society, juxtaposing itself to the ‘individualistic’ West, drew on the historical continuity and cultural value of such organization of society where the common, collective good and interests preceded those of an individual, with the calls in Soviet times to identify oneself with the collective/country/state. Therefore, what was good for the state was supposed to be good for the population. A concern for the Soviet Union, and now Russia, to be economically and militarily strong for the benefit of society blatantly tied together the strength of the state and the welfare of the population. 28. Understood as the art of governing the state according to rational principles, which are intrinsic to it (Foucault 1991). 29. This does not mean that individuals were not affected by poverty and some were more vulnerable than others. 30. The new class was the party and administrative bureaucracy (Smith 1988), but even they could not pass their position on to their children. Many of them came from working and peasant families. In ideological terms, working class was indeed the dominant class. 31. Indeed, children in Soviet institutions were coming from families of single mothers and families with three and more children (less well-off but ‘moral’ families), children whose relatives had ‘respectable’ reasons for temporary placements (illness, long business trips, etc.) and children from families that violated socialist rules (criminals, alcoholics, religious families), corrupting the moral and physical upbringing of a child. Most often mothers from the latter group were deprived of parental rights. 32. An abbreviation for ‘without a particular place of residence’. 33. I have been told that before the 1990s, when Russia allowed only ill and handicapped children to be adopted abroad, doctors diagnosed children with (mental) illnesses to make such adoptions possible. Although all adoptions are free, foreign couples are expected to help an institution from which they adopt a child, and thus boilers, space heaters, toys and computers found their way into children’s homes.

43

PART I

BECOMING A SOCIAL ORPHAN

Chapter 1

A Brief History of Family Policy in Russia

To contextualize my ethnographic data, I shall briefly introduce the main stages in the development of family policy in Soviet and post-Soviet times. The purpose of this overview is to illustrate the point that the power struggle between the state and the family we are witnessing today is a product of historical developments. Under socialism, as a direct result of state policies, an inextricable link between the state and the family had been established. The attempts to radically restructure society affected not only the state, gender and family construction, but inevitably changed the view on the child. Next I shall look at the way these ideas were put into legislation, stretching across two points of abrupt change, the Revolution of 1917 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, dividing this into three historical periods: pre-Revolutionary, Soviet and post-Soviet. From the beginning of the twentieth century, and throughout much of Soviet history, an unprecedented amount of social disruption in the lives of Russian, and then Soviet, citizens resulted in significant family discontinuity, leaving millions of children without parental care. By 1924, the First World War, the 1917 Revolution, the Civil War (1918–22), epidemics and the famine of 1921–23 had left at least seven million waifs (an increase of five million from 1917), as ‘families continued to disintegrate as a result of combat, flight, hunger, and disease, casting adrift still more children’ (Ball 1994: 4). The famine of 1933, collectivization, dekulakization1 (raskulachivanie), the Second World War and the Stalinist purges from the late 1920s to the mid 1950s continued to produce an enormous number of broken homes and orphaned, displaced and abandoned children. The post-War years marked a period of relative stability, which ended in the mid 1980s with the onset of perestroika and the tumultuous 1990s. These events contributed to the formation of the state family and social policies, some of which continued, while others did not. 47

Lost to the State

Pre-Revolutionary Shelters and the Concept of the Child The long and complex history of childcare institutions in Russia has been examined in detail elsewhere (Nechaeva 1994, Ransel 1988, Belyakov 1993). The first concept of public institutions for disadvantaged children appeared in 1682, and by the 1917 Revolution, some 583 private, religious and public charitable foundling homes and shelters cared for 30,000 poor, illegitimate and orphaned children. Although provisions were piecemeal and palliative (Madison 1968, Lindenmeyr 1996), ordinary citizens privately participated in supporting them, either by giving money to the institutions or by serving as foster families. In Christian Tsarist Russia, children were treated as God’s souls, having an intrinsic value because humans existed to serve God’s purposes. The discourse on the work of charitable organizations, including children’s shelters, was permeated with the idea of love for fellow men, compassion, pleasing God and saving one’s own soul. As an epigraph, a report on the work of children’s shelters of 1848 declares: ‘Whoever receives one such little child in my name receives me’ (Matthew 18:5). The philosophy of these shelters bears some similarity with modern child welfare institutions: Lofty is the Christian thought of providing shelter for poor children without parental care, feeding them, clothing them, sowing seeds of goodness in them and protecting them from evil inclinations, to prepare their senses to receive love for beauty, kindness, goodness and aversion to evil, to show to them the way to an honest, active and God-fearing life (Detskie priyuty 1848: 2). The purpose of the shelters was to assist poor but decent families in raising their children, and to enable parents to work outside the home and thus alleviate their impoverishment. Poor families leading the life of ‘alcoholics, idleness and sin’ and criminals were viewed as benefiting from such assistance because their children, having been brought up in the different institutional environment, were thought to influence their parents in a positive way. This is linked to a crucial difference from the institutions, which I have studied here. Although a distinction was made between decent ‘poor’ and ‘poor and alcoholic/idle’ (this distinction disappeared in Soviet times), the latter category seemed to have been supported using children as the agents of acculturation, civilizing parents by using the child as a conduit of sanctioned values. The connections between the child and the family were not severed. 48

A Brief History of Family Policy in Russia

On the contrary, the shelters paid special attention to a few key issues: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Teach children moral [still the same as today] and religious values; To maintain the connection between the children and their parents in order to ensure that all the values attained by the children were passed on to their parents [different]; Make sure that children live in the shelters without any excess, no better than in their families that cannot provide them with material goods [different]; Teach children cleanliness, love for labour, and obedience [still the same as today] (Detskie priyuty 1848).

Thus, it appears that children were seen and treated as part of their families, maintaining contact and being returned back to them, with public assistance being only supplementary to family care. However, in Soviet society the attitude towards and consequences of being ‘unfit’ families (not necessarily only alcoholics, but those not conforming to particular values) would be different, that of rejection and exclusion.

The Soviet Period: Family Discontinuity and Children-out-of-Family In 1917 there was a radical change in the idea of the state. Conceptualized now as the peoples’ state, individuals were there to serve the state and, by doing so, served themselves. This change transformed the notion of the child, shifting from being God’s soul to being a tool needed to forge the future of society, and thus having value only in relation to society. The Christian call for compassion was replaced by Soviet rationality and instrumentality: Waifs, sickly and abandoned children, should become our own, beloved children of the Soviet Republic. It is not because we should feel pity for these children. Only sickly-sweet liberal philanthropy might pity them. It does not suit us. In the epoch of the Revolution one has to reconcile oneself, clenching one’s teeth, with many occurrences that evoke pity. But for the sake of the revolutionary construction we must be rational and brutal. It is not pity that should move us to help children, it is being aware of the fact that those street urchins are valuable elements for modern Soviet Russia [my italics]. If 49

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we don’t build Children’s Homes for them, we shall be compelled to build prisons (Children After the Famine 1924). However, these sacrifices were for the better future of children themselves – and thus of the country. Overcoming these difficulties and the push forward was to ensure happiness of Soviet childhood. Ideas of happy vs. deprived childhoods reflected in the Russian pre-Revolutionary literary works, i.e., by Tolstoy and Aksakov, shaped Russian cultural thought, contributing to the myth of ‘happy’ Russian childhood (Wachtel 1990). Others refuted the idealization of childhood, with accounts of disadvantaged children by Gor’kiy or Korolenko. Drawing on this distinction and striving towards an ideal, the Soviet public image of childhood was constructed as ‘happy’, although deprived childhood remained to be a submerged issue throughout Soviet history. The Soviet state also held novel views on the family, which became a focus of government attention and the object of public policy (Inkeles and Bauer 1959, Madison 1968, Geiger 1968, Harwin 1996, Dorokhina 1998, Kharchev 1994). Changing family policies swung violently. Immediately after 1917, distrust of the ‘old’ family and plans for the total institutionalization of all children facilitated the proliferation of broken families, out-of-family children and institutions. However, since the state could not afford to fulfil its ideological position completely, it gave the family some space, oscillating between fanatical enthusiasm for institutionalization in 1918, and again in 1956, and cautious restraint due to resistance from the family and the practicalities of implementation, resulting in the steady development of state childcare institutions. The combined effect of ideology and of economic and organizational factors contributed to a partial retreat of the state and to uneasy, unstable compromises. The shifts of policy throughout Soviet and post-Soviet history sometimes marked dramatic turns in the attitude towards the family. The anti(bourgeoisie) family policies of 1918–26 sought to reorganize the system of parenthood and kinship structure. The 1936 Code was a turning point in reestablishing family stability and authority, reversing many points of preceding legislation. The 1944 and 1969 Codes again solidified and legitimized state presence in the child and family welfare areas. The post-Soviet Code of 1996 marked the legislative return to the family as an autonomous unit.

50

A Brief History of Family Policy in Russia

1918–26 The initial Bolshevik policy of 1918–26 was to destroy the old ‘bourgeois’ patriarchal family based on hierarchy and subordination (Lapidus 1978, Czap 1978), an economic unit in rural areas and a focus of loyalty (Tovrov 1978). This was to clear the way for the ‘new’ Soviet family, which in Trotsky’s terms was ‘a long and permanent marriage, based on mutual love and cooperation’ (1934). General restructuring of the old patriarchal family and gender roles in the new society postulated a greater participation of the state in family affairs, gender construction and childhood upbringing. In 1921, Alexandra Kollontai wrote that communist society does not need the old form of the family: ‘It used to be an independent and closed-up collective. This cannot and should not happen in Communist society’ (cited in Kharchev 1994: 93). A number of developments, many of them pioneering, were envisioned to achieve this goal: formal legitimization of gender equality, simplified divorce and marriage procedures, freedom of abortions (although performed not as individual right but in the interests of the state and society), the abolition of the idea of monogamous relations, ‘old’ family values and church marriage, emancipation of women from the household by sharing child socialization, recreational and economic functions of the family with the state. New housing was designed to facilitate the new type of living, such as communal living space where a number of families shared common utility rooms (many families continue to live in such communal flats even in post-Soviet times). Kollontai developed her concept of ‘working mother’, showing the social significance and value of motherhood combined with participation in the labour force. Her view on socialist motherhood tied together the concepts of society as a big family and the value of children as future workers, calling for treating all children as one’s own: Do not be afraid of having children. Society needs more workers and rejoices at the birth of every child … takes care of every child and guarantees both him and his mother material and moral support. Society will feed, bring up and educate the child … Communist society will take upon itself all the duties involved in the education of the child, but the joys of parenthood will not be taken away from those who are capable of appreciating them. Such are the plans of communist society and they can hardly be interpreted as the forcible destruction of the family and the forcible separation of child from mother … The worker-mother must learn not to differentiate 51

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between yours and mine; she must remember that there are only our children, the children of Russia’s communist workers (1977: 7–8). The guiding principles of ‘children are our future’ and ‘all children are ours’ (Rybinskiy and Krasnitskaya 1998) persisted throughout the 1960s–1980s, trickling down in a less cohesive form into post-Soviet society. The Soviet state became preoccupied with pronatalism, and this would remain one of the main characteristics of all family policies. The policy of pronatalism signified a number of state priorities: the regulation of intimate family life and the continuous production of children as the raw material for the new Soviet man. It encouraged single mothers, providing them with some benefits and financial assistance. Many of their children made up a substantial percentage of children in residential care institutions, a trend that continued into the period of ‘mature’ socialism and post-Soviet times. At the same time, mandatory work for women facilitated the separation of children from their families. The two policies of pronatalism and compulsory work outside the family seem designed for each other. But if in the 1920s pronatalism was facilitated by the calls to have children because the state would take care of them, in the 1930s it was ensured by limiting access to abortion and then prohibiting it altogether. Article 153 of the Family Code of 1918 stated: ‘Parents’ rights are realised exclusively in the interests of the child.’ This meant that the interests of the parents themselves were ignored by the government (Dorokhina 1998). If there were no questions regarding motherhood, the state’s attitude towards fatherhood was ambiguous and involved policy changes. As we shall see, state-induced marginalization of the father in place of the previous status of the father as head of the household plays an important role even in post-Soviet times. Some issues, which were previously considered to be private, were regulated by the state, i.e., a man was not allowed to recognize a child born to his wife by another man as his own. The practice of multiple sexual partners was established and a woman could claim child support from all her sexual partners, all of whom could be considered the child’s father. However, other points in legislation reflected not so much the state’s pre-occupation with children’s interests, but rather with its own, specifically when it related to ideology or the state’s economic interests. Thus, the state eliminated adoption, abolished inheritance and obliged parents to work. This legislation also introduced conditional parenthood, where parents were absolved from their duty if they were destitute or unable to work. 52

A Brief History of Family Policy in Russia

These developments resulted in a great deal of confusion regarding family issues, and the appearance of considerable numbers of illegitimate children, juvenile delinquents, street and unsupervised children. Yet the Soviet government declared the care of children to be a concern of the state, gradually eliminating the efforts of all private and public (non-state) organizations and rejecting charity, pity and handouts. Building children’s homes was the way to fight with the homelessness of children and a struggle for the ‘radiant future’: ‘By helping starving people we fought for our present, but by helping [starving] children we ensure our future. Let’s all move forward to conquer it! Let’s all help the children!’ (Children After the Famine 1924). The number of institutions quickly proliferated from caring for nearly 30,000 children in 1917 to 540,000 in 1921 and 228,127 in 1925 (Tizanov 1926). The decline in this number occurred as a result of extremely poor conditions in the majority of children’s homes (ibid.), and many children were released back to their relatives or foster parents, from whom they repeatedly escaped, joining the street children again. The prohibition of adoption was reversed and no immediate expansion of childcare institutions was envisioned. Institutional staff was comprised of the mean and kind, the wise and stupid, and those who worked only for the ration and the place to stay (Madison 1968). Children in these children’s homes were raised together, regardless of differences in their social backgrounds, abilities and needs, and the presence or absence of parents. As will be evident from the description of the child welfare network (Chapter 2) and former residents’ narratives (Chapter 7), these characteristics of the institutions remain true even now. As such, many radical and at times utopian intentions (such as the idea that all children should be brought up by the state or the idea that family as a social and economic unit are obsolete) were brought down to earth, creating the contrast between ‘the libertarian vision of social relations and the material reality of life, revealing the state’s inability to assume a major role in social welfare’ (Goldman 1993: 249). Still, many initiatives, although postponed, did not lose their potency and were resumed when conditions became more favourable. Thus, the widening of the childcare infrastructure for working mothers, which included residential care, or the idea of inadequacy of the family in matters of child rearing slowly progressed.

1932–69 The enormous scope of family and child-related problems created by previous legislation and worsened by economic and social factors accompanying the construction of the new society led to the development of the new family policy of 1936, re-establishing family authority. By this 53

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time it became evident that the family as a unit continued to serve the crucial function of income distribution and consumption equalization (Goldman 1993: 316). Freedom of marriage, abortion and divorce was replaced by severe legislative tightening, marking the state’s intention to restore family stability and recognize its importance. Parental duty was proclaimed as sacred. Moreover, maternity was treated as the most important function of women, and a state function at that (Atkinson et al 1978, Issoupova 2000), while participation in the labour force, although mandatory, became a subordinate priority. This was not reflected in economic terms, for it was women’s work in the public sphere that was remunerated, not her maternal duties. Paternity was no longer treated as a biological fact, but rather as a legal obligation deriving only from a registered marriage (Lapidus 1978). Although adoption was rehabilitated, public children’s institutions, including residential care, gained strength and credibility, a balance that post-Soviet society has not been able to alter radically up to the present day. This legislation introduced parental responsibility and criminal penalties for neglectful parents and guardians. The problem of unsupervised children was seen as rooted not in poverty but in poor work of Soviets, Party and Komsomol. In 1935, the Ministry of Education was required to advise social organizations, such as trade unions and parents’ places of work, to watch out for the absence of parental supervision, and if parents did not ‘correct’ their ways, to initiate proceedings for terminating their parental rights. Since it was claimed that crime was no longer motivated by social conditions, ‘officials sought to make parents responsible for their children’s behaviour by establishing repressive measures to enforce responsibility’ (Goldman 1993: 324). Children of such parents were placed in children’s homes at parents’ expense, the policy still in place now (as compared to ‘good’ parents like Grigoriy and Arina (see Chapter 2), for whom temporary residential care for their children was free). Repressive measures did not stop at parents. Building on the view of children as ‘raw’ material for forging the ‘new man’, the law of April 1935 introduced the age of criminal responsibility for children at 12, when they could be arrested and tried as adults, thus reversing the earlier view on delinquent children as being in need of rehabilitation and education, and using punishment instead. The conflict between work and motherhood became explicit, and in 1936 a bargain was struck which broadened the state’s and male’s responsibility for the family by expanding childcare facilities and introducing stringent measures on divorce and alimony. Thus, the idea that the state should assume the function of the family was abandoned. The 1944 Family Code 54

A Brief History of Family Policy in Russia

was the first after the Revolution to recognize marriage as a lifelong union. The state’s presence in the family and child welfare was widening, with family allowances, nurseries, kindergartens and other state provisions. The state had again intervened in rearranging the family relationship by prohibiting the determination of paternity for out-of-wedlock children. As a result, women became solely responsible for children born outside marriage and men were absolved from the paternal responsibility, which was partially assumed by the state in the form of monthly child payments (Rabzhaeva 2004). This legislation met two important goals: in the postWar period with its skewed male-female ratio, it stimulated the birth rate and stabilised society postulating the family ‘norm’ as a married couple with children. This norm was constructed by introducing such notions as the single-parent family (nepolnaya sem’ya), and the discrediting of commonlaw partnerships (ibid.). After 1953, the tactics of state regulation of withinfamily relationships was softened, when abortion was allowed again, maternity leave was extended to 56 days before and 56 days after the birth, and paid leave to look after a sick child was introduced. From the beginning of the 1960s until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, for the first time neither wars nor terror occurred. On the contrary, it was a period of striving towards material comfort and widening state support for the family in the form of longer maternity leave, some work benefits for working mothers, etc. The state and family were now viewed as partners in matters of child upbringing. The importance of the family as a social unit was recognized and became an object of intense state control and regulation. The main responsibility for family, household and childcare was placed on women, yet the responsibility for child welfare was increasingly carried out by state social organizations, expanding the state’s assistance and presence in the welfare of the family and childcare, widening family allowances, developing a series of semi-public institutions, such as nurseries, kindergartens and summer schools. Although in 1956 the experiment set up by Khrushchev to attempt an extensive institutionalization of children had been abandoned, the network of residential care institutions expanded as they became the major form of assistance both for orphans and for those whose families neglected them, could not provide for them adequately (single mothers) or were considered unfit as not conforming to Soviet values (i.e., religious families) (Madison 1968: 74). In the Brezhnev era, children once again increasingly came to be looked after by the state and its social organizations (Harwin 1996: 39). The reliance on parents remained conditional. By giving some space to the 55

Lost to the State

family, the state merely gave the family an opportunity to participate in their child’s upbringing, but did not leave this important task entirely to the family, still viewing it as a place where old attitudes and beliefs continued to survive. Importantly, however, other members of society were brought into the joint efforts by mothers and the state to bring up children, including members of the extended family, neighbours and friends, due to the limited availability and often inadequate nature of state services. At the same time, prominent family theoreticians insisted on the inadequacy of sole family upbringing, which justified and legitimized the roles of school and kindergarten teachers, ‘trained specialists’ or, as once famously put by the exemplary pedagogue A. Makarenko, ‘engineers of human souls’, in working along with the parents and through the parents (1965). The state provided not only education (obrazovanie) for the children, but also directly assisted parents in child upbringing (vospitanie) via the ideological underpinning of the education of children, as well as indirectly, through the education of parents via different media, general and specialized newspapers, magazines and journals, and advice from trained personnel. The process of communist upbringing did not stop at childhood. The 1969 Programme of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) states that adults ‘must continue to be educated in their production and active participation in public life as well as by the Party, the state public cultural and educational organisations such as libraries, clubs, palaces and houses of culture, lectures [etc.]’. Part of this programme was teaching parents how to bring up their children correctly (i.e., ‘University for parents’ TV lectures, the ‘Family and School’ journal). We shall see the link between this concept and that of ‘working with the family’ in Chapter 2. The Family Code of 1969 saw its task as the following: ‘further strengthening the Soviet family, built on the principles of Soviet morality’; ensuring that ‘child upbringing by the family (domashnee vospitanie) is harmoniously combined with public upbringing (obshchestvennoye vospitanie) in the spirit of devotion to the Motherland, a Communist attitude towards labour, and the preparation of children to actively participate in building Communism’; ‘applying all measures to protect the interests of mothers and children and ensure a happy childhood for all children, and putting a final end to the harmful remnants and traditions of the past in family relationships’ (Semeiniy Kodeks 1969: 5). Continuing from earlier legislation, this Family Code proclaimed state protection of motherhood and childhood, but, as in the 1920s, never mentioned fatherhood. In addition, parents deprived of parental rights continued to be 56

A Brief History of Family Policy in Russia

responsible for the child’s material wellbeing, that is, they could be charged child support while the child was brought up by the state in an institution.

1996 The new Russian legislation, such as the Family Code of 1996, gave the family more autonomy in the decision-making process regarding children, but placed a greater responsibility on parents for their children’s wellbeing. The violation of Soviet moral values as a reason for deprivation of parental rights was removed; fatherhood was recognized and placed under the protection of the state along with motherhood and childhood. However, the view on the continuing financial responsibility of the parents for their child, after the deprivation of parental rights, was carried over from legislation from 1935 and the Code of 1969. It is up to an institution whether or not to charge this child support (as in case of Natalia – see Chapter 3). If the Court obliges parents to pay child support, non-payment will constitute a criminal offence. The number of institutions and children residing in them has fluctuated throughout Soviet history. The huge number of orphans produced earlier in the century had been assimilated and raised either in institutions or in families. However, even in the relatively stable post-War years, the number of new cases of children without parental care per year oscillated between 100,000 in the 1950s and 50,000 in the 1970s, rising to over 100,000 in the mid 1990s (Rybinskiy 1990). Therefore, the number of children without parental care has always been high. We cannot say that there was a sharp increase in the 1990s, as current public discourse seems to imply. Rather, there was a temporary decrease between the 1960s and the 1980s. My research shows that the flow of children into institutions has been steady, although the reasons were different: from orphans, half-orphans and street children in the violent 1920s to (increasingly) children from ‘wrong’ families and families in need.

Notes 1.

The persecution of peasant families considered to be wealthy.

57

Chapter 2

The State as a Co-Parent

Fieldsite: Magadan The Magadan Region belongs to the Far East Federal District of the Russian Federation and is located in north east Siberia, positioned between Chukotka to the north and the Khabarovsk region to the south. Currently its territory covers 462,500 sq.km, with the population in 2000 reaching 202,000 inhabitants who lived in eight separate districts each with its own district administrative structure that answers to the regional administration. Magadan, a compact city built on a hill overlooking two bays, is the administrative centre of the region, the main seaport on the Sea of Okhotsk, and a home for 103,200 people. A major highway, the Kolyma trassa, connects Magadan to many regional communities on the upper part of the Kolyma River. The history of Magadan starts in the 1920s, when the first expeditions of gold prospectors found deposits of gold, zinc, uranium, tin, silver and other metals. The state policy for colonization of this region envisioned a forced ‘storming’ of the North for economic exploitation of rich mineral resources necessary to advance Stalin’s industrialization plan. To achieve this goal, an organization called Dal’stroi, the Far Eastern State Industrial and Road Construction Trust, was set up in 1931. In 1939, the Magadan Region was incorporated into the Khabarovsk Region, with Magadan acquiring the status of a city. By 1951, Dal’stroi, ‘a state within a state’, covered some 3 million sq.km, controlling mining and timber operations, geological exploration, road and building construction, shipping, fisheries and agriculture using forced labour (Shirokov 2006). The Magadan Region was created in December 1953, shortly after the death of Stalin. So, at first, the region was populated by a mixture of criminal and political prisoners who were torn away from their families and forcibly brought there, as well as vol’nonaymniye (people who came to work there 59

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on their own volition), guards and the Dal’stroi administration. In 1953 Dal’stroi was disbanded, but the need to provide the country with mineral resources remained. The Magadan Region continued developing, now attracting a voluntary labour force by offering a chance to work for one’s material gain and for the benefit of the country. Northern benefits included a gradual increase in gross annual pay, biannual paid holidays and a higher pension at an earlier age (50 for women, 55 for men), among others. Although the most developed were industrial branches that served the mining industry, other infrastructures were developing as well. In the 1980s Magadan boasted administrative hubs for geological exploration of mineral resources, exploitation of natural resources (i.e., fisheries), mining and heavy equipment factory, ship repair facilities, an electric power station, a central heating plant, clothing, souvenir and furniture manufacturing factories, building construction, a seaport, an airport, milk, bread and meat plants, and a brewery. The educational infrastructure included research and higher education institutions, vocational schools, over 30 schools and 70 kindergartens, cinemas, museums, libraries and theatres, as well as polyclinics and hospitals, including two children’s hospitals. Although aimed at economic sustainability, Magadan heavily depended on a ‘northern provision’, a support scheme regulated from the ‘centre’ bringing food and industrial supplies, first shipped to the Magadan seaport and then transported by trucks to the regional communities along the Kolyma trassa. Life in the Magadan Region had been marked by transiency – permanent transiency as it were. Many people came there only for a few years, while some returned but many stayed for longer. The population, comprised of many nationalities from many republics of the former Soviet Union, was growing steadily, peaking in 1988 at 393,700 (from 188,900 in 1959) (Rogova 2007). Being located some eight time zones away from Moscow, Magadan inhabitants have always felt somewhat isolated and not only geographically. Many left their extended family behind, while some men who came to earn money quickly separated even from their nuclear families. As such, a distinctive characteristic of the family structure was its fragmentation, the lack of extended family members living nearby, playing an important role in the dynamics of institutional child placements. As one government official recognized, ‘We don’t have many grannies and aunties living here’. Every year many people travelled enormous distances between Magadan and the materik (‘mainland’), or places in the western part of the Soviet Union to holiday or to visit relatives, or sent their children to stay 60

The State as a Co-Parent

with grandparents for the summer. But air transportation was regular, wages were high and biannually the state paid their way to the materik. Perestroika spelled disaster for the region. Between 1991 and 2000 the regional population had nearly halved in size due to a massive outmigration back to the western part of Russia and the former republics. In 2008 the city had only 96,000 people, some migrating to Magadan from regional communities that had closed down as a result of the economic disintegration, others to the materik. Those who couldn’t afford to move back to the materik, or who did not have relatives there, often complained of being ‘trapped’, making parallels with the city’s Stalinist past, portraying themselves as prisoners of the North. The 1990s were a time of massive state withdrawal. Between 1992 and 1993 the number of unemployed had increased thirtyfold (Navasardov 1994). Most state organizations were barely surviving, most state stores had closed, yielding to private stalls with high-priced food and consumer goods. The nutrition of the population worsened both in quantity and quality. Higher wages were irrelevant as food and transportation prices had increased even faster and wages were often unpaid, which became an acute problem given that most people did not have another income source. Poverty was fast becoming an issue: in 1999 46 per cent of the people had an income level below the poverty line; 60 per cent of income was spent on food (Kuznetsov and Kuznetsova 2003: 133). In 1994 Magadan had the highest percentage of people in the Russian Federation and the Far East living in communal flats (17.7 per cent compared to the national average of 11.1 per cent) (Navasardov 1994). The social welfare network developed gaps: many education and medical specialists left; the availability of kindergartens decreased – approximately half closed down, while the rest, even with a 50 per cent discount for those families classified as maloimushchaya (low income) and mnogodetnaya (with three or more children) were still unaffordable. Moreover, many kindergartens stopped accepting children younger than 24 months. Child monthly benefits were not paid for months. The climate in this region had always been considered by the medical community and the population to be severe. Winters are long, windy and cold, with the temperature reaching –25°C in Magadan and –45°C in the region. Summers are foggy, short and cool on the coast, but hot in the interior. Post-Soviet economic and social disintegration only added hardships. Throughout the 1990s, in winter there were interruptions in systems supplying heat and electricity, and city streets and many flats were dark, cold and damp. Doctors and medical researchers consider many 61

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children born in Magadan unhealthy due to poor nutrition and poor maternal health. The difficult adaptation of the organism to the ‘severe climatic conditions’ is seen in prolonged menstrual cycles and gestation, iron deficiency and changes to the placenta, resulting in foetal hypoxia (prenatal lack of oxygen) and increased risk of perinatal infections (Shubert 2004). Hence, even at birth, many children are seen as having an increased need of medical attention, enhanced care and rehabilitation, but availability of medicines has decreased and prices have increased. Some of my informants told me that they ‘don’t live, but only survive’. The devastation was even more pronounced in many small regional communities with fewer resources, where many people still remained, including small children. Some of these children were placed in the Magadan Baby Home and Talaya Children’s Home, an heir to the notorious Children’s Home in El’gen, a small community built around a women’s labour camp in the Kolyma interior. In over 70 years of Magadan history the city changed its face many times. At first the area currently occupied by the modern city was covered by labour camps, tents and flimsy wooden shacks; these were replaced by one and two storey wooden buildings housing organizations and residents. The first four and five storey, highly decorated, spacious buildings, built for the Dal’stroi elite, appeared in the 1940s in the city centre, lining the few main streets of Magadan. Gradually the city started growing outwards, replacing the wooden buildings with the five storey stone and brick apartment blocks, while the city outskirts and older districts, such as Nagaevo, Shanghai and Marchekan, were still occupied by utterly dilapidated Dal’stroi era wooden houses without modern amenities such as running water, indoor toilets or central heating (wooden stoves are used for heating and cooking). Many professional people tried to obtain better flats in modern apartment buildings as close to the city centre as possible. The city outskirts were mostly populated by people with limited financial means and modest jobs, and so were dormitories and communal apartments. Yet this does not presuppose a clear-cut territorial segregation according to social status and income level, for one could still find persons of limited means or a neblagopololuchnaya family living in good apartment blocks. Likewise, due to the shortage of accommodation, ‘good’ professional families lived in communal flats or (now) in apartment buildings in the newer districts of Magadan, quite removed from the centre. The apartment buildings house tens of families in one to three room flats, consisting of a room(s), a kitchen and a bathroom/toilet, with central heating and electricity. Often two and even three generations live in such flats. Crowded conditions at home often lead to tensions and conflicts in families. 62

The State as a Co-Parent

The philosophy, concepts and practices in child welfare I depict in this book are reflective of the wider society if we are to judge from similar processes taking place in other geographical areas (Krasnitskaya 1999, Nazarova 2000). Yet Magadan is one of the extreme examples constituted by a combination of factors characteristic of remote northern communities: the fragmented family structure with the lack of extended family support; geographic isolation that aggravated the effects of state withdrawal, leaving fewer resources and still fewer alternatives; the partial collapse of social safety networks and industries and the relatively low penetration of family and child-focused NGOs, which constitute gaps in the system of prevention; increase in the rates of alcoholism, suicide, homicide and mortality among Native and non-Native population who could not leave the region (Belton 2003, Navasardov 1994, Soboleva 2008, Anisimova 2009). However, parts of the state child welfare infrastructure remained in place. Their ‘protective’ role had only intensified.

The Child Welfare Network In 2000, the responsibility for the welfare of children was spread across four ministries: Health, Education, Labour and Social Development, and Internal Affairs. Under these ministries, there were corresponding departments of regional and city administrations and a network of organizations, all governed by federal and regional laws. The Magadan child welfare network is run entirely by the state (Figure 2.1) and could be seen as an embodiment of the social kinship model based on a co-caring relationship between the state and the family with regards to children (Chapter 5). Families with children encounter various parts of the network at some points in their lives. In 2000, continuing from Soviet times, expectant mothers were expected to register in the women’s polyclinic for pregnancy monitoring and in due time give birth in the Maternity Home. Upon release, mother and baby were assigned to a children’s polyclinic, which they would visit for health checks and from which nurses and doctors would visit them at home. Childcare is shared between the nuclear and extended family members, especially grandmothers, who provide additional parental care and supervision and constitute one of the main alternatives to nurseries, kindergartens and extended-day school programmes. In a threegenerational household, the grandparents participate in child upbringing along with the parents, with a grandmother being the authority figure, 63

64

Family

Relatives

Committee for juveniles (KPDN)

Children’s polyclinics

2 Children’s Hospitals

Department of Social Security

Friends

Baby Home Children’s Home

Children’s clubs

Schools

City Centre for the Help to Family and Children

Police

Levels of bureaucratic hierarchy. Relationships between different actors with regards to child welfare. The movement of social orphans between institutions. The movement of children between different actors.

Citizens (i.e. neighbours)

Summer camps

Kinder-gartens

Centre for Temporary Isolation of juvenile delinquents (TSVINP)

Dormitories, vocational schools or institutes

Department of Prevention of Juvenile Delinquency (OPPN)

Department of Internal Affairs

Department of Internal Affairs

Ministry of Internal Affairs

Children’s Home for Handicapped Children

5 Internats

Department of Social Security

Guardianship Department (GD)

Mayor’s office

Magadan City Administration

Department of Education

Department of Education

Ministry of Labour and Social Development

Magadan Regional Administration

Ministry of Education

Figure 2.1. Magadan child welfare network.

Family Help Centre Sotsium (outside Magadan)

Family Help Centre Stroitel’ (for one school)

Temporary Children’s Shelter

City Court (Ministry of Justice)

Maternity Home

Department of Health

Department of Health

Ministry of Health

Lost to the State

The State as a Co-Parent

which may lead to unresolved power conflicts (Florenskaya and Makeeva 1991, Oleshchuk 1991). When households are separate, grandchildren often visit their grandparents. The main caregiver is a child’s mother, but in some cases it is acceptable for children to have their primary place of residence with their grandparents. Although after perestroika many grandmothers were compelled to earn additional income, they are still expected to participate in childcare, especially for pre-school children in the case of working parents. Childcare is also shared between family and public institutions, to a greater extent in Soviet times and to a lesser extent in the post-Soviet period. Many children attend nurseries and kindergartens with pre-school educational and developmental activities, staffed with trained kindergarten teachers and nannies. Children play, eat and sleep there from early morning until their parents collect them in the evening on their way home from work. Twenty-four hour kindergartens look after children if family members have to be away on a business trip or are ill in a hospital and if no one else is able to look after the child. For school-age children, extra-curricular activities inherited from Soviet times include (optional) extended school day programmes, where children remain at school supervised by teachers until the end of the working day. There were also neighborhood and city interest and sports clubs, summer school programmes and summer camps for school-age children. If before all these activities were sponsored by the state, now parents pay a considerable fee. The concept of child safety allows a considerable degree of freedom and independence fairly early in the child’s life. Pre-school children are expected to be with adults, related or not, but children of elementary school age (seven and up) could be left at home alone. This is the age from which children may go anywhere by themselves, such as to and from school1 (there are no school buses), shops, the cinema, the city park, or visit their friends or their parents at work. After school, at home they may do their homework, have friends over, eat, read, watch television or play outside. A concept of ‘telephone upbringing’ reflected a practice of parents calling from work to check on children and give them instructions. Children are not constantly chaperoned, bussed and marshaled by adults, although they are expected to let adults know their whereabouts. Their home and the city belong to them as well as to the adults. This provides a context for limited freedom that is allowed to children growing up in residential care. All of the above is for children who live in their ‘normal’ families, but there are parts of the network that become visible in certain cases, such as children without parental care, at risk of hardship, maltreatment or neglect. 65

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The present-day network of Magadan and the Magadan Region is a combination of old, new and gaps. The gaps were created by the reduction in elements of the Soviet childcare infrastructure and by the disbanding of three regional residential care institutions. The remaining institutions were inherited from Soviet times along with the Maternity Home and children’s hospitals that carry out child protection functions, the Committee for Juveniles (KPDN) and the Centre for Temporary Isolation of Juvenile Delinquents (TSVINP). Some new elements of the existing infrastructure were begun in post-Soviet times, starting in the early to mid 1990s. There is a community centre Sotsium (a family-focused social-pedagogical centre) in a community 50 km from Magadan; Stroitel’, a centre for children from problem families who study in one school within Magadan city; and the Temporary Children’s Shelter. These three organizations display a markedly different attitude towards ‘problem’ families and specifically towards the idea of working with the family. The Guardianship Department of the City Administration (GD, Otdel opeki i popechitel’stva) continued the work of the Department of Education where, prior to the 1990s, one inspector was overseeing the issue of orphans. In addition, new professions came into being, such as social work, social pedagogy and psychology counselling, with corresponding educational departments in many universities. In Magadan, the distribution of these professions was rather sporadic and not a single specialist had relevant professional training except for a few psychologists.2 The Temporary Shelter employed a psychologist and a few spetsialisty po sotsial’noi rabote (specialists in social work) whose duties included providing help and counselling to families and young people. In the Baby Home, a social pedagogue performed duties previously carried out by the patronazhnaya sestra, a term used for a specialist who monitored families on home visits. A social pedagogue also worked for the boarding school for low-income families; in her work she focused primarily on looking after children’s needs and then on their families. In 2000, the Children’s Home and internats had no psychologists, social pedagogues or social workers; the spread of these professions into remote areas had barely begun, and their impact was limited. Children found to be in need of state support were referred to the GD, which combined the functions of child protection and child welfare agencies, serving as the focal point in all decision making and consultations regarding orphans and children from ‘problem’ families. It was responsible for all children living in the families of guardians (opeka),3 such as issuing legal documents regarding guardianship and monthly payments; it was involved in all issues related to adoptions; it registered and monitored 66

The State as a Co-Parent

neblagopoluychniye families, made home visits and attended court hearings on deprivation of parental rights; it ensured that children of divorcing or absent parents had the legal right to their parents’ accommodation;4 and it petitioned on behalf of care-leavers for a place of accommodation upon their release from institutional care, among other things. In 2000, the population of the Magadan Region stood at approximately 202,000 people (at the beginning of the year) with about 55,000 children aged 0 to 18.5 Reports prepared by the Guardianship Department for the years preceding and during my fieldwork indicated that in 1997–1998 586 children were residing in residential care institutions. This is the equivalent of approximately 1.06 per cent of the children’s population in the Magadan Region. In 1999 in the Magadan city, 6 parents were limited in their parental rights and 85 parents were deprived of parental rights. 105 children were removed from these families: 15 were placed in the Baby Home; 35 went to internats; 32 were placed under guardianship; and 23 remained with the parents who were not deprived of parental rights. Thus, in general, 55 children were placed in families and 50 in residential care. In 1999, 41 children were adopted: 11 children by Russian citizens; 8 children by USA citizens; and 22 by step-fathers. In 1999-2000 there were 208 children (new cases) who were found to be in need of state support: 59 were placed under guardianship; 130 were placed in various residential care institutions; 12 were returned to their biological (nuclear) families; and 7 were adopted. In general, 78 children ended up in families and 130 were sent to institutions. Another 208 children were raised in 116 neblagopoluchniye families. In 1999, 30 children were removed from such families: 4 were placed under guardianship and 26 were sent to residential care. In 2000 the city Guardianship Department had some 1120 orphans and children without parental care in their registry. 578 children were living in families (guardian, adopted, and nuclear neblagopoluchniye), and 542 were residing in residential care institutions (Baby Home, Children’s Homes, internats and dormitories of vocational schools6). This brief analysis shows that in the best case scenario the split between family (any kind of family) and institutions for child placement was roughly 50/50. In many cases more children were sent to institutions than to families. The Department employed five people, all of them women. The three senior staff had higher education, previous careers and grown-up children. The Head of the Department, Marina, a stout blond, was a lawyer by training and a middle-aged mother of five children. She lived in a good but crowded flat. One of her daughters worked as a social pedagogue in a 67

Lost to the State

dormitory for care-leavers taking up residence in one of the rooms there. Most of the day-to-day work was done by two senior staff members, Larisa and Ekaterina. Ekaterina was the director of a kindergarten for some 20 years before joining the GD. A widow in her 50s, the mother of two adult children and a grandmother, she appeared laid back and somehow tired. She usually represented the GD in court hearings where her reserved manner but relentless will to terminate the parental rights of ‘bad’ mothers often succeeded. She lived in a spacious flat in one of the most desirable Stalin-era buildings along the main street in Magadan. Larisa, a former school teacher and a middle-aged divorced mother of two children, lived in a more modest two room flat, a 20 minute walk from the city centre. She was energetic and outgoing, quick to act and firmly on the children’s side. Their younger colleague was a married woman and the mother of a young child, bright and educated, with much hope put on her future role within the Department. Her mother, an energetic, friendly, bright and very communicative woman with a Ph.D. in pedagogy, set up Sotsium. Finally, a very junior colleague, an apprentice, a young woman in her mid 20s, was studying at a local university. When I returned two years later, she was on maternity leave with her young child. The GD occupied two joint small rooms on the upper floor of the city administration building, one room for the Head of the Department and another for Larisa and Ekaterina, their desks facing each other. The rooms were off a long bare corridor with no chairs for the visitors; on the walls hung a stand with information regarding adoption and guardianship procedures. In the rooms, the walls were lined with shelves containing documents, files and books, while two large windows overlooked a square in the city centre. The room was cramped, with just enough space for the staff and two or three visitors. Perhaps the most striking impression of the day-to-day running of the Department (and the child welfare network in general) was that of bewildering diversity, complexity and versatility in what seems to be a myriad of life situations. The staff ’s time was divided between receiving visitors, making home visits, participating in court hearings, processing documents, answering phone calls reporting child neglect, dealing with other departments, participating in the work of the guardianship council and other responsibilities. In the encounters between the governmental officials and citizens typified in the GD, there is never a question as to who is a suppliant and who is a grantor. For the visitor, trying to get what they came for (a solution to a problem, a certificate, answer to a question) entails relentless and often 68

The State as a Co-Parent

multiple visits to various governmental offices, lengthy waiting, different opening/closing hours and lunch breaks, before encountering staff members who try to ignore them, avoid eye contact, speak rudely, do not answer questions, etc. During office hours, a visitor would knock on the door and half-open it, peeking inside to see if it is possible to enter: ‘May I?’ If there is another visitor inside, some try to come in anyway, since one cannot trust orderly queueing because others try to make their way in jumping the queue, so visiting governmental offices is always a nervewracking experience. Some try to get in ‘just to ask a question’ or ‘only to get a certificate’ but, once in, try to sort out their problem. However, since there is no information telephone line, if a person came to really just ask a question, he or she may stay in the queue for a long time only to find out that this was the wrong time/office/department. The staff inside become irritated, asking everybody but one to leave. People form something resembling a queue outside the door but, as soon as the door opens letting a visitor out, the rest storm the office, to the further irritation of the staff. They can barely contain themselves listening to the new visitor, cutting him or her short if he or she gives a muddled and lengthy explanation of their problems, some of which are not even the GD’s responsibility. More irritation ensues and answers become impatient. Sometimes the visitors are invited to sit on a chair next to the desk, sometimes they are left to stand in the middle of the room; in the winter people stand in their heavy coats and hats. But in calmer times when the queue is short, the staff are friendlier and visitors have better luck sorting their problems. The work of the GD is typical of a bureaucratic organization where the issue of whether clients will be helped or shunned often depends on the mood of the government official. Working for the city administration is a stable job, yet even their access to resources was somewhat uneven. Their salaries were paid regularly when salaries in many city organizations were not. The city and regional administration buildings had heat and electricity at a time when many residential buildings were cold and dark, prompting knowing smiles on the part of ordinary people (‘of course, what else could one expect?’). They took lunches in the small but cosy and inexpensive cafeteria on the first floor, with good food and short queues; it was nominally open to the public but was mainly patronized by those in the know. There was some leeway with time, such as taking advantage of good autumn weather to collect mushrooms and berries for winter during office hours. On the other hand, they had no vehicle to go to the most distant corners of Magadan for home 69

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visits or other business. Unless they can secure a police car, such as when a few of us went to the house of one mother to remove her child, they either walk or use public transport, for which they pay out of their pockets. Besides receiving citizens during office hours, in its everyday work the GD receives telephone calls and/or written reports regarding various troublesome circumstances of children. Continuing from earlier legislation, the Family Code of 1996 obliged all citizens, childcare and educational organizations, such as schools, kindergartens, children’s hospitals, polyclinics, and children’s homes, to report to the GD any child whose health or life is viewed as being in danger. A file is opened for each case. For example, a neighbour phones the Department reporting a young mother in a dormitory whose six-year-old child rummages through a garbage bucket looking for food. Larisa pulls out a form and starts filling it out, writing the mother’s name, address and a description of the problem, and promises to make a home visit. Sometimes people come in person seeking advice regarding family problems, such as strained relationships between family members or a lack of money to pay for their grandchildren’s school expenses, or concern over children whose parents do not look after them properly. Also, any child welfare organization that has had a child in its care for three or more days, without parents or relatives making inquiries about him or her, is obliged to inform the GD of this in writing. After that, no child will be released to parents or relatives without the GD’s permission. Receiving such information indicates to the GD the possibility of child neglect. Thus, an official document would arrive from the Children’s Hospital signed by the head doctor, notifying the Department of a child who was left at the hospital three or more days ago, after which his mother came to collect him; the hospital refused, as it should have done according to the law, and notified the Department. Next, this mother would have to come to the Department and explain herself. The GD is required to make home visits, several if necessary, collect information on parents and write reports on their findings. The child will only be released to the family if the GD finds that childcare in that family is adequate. The GD is closely connected with the network of residential care institutions, a self-contained busy world with a life of its own, which looks after children lacking parental care from birth to 16 or sometimes 18. In 2000 there were nine such institutions. The Magadan Baby Home (Dom Rebenka) provides care from birth up to three years of age to children not only from the city but from the region as well. There are two regional children’s homes: the pre-school Children’s Home (Detskiy dom) for children aged three to seven, and another for mentally and physically disabled 70

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children. Four internats (boarding home/schools), one in Magadan for mentally disabled children and three in the communities many kilometres from Magadan, house and educate school age children. In Magadan there was also a school/internat for children from low-income families, which looked after a few social orphans, and the Temporary Shelter. Some children may start off as parental children, but in the Maternity Home or a children’s hospital the system bifurcates and, instead of being brought home, they are channeled into this chain of residential care institutions. The Maternity Home, Baby Home and two children’s hospitals are the other four important places where many events related to children’s wellbeing take place, specifically decisions made by mothers and placement suggestions made by the doctors. They are closely linked to the GD. Children’s hospitals are places not only for sick but also for abandoned children, or those removed from a neblagopoluchnaya family before they are moved to a residential care institution, so as not to endanger other children. Breaking this rule created problems: once a one-year-old child was brought from a family directly to the Baby Home, where the medical staff felt compelled to place him in the isolation unit for two weeks. Before the Baby Home came into existence, many abandoned children lived in hospitals. The Maternity Home is a medical facility for childbirth, prenatal and postnatal care. It occupies a large standalone four storey building, where no visitors are allowed inside – they could only see women and babies from the street through a window. Women are not free to leave it when they wish, but only after they have been officially discharged. In the Maternity Home, mothers may leave their children for good, writing a letter of rejection (otkaz), which serves as a legal document indicating that a child is adoptable. Some women escape from the Maternity Home alone, leaving their babies in an ambiguous state of belonging, being neither officially rejected nor having been taken by the mother. As a result, the GD cannot make decisions related to adoption and a child may be in state care for years. Such children are moved to the Baby Home while the GD tries to find a way of depriving an absent mother of parental rights in order to free a child for adoption. However, in the Maternity Home and children’s hospitals, doctors also advise some mothers to leave their children in state care temporarily, and these mothers, after writing the letter of request for placement, are discharged while their children are moved to the Baby Home. From these healthcare organizations children could either be returned back to their parents and relatives or be transferred to other residential care institutions as they grow older. 71

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If children’s homes and boarding schools/homes look after children on a permanent basis, the city Children’s Shelter is a temporary facility for children aged 3 to 16. Its capacity is 30 children but often there are as many as 40 children. According to the Shelter’s Director, since 1996 when it was set up, it hosted some 479 children. Although the recommended ratio was 7 children per teacher, in actual fact, the Director said, ‘we have close to 15 children’. It is a home for children who run away from various family circumstances, such as having little food and parental attention, being left alone in a flat for a few days or their parents abusing alcohol and fighting. In other cases, teenagers have conflicts with their parents, leave home and after a while living with friends or in basements, come to the Shelter or GD. Sometimes friends, relatives or neighbours bring children. Children reside and study in the Shelter for up to six months, while the staff helps their families to sort out their problems. The TSVINP is a prison-type facility, a children’s branch of the police dealing with children under 16 found out of their homes too late at night, vagrants and juvenile delinquents. Children as young as nine live in run-down small cells for one person, with a bed, a chair and a tiny desk. They may remain there for a month, locked up and guarded by female police officers, while the staff ‘work’ with their parents. From the Shelter and the TSVINP, depending on their family circumstances, children can be returned to their families or transferred to the Children’s Home or an internat, a boarding home/school. The latter two are linked to the GD and the children’s hospitals, but this link was not as direct, being mediated through the regional Department of Education to which they belonged. The city Committee for Juveniles (KPDN), a small court in its own right, deals with misbehaving children, vagrants, juvenile delinquents and their families. The TSVINP, the KPDN, the Shelter and the GD work together because they have the same catchment population, ‘problem’ families, and families with ‘deviant’ children and teenagers. The networking of these institutions and agencies allows the child welfare system to move children between the components of the network without returning them to their birth family if it considers parents to be ‘unfit’ or suspects them of being so. At first glance, the child welfare network appears to function as a single, all-encompassing, extensive and cohesive whole, with interconnected components, working closely together, that strives towards ensuring the health and wellbeing of all children in the region and in the city, which in many cases is true. However, such a depiction, although useful for illustration purposes, hides the degree of fragmentation. Within this system 72

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we can find an extreme polarity of opinions; contradictions in justifications of certain practices; different views on children and their often problem families, and on what constitutes the children’s ‘best interests’. The nature of the connection between various institutions and agencies also serves to reinforce a division. This division separates the ‘parts’ into autonomous units and prevents the flow of information and people in one institution from observing and knowing what is going on in the rest of the system. One of the outcomes is that once the child enters an institution, the child and the family become subject to other forces which may not be known to those who recommended the placement. Institutional placement moves a parent closer to the possibility of being deprived of parental rights. Whether formal (i.e., filing a court suit for deprivation of parental rights by the Baby Home) or informal (doctors advising mothers to leave children temporarily or refusing to allow parents to see their children), some initial decisions may be made by these individual institutions, which affect the whole life course of both a parent and a child.

Residential Care Institutions and their Functions All residential care facilities see themselves as state guardians ensuring various aspects of children’s wellbeing. Depending on the institution, the aims have been identified by the directors as to ‘protect life and support children’s health’ (Baby Home), to serve as a ‘substitute for the family, providing upbringing and education’ (Children’s Home), to provide ‘social protection and adaptation’ (an internat for children from low-income families) and to ‘provide refuge for children in difficult situations’ (Temporary Shelter). Reflecting the variety of purposes of these institutions, the make-up of children also varies: there are gosudarstvenniye (state children, whose parents’ rights were terminated, with the state becoming legal guardian), roditel’skie (parents’ children) and children whose status is not yet determined. Apart from a child’s legal status, children residing in the same institution could be foundlings, abandoned, left temporarily, without parental care, removed from families and orphans. Next I shall outline some functions of the institutions.

The Baby Home By far the most vigorous movements through an institution take place in the Baby Home (Figure 2.2).7 73

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Figure 2.2. Movement of children from birth to three years through the Magadan Baby Home (1983–1999).

Children here come from all walks of life. Some children are placed here temporarily by their parents or relatives. They may be transferred from other institutions, i.e., the Maternity Home when a mother refuses to take the child home, but has not decided whether or not to leave the child for good. They are brought by the authorities from either a family or a hospital, in cases when remaining in the family is seen as dangerous to a child’s health or life or, for example, a toddler was left at home alone. Thus, one function of the Baby Home is temporary housing and a care facility for children in cases of various family disruptions when the birth family cannot, or does not wish to, provide adequate childcare due to perceived difficulties, if the birth family care is unavailable or if it is viewed as unfit. Some of the reasons may not relate to economic hardships but to the inability of the parents to care for their child, i.e., working away from the city, long work-related trips, or illness or hospitalization (director of a Baby Home, personal communication, Chechot 1984, Klyucharova n.d.). For mothers abandoning their children, the Baby Home serves as a dumping ground and an alternative to infanticide. Some placements are voluntary and are performed by a parent, relative, neighbour or acquaintance. A child could also be taken away by force (otobran), in which case it would be an order from the authorities. Placing the child seems to be a fairly simple matter. The Baby Home is always open and willing to take children in, and it does so on the basis 74

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of an official written letter of rejection (otkaz) or a written request for temporary placement (zayavlenie) from the mother or a relative. However, not all zayavlenie written by mothers mean that the placement was done entirely on her initiative – they are often written as dictated by the Maternity Home or Baby Home employees. I witnessed a conversation between a social pedagogue of the Baby Home and a couple who came to the Baby Home to collect their baby girl. The girl had been transferred from the Maternity Home to the Children’s Hospital for health reasons, and the mother, having another child at home, did not stay in the hospital with her daughter and did not visit her as required. The girl was then transferred to the Baby Home, which refused to give the child back to the parents without the GD’s permission. The social pedagogue told the mother to write the request to place the child in the Baby Home. The writing of these requests is important. They indicate that it was a mother who requested the placement, although as follows from my example, the mother was asked to write such a letter after the Baby Home refused to return the child to her. She did not actually request them to do so. Recorded in a child’s file, the input from these institutions may have a cumulative affect over time, as the GD and the court may take certain actions and make final decisions based solely on information received from these institutions, but the way some GD and institutional files are written does not reflect the complexity of the process which has led to a child’s institutional placement and residence. Because of this, the mother’s voice or viewpoint disappears from the record. By the time the case comes to court, the written record becomes authoritative, but the mother’s own voice does not have the weight to contradict it. The mother finds herself being held accountable, while other parties participating in the decision, such as state representatives who talked her into leaving her child to state care, are not. I shall demonstrate one case where the mother made this point in court, and the case continued as if she had not even spoken. The release of the baby can now be done only after home visits to check on the reliability of the parents. Thus, the Baby Home protects children from parents who wish to collect their children, but are suspected of being neglectful. The Baby Home’s social pedagogue evaluates a family’s circumstances to decide whether or not a child may be returned to them. The preliminary decision is made by the Baby Home director, the social pedagogue, the senior upbringer and the GD. The social pedagogue thinks it better for a child to be in the family than in the Baby Home, but admits:

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Only a fraction of children go back to their families. Most parents have such deplorable living conditions; they do not have a job, no income … It is out of the question to return children back to them. Only a small percentage of children have fathers; usually we return children to these families. When the Baby Home administration thinks that a family fails to ‘normalize’, they file a court suit against the parents for deprivation of parental rights. Quite often the motivation behind these proceedings is to ensure the ‘best interests of the children’ and to free a child for adoption if they view a family situation as hopeless. Although in post-Soviet times the chance of adoption by local families is low, children under three have a much better chance to be adopted by non-related couples than children over five. One reason is the Secrecy of Adoption Law. The attitude of society towards adoptive parents is ambivalent. The decision to adopt is a decision that requires justification, unlike giving birth to a child. Adoption is treated as a noble step, but simultaneously evokes suspicion that there must be something wrong with a woman; it is a sign of failure. The feeling of pity and resentment on the part of citizens, mostly women, goes both ways, for the child and for the woman. One of the main concerns regarding the child is whether or not he or she has poor heredity, ‘bad genes’ that the adoptive parents will not know about until it is too late. Given this ambivalence, most adoptive parents, in order to keep their actions secret, choose children who resemble them, imitate pregnancy, concealing their intentions to adopt even from their closest relatives, and change their city of residence before or right after the adoption. Foreign adoptive parents invariably raise suspicion as to their real agenda as, in the minds of many institutional staff, why would someone raise a somebody else’s child unless there was a good reason for doing it? Some repeated concerns often found in the media that children are adopted abroad ‘for organs’, while others learnt that these families receive tax cuts. This attitude towards adoption is directly related to the widely accepted model of kinship based on biological relatedness. Nevertheless, the hope of finding a good adoptive family has driven many decisions to retain a child from an ‘unfit’ family in the institution and deprive parents of parental rights. By facilitating this process, the Baby Home serves as an intermediary for adoption.

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The Children’s Home If not returned to their birth family, adopted or taken under guardianship, children are transferred from the Baby Home to either the Children’s Home for the disabled or to the regular pre-school Children’s Home. Children residing in this institution are in most cases transferred from the Baby Home or the Temporary Shelter, or removed from their families. These families, according to children’s files, tend to be those of neblagopoluchniye, alcoholics, criminals, people diagnosed as mentally ill, hospitalized, unemployed, neglectful and abusive. The movement of children in and out of the Children’s Home is less when compared to the Baby Home. Most of them will be transferred to the next level of institutions, the internat. Hence, the Children’s Home serves as a sieve, separating cases where there is still some hope for the parents and children to reunite from those where hope is lessening and the relationship between the parents and the child is altered, perhaps irreversibly. This latter situation occurs when the parents are deprived of parental rights and the child is adopted. The child is eligible for adoption after six months from the date deprivation of parental rights took place, in order to give birth parents time to restore their parental rights. The residential care institutions are often the final place where the sorting out of family’s circumstances takes place before the authorities decide to deprive parents of parental rights.

The internat The internat is a facility for school age children without parental care. As with all residential care institutions, these are large, self-contained, multistorey buildings where children live. They are staffed with adult carers, such as teachers, upbringers (vospitateli), nannies, technical staff (cooks, kitchen staff, drivers, etc.) and administration. Some internats have their own schools, in which case the children live and study together in the same building, but some have no school, sending the children to a local school. Children that end up in internats were transferred from the Children’s Home or Temporary Shelter, or came from families. These tend to be ‘unfit’ parents: families with conflicts between parent(s) and teenagers, and families with acute financial, personal and social problems. There are internats for disabled children, for normal children and for children from low-income families, the latter also taking in children from families where parents are away for a considerable period, or those from regional communities sending their children to Magadan to study in vocational or sports school, such as a 77

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well established boxing school. The movement of children to the Children’s Home and internats is mostly in and rarely out to their birth families. For parents who feel they cannot adequately provide for their children, institutions of all kinds constitute an additional resource providing care, upbringing and education for the child at no expense to those parents who have little resources to support their child (money, food or clothing). Historically, the institutions have been a place where children’s lives were saved and protected in the most basic sense during social upheavals, the Revolution, famines and wars. This legacy remains in the memories of many older former residents and of the wider public. The many functions of institutions define the special role played by the state child residential care homes. They occupy a permanent place in the social structure of the community, because people continue to rely on them in various cases of family disruption. As such, institutions could be seen as an extended arm of the state; in the case of a birth family, they constitute social ties to act upon. As could be expected, the decision to return children to their families or retain them in state care depends on the family circumstances. There is, however, an added nuance: what is being evaluated is not just family circumstances but a type which a family is seen as constituting, and this measurement and judgment (as to what this family is) takes place throughout the encounter between the state representatives and parents.

Categories of the Family Families could be placed into two large heterogeneous groups, called blagopoluchnaya sem’ya and neblagopoluchnaya sem’ya. The use of these binary categories is at the same time helpful and confusing. It is helpful for those who think with these categories, as it serves as a tool of clarification for separating right from wrong without undertaking detailed investigation. Etymologically, blagopoluchniy (or blagopoluchiye, with its antonym, neblagopoluchiye) means to receive goodness; it is equated with success, good luck and happiness: ‘A tranquil (peaceful, calm) flow of life. Material sufficiency, comfortable circumstances. Happiness in love and in family life. Regular – without departure from the norm, unwanted occurrences’ (Efremova 2000). The desired norm for children is living in a blagopoluchnaya sem’ya, which provides a nurturing environment, surrounding the child with love and care, and thus positively influencing a child’s growth, his or her physical and spiritual development (Nechaeva 1999). This is therefore a ‘good’ family. Many families coming into contact 78

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with child welfare authorities are families with problems, classified in professional and public discourse as neblagopoluchnaya or a ‘problem’ family, which constitutes a departure from a ‘good’ family norm. This category serves as an umbrella term for a range of family situations where numerous risk factors are believed to create what are considered to be unfavourable conditions for raising a child. They are further subdivided into sotsial’noneblagopoluchnaya (families with material and personal problems) and vneshne-blagopoluchnaya (superficially good) families. The term sotsial’noneblagopoluchnaya sem’ya readily evokes the image of alcoholic, low- or noincome family, living in poor and dirty dwellings, with poor hygiene, diet and health, unkempt personal appearance and a lack of material goods, good furniture or clothes. This image is so powerful that it became a label with a social role attached to it. One does not need to understand the particulars of neblagopoluchiye of a certain family – the image paints it all. The number of factors that may contribute to their neblagopoluchiye is extensive, embodying material, moral and psychological aspects of family life. Some of the factors described were unemployment, poor home conditions, low income, single parenthood, family with three or more children, step-families, ‘bad heredity’, promiscuity of mothers, conflicts between parents or between parents and children, poor parenting skills, low level of education, parents having ‘deformed’ value systems, alcoholism and drug abuse, an immoral and ‘parasitic’ way of life, cruelty and criminal convictions (Krasnitskaya 1999, Ivanova and Barabanova 1999, Dzugaeva et al. 1989). This is where a possible confusion arises, as some problems are thought to originate only in a neblagopoluchnaya family: one would not expect a ‘good’ family to live in a dirty run-down place, have drunken fights and no food for the children. Signs of neblagopoluchiye in a ‘good’ family gives rise to a suspicion that the family is only vneshne blagopoluchnaya, a family whose material affluence implies an absence of poverty-related problems but which only appears to be good and well, such as families where parents are too busy with their own lives and demands of their jobs to pay much attention to their child. In the post-Soviet period, the number of families experiencing difficulties is growing; certainly, with the introduction of the new Housing Code, many families, particularly women with children, are left without their own accommodation if a former spouse (usually a husband) evicts them and annuls their right to the flat. Together with worsening economic conditions, personal problems also become aggravated: a recent study revealed that 52 per cent of deaths in Russia are caused by alcohol abuse, as compared to less than 4 per cent worldwide, this being a result of a crumbling healthcare system, changes in 79

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diet, job losses, raised stress levels and increased drinking (Zaridze et al. 2009). Being placed into the category of neblagopoluchnaya may have wide implications for a person, often indicating his or her particular essence, a ‘bad seed’ as it were. Thus over-categorized, the definition of a neblagopoluchnaya family has fluid and unclear boundaries. If desired, many families could be formally identified as having a different kind of neblagopoluchiye, if there is some evidence of departure from blagopoluchiye. The term describes families with circumstances similar to each other in one aspect: they lead to the emergence of conditions viewed as detrimental to a child’s healthy development and in need of correction. It is accepted that misfortune in a neblagopoluchniye family is nested within the family where (1) neblagopoluchniye roditeli (problem parents) create (2) neblagopoluchniye usloviya dlya vospitaniya (unfavourable conditions for raising children), resulting in (3) neblagopoluchniye deti (problem children) (Dzugaeva 1989: 139–57). The stress is very much on the evaluation of the personality of the parents and their ability to create suitable conditions. Therefore, children should be protected from unfavourable conditions and ‘problem’ parents.

The Benevolent State and ‘Good’ Parents: Voluntary Placements and Cooperation In the day-to-day work of the child welfare network, depending on what the family reveals itself to be, the power relationship between the state and the family gradually shifts from cooperation between the two to utter distrust of the family. This shift has both a typological and progressive character. We will start with an illustration of the ideal relationship of ‘partnership’ between the state and the family in childcare where the power relationship appears to be balanced. Two case studies shall serve to depict the benevolent state lending a helping hand to a family in need on either the parents’ initiative or that of the child welfare officials, with the understanding that the parents can retrieve the children later.

Grigoriy and his Dilemma One day when I was working in the GD, a man in his early 40s walked in, limping. He stood there nervously squeezing his hat. Larisa invited him to sit down and prepared to listen to him. He came to ask for advice on what to do with his two small children because his wife had left the family. After learning 80

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that Grigoriy had been hospitalized after a knife attack and that currently neighbours were looking after his two young children, Larisa offered to place them temporarily in residential care. Grigoriy readily agreed. While filling out papers she asked if he would be able to raise the children by himself after they were returned to him. He replied that he thought he could but was not very clear on how; perhaps he might need to place them in a 24-hour kindergarten. The next question was about his living conditions. He replied that he had a two room flat. Grigoriy also said that he had higher education, was employed and made good money. Larisa informed Grigoriy that he could bring the children to the institutions immediately. The next day he wrote a letter of request for placement and left his younger child in the Baby Home and the older one in the Children’s Home. After that I spoke with him confidentially. Grigoriy told me that he was from a working professional family. His parents and a married brother lived in the same city. He married, against his family’s wishes, a woman from a neblagopoluchnaya family. He described her as a bad mother, who often left children in care of neighbours or his brother’s family, and worked only occasionally. When his wife left him and he was hospitalized, his extended family chose not to help care for the children, suggesting placing them in children’s homes while Grigoriy was recovering in the hospital and removing his wife’s parental rights. When asked why he opted for state care, Grigoriy named a number of difficulties he perceived as standing in the way of home childcare: ‘I don’t know where to look for a nanny, and I do not have time for it. Even if I did, what am I going to do with them when I come home after work, tired?’ Finding childcare options was either a lot of work or entailed some expenses, while state residential care, where the children would be looked after by professional nurses and teachers, was easy and free. It constituted an additional resource. As often happens, six months later he wrote a letter of request for further stay of six months. It is clear that, however badly, the family had been held together by the presence of the mother who stayed home with the children, When she disappeared, Grigoriy was at a loss for what to do with them. This case is reflective of many cases where fathers bring their children to institutions when the mothers or grandparents became unavailable. Often these fathers are not necessarily in a dire financial or material situation. The place of the father in a Soviet family, specifically in his relationship to his children, can be described as ambiguous. In urban matrifocal families ‘the fathers were largely invisible to their children in the most important moments of their lives; certainly Russians today speak about “absent fathers” (bezotsovshchina)’ 81

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(Vannoy et al. 1999: 88). Very few fathers took on this role alone, and fathers were often less involved in childcare than grandparents were (Boss et al. 1999). Indeed, in Soviet society, the male’s domain was work, while the female’s domains were work and home (Atkinson et al. 1978, Bridger et al. 1996, Ashwin 2000). Societal understanding of masculinity (Kukhterin 2000, Kon 1995), whereby intensive involvement in housework and childcare likened men to women, was viewed as shameful and reinforced this division. Understandably, once a mother is removed from a household, some fathers do not know what to do with their children and the family often disintegrates. One internat teacher with nearly 40 years of experience dismissively waves her hand: ‘Here we have children who have fathers. These fathers start new families and go on having more children, but they leave their children from the previous marriage here in the internat.’ Grigoriy’s inability to look after the children was more readily acceptable to predominantly female staff of all institutions involved than the refusal of Grigoriy’s parents to help care for their grandchildren without recourse to residential care. That choice raised a few eyebrows. Let us make a note of it, as this is a constitutive part of my discussion of biological vs. social models of kinship: although reliance on social ties was acceptable to and exercised on both sides, implicitly the place for children is seen as being firstly within the nuclear and then the extended family.

Arina In contrast to Grigoriy, who had relatives in the same city, Arina, a 28-yearold mother of two children, a 6-month-old baby and a 7-year-old daughter, did not have her family nearby. She was sent to the GD by the Baby Home where she went first to temporarily place her baby. Arina was an intelligent educated married woman. She told me that when she accidentally got pregnant and wanted to have an abortion, her husband insisted on them keeping the baby. She worked for small private companies because they paid more but, compared to a state enterprise, they did not offer social benefits. When she got pregnant, she lost her job and had no paid maternity leave, leaving her completely dependent on her husband. However, as soon as the baby was born, he left her and their children for another woman. Because Arina was officially married, she was not eligible for monthly child benefits paid to single mothers, although she was in fact a single mother. Because her husband was employed she was not eligible for any financial assistance from the state as a low-income parent. No employer would give her a job with such a young baby. There was nowhere else to go. She 82

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completely fell through the holes of the social safety network and found herself without any financial or psychological support. She placed her baby in a children’s hospital and went to the Baby Home, where the Chief Doctor, after hearing the reasons for the placement, agreed to take the baby but sent her to notify the GD. However, Marina refused to begin the paperwork because she explained that the Baby Home could place a child for up to three months without involving the authorities, and then renew the placement for another three months. ‘Why did they send her here?’ she asked indignantly. ‘Don’t they know the rules? They are just being overcautious’, she continued and said, addressing Arina: There are many mothers who come and state one thing, but in fact do something entirely different. The Baby Home doesn’t want to take responsibility, so if something happens, they are not blamed. Believe me, you don’t want us to get involved at this stage. Solve this problem between you and the Baby Home without us. When we get involved … It is a different story. They told Arina to return to the Baby Home and tell the Chief Doctor that the GD had been informed, and instructed her as to what to do: ‘Write the letter of request, collect all the necessary documents, and carry out all the requirements they tell you to do, visit and bring something to the child.’ Thus, the first stage of the placement of her youngest child was completed. Larisa also inquired about Arina’s older daughter, suggesting that Arina should place her in the Temporary Shelter. Arina politely declined. Larisa repeated her concern: ‘What about your older child? You can protect her from hardship. Would you like to reconsider?’ Arina looked at Larisa in horror and quietly but firmly said, ‘No, we are going to make it somehow. My friends help. She will go to school’. There were no questions asked about parents or other relatives. It is significant that the first move by the GD was the offer of institutional placement. In all its subtlety and apparent insignificance, this point was crucial in the relationship between Arina (the parent) and the GD staff (the state) with regards to her older child. Central to it was the fact that Larisa asked Arina if she wished to place her older daughter, and accepted the refusal of placement. Later we shall see that once a child is in the system, the road back to the family is not easy or ensured; the critical moment in the voluntary placements is the agreement by the parent(s) to place a child in an institution. It is still optional at this stage and Arina is still the decision 83

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maker. It is up to her how she is going to solve her difficulties with a job and finances. To summarize, Arina (1) was experiencing difficulties and felt she had no one to turn to; (2) voluntarily placed her younger child in the institution; (3) was offered another placement for the older child by the GD who anticipated hardships for this child; (4) was not asked by the GD about other relatives; (5) refused the placement and her wish was granted, therefore there was no direct coercion here. Had she agreed, her further relationship with the state would be locked up in an increasingly skewed power relationship, which she was not aware of at that time. She was on cooperational terms with the state because she had not displayed signs of being a neblagopoluchnaya mother, just a parent needing assistance, which the state was able and willing to give to her. What unites this and many seemingly diverse cases is that the families perceived their difficulties as insurmountable within the space of the nuclear and sometimes extended family, finding a resolution outside their family circle. Grigoriy first sought help from his family and only then opted for residential care. Arina felt she had no other options but temporary state care. All was well at the end in these two cases. From the point of view of the child welfare authorities (the GD, the Baby Home and the Children’s Home), both parents constituted ‘good’ parents in difficult life situations. They were well educated, had their own accommodation and were either employed, or had a good prospect of employment. While their children resided in institutions, the parents solved their problems. Grigoriy recovered from his illness and removed his wife’s parental rights. Arina took a secretarial course, met a man and found a job. Both parents actively sought to bring their children back, adhering to all the requirements, visiting the children, taking them for walks and bringing gifts. At the end, the parents and their children were reunited. On average, 30–50 per cent of the children from the Baby Home were returned home. So long as such parents were in the position to follow certain rules, they were able to use the state as a resource. This is an ideal and culturally acceptable case of parent-state cooperation and the implicit expectation of the authorities is that all cases should take a similar course and end up like this. Although institutional placement may occur under very different circumstances, in this particular type of situation, two points are noteworthy: (1) the ease with which children can be separated from parents and with which the placement takes place, and also the willingness of parent(s) to use an institution as a solution to their problems; and (2) the readiness of state 84

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employees to suggest institutional placement as a way to help parents. It is possible to conclude that the place and role of residential care facilities are well established in the minds of state officials, parents and the wider public. These homes are easily accessible, staffed with trained personnel and have considerable resources invested into the institutional network by the state.

Notes 1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

Schools operate on a two-shift school day. For example first-graders may go to school early in the morning coming back home by noon; the same classroom will be used by fifth-graders whose school day may start shortly after lunch time and last until early evening. High school children spend longer hours at school. Individuals hired for a position of a psychologist may not have had any training in psychology, i.e., one person was trained as a sociologist but worked for a while as a psychologist; others have been re-trained for 9 or 18 months; still others have been trained in departments of psychology. I have encountered all three types. Fostering of an underage child by related or non-related adults appointed by the GD as legal guardians, to whom the state pays child support. Since then the laws have changed. The new Housing Code RF 188-ФЗ of 29/12/2004 allows the owner of a flat to evict an ex-spouse together with underage children. See for example http://www.gazeta.ru/realty/2007/06/ 13_a_1802526.shtml (last accessed 1 January 2008). As the regional population numbers decrease, so does the number of children. In 2002, regional population stood at 187,218 with 48,866 children ages 0-19; in 2008 the numbers were 165,820 and 37,745, respectively. The number and capacity of residential care institutions did not change (except since I finished my fieldwork, another temporary shelter has been opened). These institutions, being regional, also hosted children from regional communities other than Magadan. The families these children came from, being the responsibility of the respective district and municipal administrations, were not in the Magadan City Guardianship Department books. These calculations are approximate; I made them using (at times incomplete) data from the Baby Home recording journal.

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Chapter 3

State and Family: Tilting the Balance of Power

‘facilis descensus averno’ said by Sibyl to Aeneas: ‘It’s easy to descend to the Underworld’ in Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’

So far I have described the practice of institutional placements where parents and the state served as partners in childcare, where the state lent a ‘helping hand’ to parents in difficult situations. The invisible power relationship was balanced because the parents adhered successfully to all requirements. The authorities see a departure from this ‘ideal’ type of state-parent cooperation as a deviation in need of correction. This can result in not only placements, but also the retention of the child in an institution by state agents, against the wishes of the parent(s) and often the children. There are many instances when placements end up differently from Grigoriy and Arina’s cases. In the next two chapters I shall demonstrate the transformation of power relations when the state deals with the different categories of family, illustrating this with two cases. The first shows a growing tension in negotiations between the state and the parents (Natalia) and the second depicts the subversion of any strategies employed by parents for retrieving their child (Maria). The deceptively easy and quick process of institutionalization gives the impression that the returning of the child will be just as easy as the placement. What the parents do not realize is that at the moment the child is moved from the parents’ arms to the welcoming arms of the state, a silent shift in the relationship takes place. As soon as a child is placed in an institution, the role of the state in regulating the relationship between itself and the parents increases considerably. Although this might still look like cooperation, the power balance starts tipping, at first unnoticeably, until some parents become completely overwhelmed by the state. This occurs under conditions of either quiet resignation or attempts by the parents to fight the state using different strategies, ranging from compliance to open rebellion. 87

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The returning of the child to the family depends on the adherence of the parents to two sets of requirements. The first is clearly spelled out at the beginning of the placement proceedings. This set concerns how the parents should behave toward their child while the child is in the institution. The Baby Home administration and employees must be able to observe the parents expressing interest in their child’s wellbeing, visiting their child, taking him or her for walks and bringing treats. We saw how Larisa instructed Arina almost in passing to do everything the Baby Home told her to do. Indeed, I often saw Arina in the Baby Home. She would come into the unit where her baby lived together with a dozen children of approximately the same age. It was unmistakably clear how much she missed her child – hurrying into the room, taking the baby into her arms, kissing, talking and playing with her – the signs were easily readable and interpretable. However, the second set of requirements becomes known to the parents only after the placement has been accomplished. These requirements may be much more difficult for the parents to fulfil, because they relate to their living conditions, employment and income; some find the task of finding their own accommodation or a job nearly impossible. A parent is expected to have a clean, warm, orderly, furnished flat or room with a special place designated for the child, and have enough food and children’s clothes; a parent is also expected to be employed with a permanent income. For many parents, especially those who placed their children voluntarily due to hardships, these requirements come as a surprise when they are seeking to collect their children. As one mother put it in her letter: ‘We never knew that it would be so difficult to bring our child back home. If we had known this in the beginning, we would never place him in the Baby Home.’ Some parents encounter many more obstacles in their attempt to bring their children back home than described in the cases of Arina and Grigoriy, and may never see their children again. Some children will end up in adoptive and guardian families, while others will remain in this institution, later to be transferred to the next institution, spending their entire childhood in residential care. If the placement of children in the Baby Home is easy, the way back to the birth family is not. The transfer of children from the care of parents to the care of state institutions is not harmless. It constitutes an invisible threshold beyond which the family soon acquires a new history. The family becomes marked either in official records or in the memory of the Guardianship Department staff members, turning itself into a watched family, vulnerable to accusations. Larisa and Ekaterina often remembered the particulars of 88

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complicated family circumstances from many years earlier, revealing a remarkable landscape of their memory regarding dozens of people of different ages, degrees of kinship, places of residence, events in their lives involving jobs, divorces, brawls, cohabitations, name changes and movements of children between households. This new history of the family now involves the heavy presence of the state from its previous non-involvement or occasional involvement in the family’s affairs regarding their children. The clock starts ticking upon the child’s admission into the institution. The first several months of a child’s residence in an institution are transitory, meaning that the child is not under the care of his or her parents, but has not yet become a child of the state. The family occupies a ‘grey’ area, where it is watched and evaluated to be finally placed either into a category of blagopoluchnaya (but experiencing temporary difficulties) or neblagopoluchnaya. The general pattern includes the following steps: children are placed in institutions; an institution makes a judgement as to the possibility of returning a child back to the family; if judged as ‘unfit’, the Guardianship Department (GD) or an institution file a court suit against the mother or parent for deprivation of parental rights. This is the course of events that took place in the family of Natalia.

Neblagopoluchnye Parents: Tension between the State and the Family ‘Child Neglect’: The Case Study of Natalia My first meeting with Natalia’s family took place in the Baby Home where I was doing participant observation. Her son Tolya, a 14-month-old smallish and fussy boy, was one of nine children in his age group. I studied his file and the information recorded there gave a strong impression of neglect and indifference on the part of his mother. A 28-year-old single unemployed mother, she was described as ‘leading an asocial life, and infected with STD’. Information on the father was terse: he was ‘a driver and F-1’.1 She had an 11-year-old disabled son Arseniy living at home. The Baby Home filed a court suit against Natalia for termination of parental rights, but did not attempt to charge her child support. No attorney represented the defendant, a quiet woman dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. In hearings like this I have never seen a defence attorney – all the defendants invariably represented themselves. I was told that only the most 89

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Figure 3.1. A house of neblagopoluchnaya family A.

Figure 3.2. Interior room in the house of neblagopoluchnaya family B.

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Figure 3.3. Interior view of kitchen in the house of neblagopoluchnaya family C.

serious criminal courts provided a free lawyer. A fee for a single consultation with a lawyer cost 100 roubles (1 pound sterling= 45 roubles) and a figure of 3,000 roubles (66 pounds) was mentioned as a lawyer’s fee for the defence in a court case, the equivalent of a month’s salary for a professional state employee. This made a defence attorney beyond the reach of most such families. I recorded (with permission) the entire court hearing, which took only 15 minutes to complete. The judge read from the file that, from the Maternity Home, Tolya was transferred first to the Children’s Somatic Hospital (CSH), where he spent one month, and then to the Baby Home. After a week he was signed out to his family according to the wishes of his mother. Natalia’s file contained the description of overall poor conditions of her home: it was described as overcrowded, dirty, unkempt, disorderly, in need of repair after a fire and utterly unsuitable for the child’s upbringing (Figures 3.1–3.3). The judge read further: At home the boy didn’t have adequate care, didn’t have enough food, and as a result, he was diagnosed with under-nourishment of the third degree and placed [back] in the CSH. During his illness, his mother did not express any interest in him. For over a month nobody visited him 91

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or asked about his health. He was transferred to the Baby Home for the second time, where he presently resides. The social pedagogue of the Baby Home and the representative of the Guardianship Department visited the family to evaluate their home conditions (sotsial’no-bytoviye usloviya). In two weeks the mother wrote a statement (zayavlenie) where she agreed to give her son up for adoption, signing the renunciation of her parental rights, and stating the reason: ‘unemployed and do not have own accommodation’. In the best interests of the child, in order to establish his social status [a status of an orphan to be adoptable], the Baby Home requests the Court to remove Natalia’s parental rights and move the child under the guardianship of the Guardianship Department and charge her child support. Judge: Natalia: Judge:

All: Judge:

Do you agree with the charges? I agree. In the case when a defendant agrees to the charges, [the] Civil Code allows a shortened session. Do all the sides agree to accept Natalia’s agreement with the charges? Yes. The Court has removed Natalia’s parental rights. The session is over.

After the session, I followed Natalia in the corridor and asked her to tell me her side of the story. Note that none of the information I am about to present, besides the authorities’ representation of the situation reflected in the initial statement, ever became known to the court. I have coded myself, the interviewer, as ER, and the mother as NI. I learned that Natalia was brought up in internats. After the divorce of her parents, her working mother cared for her and her disabled brother. While attending a mainstream school, Natalia started lagging behind in her studies and her mother was advised by the educational authorities to place her in the internat for low-income families, where she would receive better help with her studies, while making it easier for her mother to work and look after her disabled brother. However, she was soon transferred to an internat for (mentally) disabled children. Both internats were in Magadan, and Natalia was coming home for weekends. Then she was transferred to the internat for disabled children in Chukotka, hundreds of kilometres away; she was able to return only for holidays. She missed home and helping her mother, but said that in the internat they were 92

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constantly busy and didn’t have time to be bored. Having completed eight years of formal schooling in Chukotka, she returned to Magadan and wanted to continue her education. However, she was refused admittance to a Magadan vocational school, being caught up in regulations regarding eligibility: NI:

I wanted to enrol into a vocational school in Magadan. But the culinary school told me that if I had finished at a school in Magadan, then they would have accepted me. But because I finished internat in Chukotka, they said, go back and study there. I wanted to become a cook but they told me ‘no’ and that was the end of it.

At that time she became pregnant at 17 with her first child and her mother helped her to get a job so she could receive maternity leave. At the time of the interview, she was unemployed. She was looking for a job as a cleaner or a street sweeper, but she had to have a medical exam and could not find the 500 roubles to pay for it. Without income, she was eligible for assistance from the Centre for Help for low-income families, but had difficulties registering there: NI:

To register, I need a certificate that shows my registration with the housing authorities with the number of people living in the flat and residence permit (propiska). But because I don’t have a flat, the district housing authorities do not issue this certificate. So it’s zamknutiy krug [Catch-22]. The Centre put me on file temporarily without this certificate, because my child is handicapped and I brought to them the certificate from my polyclinic that he is handicapped. But soon, I will need the real certificate.

She lived in her mother’s flat with her son and the disabled brother: NI:

We lived in Shanghai. Then we had a fire. The city administration gave us money to buy another flat and we were collecting necessary documents. But I couldn’t find a suitable flat for the price range they stipulated. Then we lost the documents and while I was collecting them anew, the time for buying a flat expired. Now I don’t have anything.

Although as a mother of a disabled child, she has a right to a flat, that right does not guarantee accommodation: 93

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ER: What are you going to do now? No education, no money for the medical exam, no job? NI: I hope that my problem with the flat will be resolved, and I will find a job in the district where I will have my flat and propiska. I have already submitted my documents for a flat. I went to see city administration. They said, “When we have made a decision, we will notify you”. I am still waiting for their notification. If I need to, I will go to see them again. I have a right to have a separate flat. It is just they don’t give it to me. Natalia had her second child, Tolya, at 28. I asked her about the circumstances of his birth: NI:

ER: NI:

ER: NI: ER: NI: ER: NI: ER: NI:

Tolya was an accident and the pregnancy was too advanced for abortion. They said, it would be either early birth or late abortion. I said, eh, doesn’t matter. I will give birth and then somehow raise him. If you decided to keep him, why did he go to the Baby Home and hospitals? I was hospitalised into the Department of Pathological Pregnancies to have a C-section, and they said that this affected the child. They found a bunch of illnesses in him, he was born three weeks prematurely. So, they sent him to the Children’s Hospital. Then he was transferred to the Baby Home. Did they ask your consent for this move? I gave my consent because he was underweight and I wouldn’t be able to nourish him enough to health. Is it what you decided or somebody told you that? The Chief Doctor of the department of the CSH told me this. Did you lactate? No, because I had a C-section. Did you agree with her, that you would not be able to provide enough food for him? She explained to me that his weight was under 2.5 kilos, I don’t have milk, and at that time I didn’t buy any formula. She said, why don’t we leave him here in the Hospital temporarily, so he can gain some weight? If you still don’t have any milk, we will transfer him to the Baby Home, while you look for money and food. Then you will come and collect him. So I did and was visiting him in the hospital and later in the Baby Home. The 94

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children’s polyclinic gave me baby formula. But when I brought him home somehow this formula didn’t suit him. I was preparing it with boiled water … He was throwing it up a little (srygival). So instead of gaining, he lost some weight. We needed food and I found a job picking potatoes and haymaking. When my mom started to feed him and he was throwing up a little, she called an ambulance and he was taken to the hospital. I don’t know what problems my mom had [I sense Natalia’s irritation with her mother]. I was making money to buy another kind of formula for the baby, coming home late in the evening, asking mom how things are and she would say – oh, everything is fine. ER: Who left Tolya in the Children’s Hospital? NI: My mother. Then I found out that she didn’t do anything, she just sent him to the hospital. Natalia’s mother, having previously placed Natalia in an institution on the advice of the authorities, now resolved the problem of caring for her grandchild in the same way, trusting the state to solve the problem. However, for her, the reason for placement was ‘respectable’: Natalia’s (supposed) mental illness. The state was a partner and a resource, and in the end, she was reunited with her daughter. Yet with her grandchild the end was different, for there was a suspicion of neglect. The situation was aggravated by Natalia’s own institutional history and mental condition implied by her move to an internat. Throughout this entire ordeal, the father of the child was invisible. Since he is a cohabitant it is as if he does not exist. Once in similar circumstances a government official told the father of a child: ‘Who are you? Your name is not on the birth certificate, I don’t have to talk to you because you are nobody!’ This detail is reflective of the wider society where only what is official and documented is real (Humphrey 2002): ER: Are you married? NI: No, I am a single mother. I am dating someone. ER: Is this man Tolya’s father? [She nods.] What does he think about his son being in the Baby Home? NI: He is unhappy, we even got into a fight, that I am rejecting my son. He is in the gold mining community and comes to Magadan only periodically. When he learned about all this, he blamed me for my mom sending Tolya to the hospital. 95

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I was still wondering why she did not say any of this during the court hearing, where it appeared that she did not care to raise her child. Natalia asked me to turn off the tape-recorder: ER: NI: ER: NI:

Do you want your son? Yes, of course, I would like to raise him. Why didn’t you fight for him? I did not want to repeat the same situation I had when the Guardianship Department came to my home. She yelled that it is dirty in the flat and because of the fire, it is messy, as if it were my flat. I tried to explain that this is not my flat, but she didn’t listen. She asked Arseniy to tell her something, but he is not talking much even with me. She threatened me that if I will try to get Tolya back, she will take away both children. I am keeping silent now because I don’t want to lose Arseniy. ER: Are you going to try to get him back? NI: How? What can I do now? I have already signed him off [her eyes filled with tears]. What can I do against all these educated people? Natalia did not dare to object because when she resisted the GD’s suggestion to reject the baby, they threatened her with taking away both of her children. Since being given the status of ‘orphan’, Tolya was up for adoption but resided in the Baby Home for two more years until he was adopted abroad. Later, Natalia had a third son, who she also called Tolya. I observed this pattern time and again. While I was collecting my data, at least four young women whose children were taken away from them went on to have more children.2 In June 2002, he was placed in the Baby Home with signs of physical abuse. Importantly, in Soviet times, the field of child maltreatment, abuse or neglect did not constitute an object of social science and policy study. In post-Soviet society, technical terms, concepts, policies or practices are yet to be developed. One of the Baby Home doctors told me that in her practice, Tolya’s was the first case of child abuse given as an official diagnosis. To summarize, Natalia was brought up in institutions while having her own family, neither completing her secondary education (children from internats for the disabled rarely do) nor enrolling into a vocational school, was unemployed, lacked accommodation, was caught between the need to make money and the need to look after her child, and was accused of child neglect. Compared to Grigoriy and Arina, she had few resources to draw on. Here we see the repetition of institutionalization through generations, the social acceptability of institutional placements, and an invisible father. 96

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The combinations of problems that brought about the loss of Tolya, including unresolved tension between the grandmother and Natalia, poor housing and unemployment, have not been solved and therefore the root of the problem has not been addressed. I shall illustrate that in most of my cases this is the pattern: a child is taken away, but the family is left to fend for themselves.

‘Inadequate Fulfilment of Parental Duties’ In English terms, Natalia was found to be an unfit mother. She was a neblagopoluchnaya mother who proved to be unable to carry out her parental duties properly. The two most common types of inadequate parenting are avoidance of parental duties (ukloneniye ot vospitaniya) and inadequate fulfilment of parental duty (nenadlezhashchee vypolneniye obyazannostey). When proven, both types of behaviour constitute grounds for deprivation of parental rights. Much like the previous Family Code of 1969, the new Code of 1996 does not provide a detailed explanation of what constitutes either type of behaviour. Instead, their interpretation is based on the recommendations for interpretation, mostly circulated in the child welfare authority’s departments (Dzugaeva et al. 1989, Methodicheskie recomendatsii 1991), and on the private understandings of the authorities, which often differ among themselves. I asked the GD what they consider to be minimal, yet adequate fulfilment of parental duties. Larisa considered that: if a child was fed with just something, was somehow dressed, was provided with medical care when ill, and did not scream for three days without any adult attention, as often happens in our work, then the minimum is met. Ekaterina first gave me a normative account typically found in the official requirements: a family with loving, caring parents, where ‘everything should be done for the child and for the sake of the child, with love’. When pressed for a more clear definition of the minimum, she explained that: when the fulfilment of parental duties is not ‘adequate’, but there is no danger to a child’s health and life, schools and kindergartens [my italics] take care of such cases. The Guardianship Department is the last resort in cases where there is danger to a child’s health and life. We had a family where four children were fed, clothed, and went to 97

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school, and most of the requirements for sufficient childcare were fulfilled. But their house was very dirty! The children had scabs and lice, and two children had a progressive hearing loss. So we took the children away and now they are in two different internats. In most children’s files, the emerging description of child neglect is depressingly similar: Two sisters, ages 3 and 2, parents lead an immoral, antisocial life, and cannot adequately provide for the children. The children do not get even basic nourishment, and are suffering from a dystrophic condition. They are dirty, emaciated and unkempt. The mother objected to hospitalisation. She was absent for a few days in a row. She brought the children to the kindergarten dirty, however, after a few comments by the teachers, she improved. The mother was eventually deprived of parental rights, the girls were put in different institutions and subsequently adopted.3 A 3 year-old boy. Grandmother informed the authorities that her daughter does not provide adequate care for her son, leaves him without supervision, hungry and dirty. Parents drink, have unsanitary conditions at home, leading a disorderly life. Father worked only nine months for the past seven years. We feel that leaving the child with his family may be dangerous to his health. Ingrained in the law (Family Code, 1996: 1: 122) and practice is a philosophy of protecting children not only from actual, but even from suspected neblagopoluchie, leading to situations where the authorities retain a child until they are sure that the child’s family is able to provide favourable conditions for him or her. One example can illustrate this practice: Tatiana, a married woman, gave birth to her third child at home. A day later they called the ambulance because she felt unwell. The ambulance took her to the women’s’ clinic and the baby to a children’s hospital. Her husband and her mother had to work and could not visit the child, and although they tried to make a few telephone calls to the children’s hospital, they could not get a hold of the doctor. After three days of parental absence, the doctors from the children’s hospital notified the GD. As soon as the mother was discharged from the hospital, the parents came to the children’s hospital to collect their child, but the hospital staff refused to give the child back, 98

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sending them to the GD for clearance. The distraught parents came to the GD and were shocked to learn that their child would be retained by the hospital until the authorities made home visits to make sure that the family was blagopoluchnaya. The father was (cautiously) furious, ‘What do you mean, you will not give us back our own child?! What right do you have to do that? What have we done? These were just such circumstances’. A few weeks later the child was returned to the family. The GD indicated in their report that the family seems to be normal, living in a three-room, clean, furnished flat; the father was employed and the mother used to be a teacher. However, had the family conditions been different, showing signs of being neblagopoluchnaya, then the battle between the family and the state would have taken a different route, as we have seen in the case of Natalia.

Working with the Neblagopoluchnaya Family An important first stage of this process would be working with a neblagopoluchnaya family before terminating their parental rights. In legislative documents, explanatory and interpretative notes, the deprivation of parental rights is considered to be the last resort, after all other measures to correct the family have been applied. This implies that these families are assisted in overcoming their problems. The Baby Home social pedagogue, a former kindergarten teacher, recognizes that: My work with the family should be directed towards returning the child to the family. But it does not happen in 90 per cent of the cases, because the family absolutely does not have proper conditions for raising the child. To help such families, there should be real help, but we do not have either financial or other means. We do not have special services that help families, especially with small children. It is just myself. She has her own system of categorization of families. There are those who have a desire to help themselves and their children, and those who do not. Depending on family circumstances, she decides what strategy to choose in each case. With the second category, where she thinks there is no hope, she tries to talk them out of taking their child home. The borderline families of the first category, who have a desire to help themselves, fall into two different subcategories: those who wanted to collect their children and eventually were able to do so, and those who wanted to, but were unable to 99

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collect them because they could not fulfil the necessary requirements. Grigoriy belonged to the first subcategory and Natalia to the second. So, what does she do to help families viewed as ‘correctable’? She talks to parent(s), explains to them what is required from them as parents, what they have done wrong and what they should do to correct their situations, whether it is to find employment, clean up their flat, or exhibit certain behaviour towards their child (visiting, bringing gifts, etc.). She visits homes, trying to determine whether or not the parents have corrected their behaviour/appearance/lifestyle as advised, and whether or not the child can be returned to them. After interviewing social pedagogues from a school, from a kindergarten, and the Head of the Centre for Temporary Isolation of Juvenile Delinquents (TSVINP) regarding their concept of ‘working with the family’, I realized that they all followed a uniformly similar pattern. After a family problem became known, state agents admonished the parents, expecting that they would correct themselves and, if that did not happen, they used sanctions. This way of ‘working with the family’ is deeply rooted in the old Soviet practice of vospitanie roditelei, or admonishing the parents. The reader should take note of this, as we shall return to this concept, its meaning, roots and implications in Chapter 8. The examples of Grigoriy and Natalia illustrate two major outcomes. Children were returned to a member of the community who proved to be decent, with a good job, sober lifestyle, good clean flat and respectable relatives. In the case of Natalia, we see a typical case of a neblagopoluchanya family. A single mother and a former internat resident, unemployed, with unsanitary home conditions, along with the condition of her son, indicated inadequate care and endangered health. It was unclear why she did not visit him in the hospital, and nobody asked her that, but the authorities assumed it was because she did not care. It is often the case that as soon as the family is moved into the ‘problem’ category, further explanations of circumstances are not required. She was given a chance, but was unable to use it effectively and so, during the court hearing, she agreed to the deprivation of parental rights without fighting for her child. There are cases where mothers fight but do not get a second chance. I observed the court hearing for termination of parental rights of Tamara, a 40-year old mother of three, 16-year-old Lena and 10-year-old Vera and a 6-year-old boy, living with her cohabitant. Tamara was brought up in a children’s home for disabled children (see Appendix 2). According to her, the Children’s Home lost her documents, and when she was on maternity leave, her employer gave her flat to somebody else. When she lost her job 100

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as a factory night guard, the family had neither food nor clothes. She tried to secure assistance from the state, going to the Unemployment Office (after a year they offered her a job that paid very little) and to the Family Assistance Centre, which gave her humanitarian help once and then criticised her for coming to them and begging like a pauper. Finally she asked for her children to be placed in the internat for low-income families. However, the paperwork was taking too long to finalize, Lena stopped going to school, while Vera spent much time outside the home with friends. A family friend, an American charity worker, took pity on the girls, placing them in the Shelter. Unbeknown to Tamara, the girls were tested by the Psychological-Medical-Pedagogical Committee and placed in an internat for mentally disabled children, and from there to another internat which, together with the GD, filed a court suit for deprivation of parental rights because Tamara was considered to be neblagopoluchnaya and because the children were truanting. Prior to the first court hearing, Vera escaped from the internat, located some 60 km from Magadan, and returned home. Both Tamara and Vera strongly objected to the deprivation ruling by the court. Tamara described how she went to the internat for low-income parents, the Department of Education and the mayor’s office seeking help, but to no avail. She fought like a trouper. Nervous and sweating, she threatened in desperation that if the children were taken away from her, she would burn herself in front of the GD: ‘I cannot live without them. They are all I have and I am all they have in this world.’ Nevertheless, after a few court hearings she was deprived of parental rights. Ekaterina, who represented the plaintiff, the GD, brought up the issue of Tamara’s (mental) disability which in her eyes would explain why the girls were diagnosed with delayed development and educational neglect. As an uneducated disabled mother, Tamara was unable to help them with their schooling. She was visiting her children in the internat, but when she asked the administration to allow them to join her for a holiday, they refused, stating that first she must restore her parental rights and only then her request will be granted. This never happened. However, her son, whose speech at six was unintelligible, was left in the family. Next I shall turn to the case study of Maria, representing cases where the state completely overpowers the family, who was not even given a chance to get their child back, and whose voice was muted during the court hearings.

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Notes 1. 2.

3.

Meaning that his name was recorded as stated by the mother. Psychologically this may be similar to bereavement on a child’s death, i.e., getting pregnant again and even reusing the name, an attempt at replacement. This consideration owes much to the discussions with Dr Piers Vitebsky. Adoption procedures are the responsibility of the GD, the Department of Education and the court.

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Chapter 4

Parents Overwhelmed by the State

‘Child Appropriation’: The Case Study of Maria So far we have examined cases ranging from those where children were returned to their parents (Grigoriy) to those where a child was returned to the mother but was then readmitted to the Baby Home; the mother did not formally object to the court terminating her parental rights (Natalia). We also saw the desperation of one mother, Tamara, a ‘bad’ mother and a former institutional inmate with a history of mental illness. Her attempts at securing state assistance without being punished for her inability to provide for her children proved futile. Next we shall examine a court case where the mother, Maria, was not able to bring her child home. After Maria gave birth to her son, doctors in the Maternity Home advised her to temporarily place the baby in state care, but later she was unable to retrieve him at all. It thus represents an extreme case in the typology established in Chapter 2. I followed the development of this case for over three months through informal interviews with the state representatives and family members, and observations during the three court hearings of deprivation of parental rights, which I taped. The hearings took place in the city court in a small plain room. The chairs on one side of two office desks were occupied by the court, all of whom were women. The judge, a stout short woman in her thirties, was physically disabled due to a crippling disease. Yet, unlike many disabled people in Russia, she succeeded in getting higher education and becoming a city judge, getting married and giving birth to a child. She and her husband also adopted a toddler from the Baby Home not too long before the hearings. Ekaterina, who represented the plaintiff, the Guardianship Department (GD), was calm, self-assured and well versed in the language and procedures of court hearings. Once, when another court case was conducted by a young inexperienced judge, when the judge was hesitating, 103

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Ekaterina manoeuvred her through the court’s procedures, prompting her as to what questions to ask. The Prokuror, a fashionably dressed woman in her thirties, was there to see that the court adhered to the correct judicial procedures. She asked the defendant and witnesses occasional questions. The secretary recorded the proceedings in handwriting. Maria, the defendant, a 24-year-old mother of three, a pale, fair haired, phlegmatic woman, sat across the room facing the court. Dressed in a dark unbuttoned coat, she would get up with effort every time she had to speak. It was only halfway through the hearings that the women comprising the court noticed, in disbelief, that Maria was pregnant. She had an air of detachment around her, rarely raising her voice and not getting too excited, unlike Maria’s mother (referred to as Grandmother henceforth) who, with the help of the GD, sought to terminate Maria’s parental rights for her oldest son so that she could receive financial support from the state. The Grandmother was in her late forties, shrewd and manipulative – everything about her, including her spoken and body language, was used to persuade, in stark contrast with her daughter, who appeared emotionally flat. Her role was a difficult one: because she sided with the GD in terminating Maria’s parental rights, she oscillated between her interests and those of her daughter, switching sides without entirely leaving them, making alliances with the state representatives one minute and supporting her daughter the next. Her attachment to her grandson was plain for everyone to see. When the court threatened to take her precious boy away if she did not press on Maria sufficiently enough to agree to her deprivation of parental rights, she became very emotional and tearfully begged Maria to agree. Finally, two men were involved in the case. As in previous cases, in this family drama their role was a secondary one. Petr, Maria’s partner and the father of her daughter and one-year-old son, was never called to present his views. Because their marriage was not official in the eyes of the court and state agents, he was not considered to be anyone of consequence in legal terms. He drifted in and out of discussions, half-recognized and halfignored, being called ‘husband’ on one occasion and ‘cohabitant’ another. However, he provided most of the financial support for their joint household. They lived in a dilapidated house in Marchekan. The second man, the Grandmother’s unmarried partner of 18 years and Maria’s stepfather, was called as a witness. However, outside of a brief statement supporting the position of the Grandmother, his wife, he was barely referred to in discussions. They lived in a two-room furnished flat. Certainly, not only was this court made up of women, but the main actors 104

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were women (Maria and the Grandmother) while the men disappeared into the background. The major issues discussed during these two hearings revolved around: (1) the circumstances of child placement; (2) the provisos for returning the child to Maria as articulated by the GD and the Baby Home, revealing each party’s different understanding of the ‘norm’; (3) the importance of ‘socialliving conditions’, which we shall encounter throughout the hearings and which will be examined in the next chapter; and (4) the authorities’ moral judgement of the mother. While examining these issues I also aim to make visible the power asymmetry and power struggle between the state and the parents, not only through a reconstruction of events (as narrated by Maria and the state representatives) that led to the court hearing in the first place, but also as revealed through the state representatives’ use of language that essentially deprives parents of a voice and excludes them and the children. Maria had no lawyer. Let me take you through the court hearings, paying attention to the most important points in the discussion. We shall examine the significance of these points in subsequent chapters.1

Court Hearings The judge read from the file: The Guardianship Department has filed a Court suit against a 24-yearold single mother of three children. The oldest, a six-year-old child lives with his grandmother, the second child, a two-year-old girl lives with her parents, Maria and her cohabitant Petr. The youngest, a oneyear-old son has been residing in the Baby Home. With the help of the Guardianship Department, Maria’s mother who raises her eldest grandson seeks to deprive her daughter of parental rights to be able to establish guardianship over the boy to receive financial state support. The Guardianship Department seeks to deprive Maria of her parental rights for her youngest son because Maria is not willing to correct her life so as to care for her son, and she is indifferent towards her children. The judge read the rights of both sides and informed everyone that a decision could be made either by the judge alone, or by the full court, which will include two juries. Having said it many times before, the judge knows the text by heart and speaks fast. The GD, having heard this part on numerous occasions, knows the procedure and meaning of the words well. I, on the 105

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contrary, have to think hard to follow what she was saying to understand it. Maria does not seem to understand this highly technical language at all: Judge: Does the representative of the Guardianship Department, the plaintiff, agree with the judge making a decision alone? GD: Yes. Judge: Defendant? Maria: I do not understand what you are saying. The judge explains in simpler language and Maria agrees. The judge reads from the document describing the GD’s demands for the termination of Maria’s parental rights: Judge: Maria has three children, Volodya who resides with his grandmother, Klava who previously lived in the Baby Home, and Vasiliy. On August 5 Maria gave birth to Vasiliy and on August 8 left him in the Children’s Hospital with a written request for placement in the Baby Home. The living conditions of Maria are not satisfactory for small children. It is dirty; there is very little furniture, and little food. Vasiliy has resided in the Baby Home for more than 6 months, having the state as a guardian and major provider. She does not make any inquiries about her child, doesn’t care about her child, and doesn’t participate in financial and upbringing matters. Currently, his legal status is not established. But according to article 54 of the Family Code every child has a right to live and be raised in their family, which is necessary for his/her normal development. Vasiliy does not have the possibility to be raised at home, because it is not possible to give him back to his mother since this will cause harm to his health. He is an orphan with living parents (sirota pri zhivykh roditelyakh). Volodya, the eldest son of Maria, has been raised by his grandmother since birth, his mother avoids bringing him up, doesn’t support him financially, the boy has weakened health and needs medical attention and a high caloric diet. Taking all the above into consideration, the guardianship of Volodya by the grandmother was established. The grandmother’s family is not well off, so the child is in need of state support. Therefore, the Guardianship Department is requesting the removal of parental rights from Maria in relation to both of her sons.

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When the judge asked Ekaterina to explain the GD’s reasons for the termination of parental rights, she started by establishing Maria’s family as neblagopoluchnaya: GD:

The first data on the neblagopoluchnaya family of Maria we received from the Baby Home. Visits have shown that the parents do not work, abuse alcohol, lead an immoral life style, and do not have material means to maintain the child. It was out of the question to give the child back to his parents, because it is not possible for a child to live in such a family, and also because the mother, who, when she gave the child to the state care, practically forgot about his existence.

She continued further to sketch Maria’s inadequacy as the mother of her oldest child, who is raised by the Grandmother. The Grandmother provides a caring and loving environment for Volodya and has good home conditions: That is why we ask to deprive the mother of parental rights, because she doesn’t support her children financially, and both boys need state support. If the mother is deprived of parental rights we may be able to find a good family for Vasiliy and support Volodya by giving his grandmother guardianship benefits. All our requests with regard to removal of parental rights are directed to support the children, and provide them with an opportunity to grow up in a normal family. Maria’s family, however, is viewed as suitable for Klava, the couple’s daughter: GD:

With regard to the third child, Klava, we think that she has a more or less satisfactory relationship with her family, and Maria will be able to cope with one child, if she doesn’t harm herself with alcohol, and with brawls and fights with her cohabitant. We think it is best to leave the girl with her mother for the time being. The boys however don’t have satisfactory living conditions there, the family has just one bed for all, and the material situation is extremely poor. Most importantly, Maria does not express any interest in the fate of her children, and doesn’t give them any financial support.

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Vasiliy The judge now questioned the GD and then Maria herself: Judge: Did the Guardianship Department have any conversations with Maria? Did it ask what the reasons are for her not taking care of her children? GD: The eldest son was born when Maria lived with her mother, in her flat, and for a while, there were no questions about her being irresponsible in executing her parental duties, since they all lived together. It was when Maria moved in together with Klava and her cohabitant that she wasn’t able to make a normal life and conditions for herself and her family. Maria gives the excuse that she doesn’t have a job. That is why she left her child to the Baby Home, explaining she has difficulties with housing and finances. We feel that these reasons do not justify not caring for her children. Judge: How did she explain to you the fact that she is not working? GD: I personally didn’t talk to her. The employees of the Baby Home and another staff member of the Guardianship Department have visited her and talked to her. What can I say? It all points to the absence of a job. Judge: Do you think Maria has neglected her parental responsibility? GD: We think so. Two years ago she suddenly showed parental interest in her eldest son and decided to have him live in her family. It all related to her receiving child benefits, which required the child’s residence at home.2 This is when the belated child benefits were paid. But based on information received from neighbours, the child does not know his mother, and he is afraid of her and her cohabitant. Eventually he was returned to his grandmother, who came and told this to us. Maria did not visit her younger son in the Baby Home, and did not bring him anything. To go for a walk with him, to hold him in her arms, there was no such behaviour on the part of Maria … Judge: Does the defendant have questions for the plaintiff? Maria tried to dispute some of the information which presented her as a bad mother. Note how the judge interrupts Maria (episode 1). In the middle of a discussion, when Maria manages to provide persuasive answers, both the judge and Ekaterina bring up other issues to prove the initial GD’s 108

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accusation of Maria as immoral and irresponsible (episode 2). Often the judge does not acknowledge the arguments given by Maria, i.e., the participation of the state agents from at least three different state organizations in distancing Maria from Vasiliy was silenced by first ignoring Maria’s statements and later by turning them against her (episode 3). Finally, the judge refused to even engage in a dialogue (episode 4): (Episode 1) Maria: Yes, I have. Why don’t you know that I am helping Volodya financially, when I recently gave them money? GD (irritably): I don’t know what happened last week! Maria: Not last week, at the beginning of the summer. GD: All right, you can tell us all about it, when, how much, and what you gave him. Judge: Maria, please ask questions, because you can have your explanations later. What are your objections? Maria: My objections are that … Judge (interrupts): You have to stand up when answering to the Court, unless you have health problems that prevent you from doing so. Maria: I don’t agree that Klava was living in the Baby Home. She has never been there. Judge (interrupts): We are not talking about her now! Maria: Regarding Volodya, I do not agree that I do not help him financially and do not participate in his upbringing. I contribute towards his clothes. I give my mother money for food. Petr constantly makes money for Volodya. He is always absent from home because he works. (Episode 2: note the switch to her marital status rather than her objections) Judge: Are you living with him in a civil marriage? Maria: Yes. Judge (writes it down, stressing): In a civil marriage … Your marriage is not registered … it’s not official … Judge: When Vasiliy was born, why did you leave him? What reason did you indicate? Maria: That my financial situation was not good. Judge: In September of 1999 you didn’t have money to collect your son. Why did you give birth to him then? 109

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Maria: Judge:

What do you mean – why … Please, explain to me why did you have a child? In order to give him to the Baby Home?

(Episode 3) Maria: I wanted to write the request to place him there for a month, but in the Maternity House I was told, write the request for a year. Then when the Guardianship Department came, the second woman, I don’t know her name, she said, it is better for you to write a rejection letter right away as the children will be much better off there than with you. You will not be able to provide for them anyway. The judge did not acknowledge either Maria’s remark regarding the advice she received from the Maternity Home to place the baby in state care or the refusal of the GD to return the boy to the family. She found Maria’s arguments unconvincing: (Episode 4) Judge: Maria: Judge: Maria:

Have you been in the Baby Home? No. Why? Because when he was 4 months old, they came and told me, he will not be given back to you anyway. Judge: Why didn’t you take him back? Maria: Because I was told he would not be given back to me. Judge: Did you go to the Baby Home? Maria: [The] Guardianship Department told me that… Judge (speaking over her voice): Did you go to the baby home? Did you ask about your rights3 as the mother who temporarily placed her child to the baby home? Why are you so irresponsible towards your children? Maria: I thought I could collect him in a month. Judge: Why didn’t you do it? Maria: Because I was told they would not give him back to me. Judge (raising her voice): But did you try? Maria: People from the Baby Home told me they would not give him back to me. What, do I have to take him by force?

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Judge:

But you didn’t even try! And now you are trying to come up with excuses and find a guilty party, although you are the one who has her child in the Baby Home.

The judge takes a few seconds to calm down and then continues: Judge:

You know, I am a mother myself and I can’t understand you. Why didn’t you come to the Baby Home and play with him? Why don’t you have the desire to do so, or if you had such desire, why didn’t you carry it out? I have a neighbour, an Evenk woman, she is also not working. She gave birth to a girl this year, and it was offered to her to leave the girl. She said, never! From morning to evening, she picks berries and mushrooms, sells them at a market, but she doesn’t let her girl out of her hands!

This is an important utterance. Firstly, it follows from the judge’s statement that it is a routine occurrence to suggest abandonment of children if the parents are perceived as having difficulties, and that is why she did not acknowledge Maria’s explanations regarding the participation of the third parties. For her this carried no weight. Secondly, mothers are expected to fight for their child against all obstacles and authorities, indeed to ignore their advice, warnings and threats. At the same time, they are expected to follow the state representatives’ advice in other matters, such as improve her living conditions, and to lead a particular lifestyle. One has to know where to resist, where to follow and how to play the system. It is also evident that the placement based on ‘kind’ and ‘caring’ advice has to be done voluntarily, although with encouragement from the state agents. Later in an interview I asked Maria about the circumstances of her leaving the baby: ER: Maria: ER: Maria:

ER:

You mentioned that you were advised to leave your child. Who advised you? A children’s doctor in the Maternity Home. Why did she do that? They told me it’s because I don’t have a baby’s bed prepared at home, and I don’t have baby clothes. They said I should write a request to put the baby under state guardianship. Even if you didn’t have a baby bed, who would know about it? 111

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Maria:

They come to your home the very next day after they discharge you from the Maternity Home, and I haven’t kept any baby wraps from Klava. I wanted to leave him for a month, but the doctor told me, write a request for a year because it’s not customary to write a request for a month [this is not true]. And so I did. ER: Then you came home. Did you have any money later? Maria: Yes, later we had more money. But then they didn’t give us the child. ER: Couldn’t you prepare everything, a bed, wraps, and show it to them? Maria (waves her hand dismissively): I think that then it was of no consequence, if they were not giving this baby back to me. If the Guardianship Department came and said, you had better reject your child right now, we are not going to give him back to you anyway. They said if you have another child, we will take it away right there in the Maternity Home. Children with us have a great life (‘slide like cheese in butter’, kak syr v masle katayutsya). ER: Did you really believe that they could so easily take your child away from you? This is your child, after all? Maria: What could I have done? Send my husband there with a rifle, so he would shoot everybody and take the child and then he would be sent to prison? During the second hearing, the court called, as a witness, the representative of the Baby Home. The picture painted by the Baby Home representative was very similar to what has been put forth by the GD. The representative stressed the fact that the placement was done at the mother’s request, that the mother never came to the Baby Home, never called or brought anything to the boy. Moreover, she stated that the father never appeared in the Baby Home either, which in the end turned out to be untrue: Judge: Baby Home:

Did you talk to Maria about the possibility of her collecting her child, to bring him up? To give this child to her so he will be raised under the conditions she lives in is impossible. It will be harmful to his health. All we asked from her is to show her maternal feelings, to make an inquiry about his health. However, she never expressed such interest. 112

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Judge: Baby Home:

Judge:

Baby Home:

Judge:

Baby Home:4

Judge:

Did you personally talk to her? Once I came to see her at her house with the social pedagogue of the Baby Home. The door was locked and we talked via a small window. So, there was no tête-àtête conversation between us. That time we went to collect the documents from her. She collected documents, the baby’s birth certificate and didn’t return it on time. Later we found out that she collected these documents in order to get child benefits. Do you know anything from other employees of the Baby Home about the reasons for Maria’s decision to put the child in the Baby Home and why she isn’t helping the Baby Home financially or in any other ways? Vasiliy was transferred from the Children’s Hospital practically right after birth. He was left at his mother’s request in the Baby Home, then he was transferred to the Children’s Hospital, and to the Baby Home. For almost a month the baby didn’t have a name. Because he is a parent’s child, not an abandoned child, she was visited at home a month later. We asked her to come and write a request for him to be placed in the Baby Home. She did so, stating ‘difficult financial situation’ as the reason for the placement. She asked us to keep him there for a year. But we didn’t see her during that year. During this year, did you try to find out whether or not her financial situation had improved? Why she wasn’t visiting her son? Is he healthy? Maybe he suffers from physical illnesses that preclude him from being raised at home? No, the child … this child can be raised at home, but I think that in this family … with this mother who gave birth to him, he definitely should not be raised, she is not going to give him anything. This child now doesn’t have a legal status. He is an orphan with living parents, with a mother. If we can change his legal status and find good parents for him, who will love him, then he will find happiness in an adopted family. Did anybody else come and make inquiries about the child? Maybe his father? Do you know anything about it?

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Baby Home: Judge: Baby Home:

No, the child’s father didn’t make any inquiries about the child. He is F-1.5 The father told us that he came to the Baby Home and made inquiries about the child. In the Baby Home we have a special journal where we register all visits made by relatives. We register the date, how long a person spent there, and what did s/he bring. However, while talking to a teacher, we found out that no relatives came to visit the child. Also the social pedagogue told me the same.

However, this turns out not to be true. A document supplied by the Baby Home indicated: ‘A few days later the father came. He was warned that if the parents continue to have an irresponsible attitude towards life and not to follow the rules of the Baby Home, then the administration of the Baby Home will remove the parental rights of the mother’. During my interview with Petr, the father, he indicated that he came to the Baby Home to claim his son but was refused: ER:

Maria told us that you went to see Vasiliy in the Baby Home. Did they tell you about the possibility of returning the child to you? Petr: They said, until you or Maria find a permanent job in a state organisation, until you have 2000 roubles a month as your salary, don’t even bother to come here. But why should I work for the state, if I can get up at 10 am, no hurry, have breakfast, jump with my neighbour into a car, and go to collect scrap metal to sell to the scrap metal yard. This summer I was making no less than 2000 a week. ER: Do you have a profession? Petr: I am a welder, a plumber, an auto-mechanic. I have been working since I was 15 years old. I was unofficially hired in an automechanic shop, from where I went to the army with the 3rd category of auto-mechanic. Then I studied to become an equipment repairman. Why should I wait a month for my salary, if I can make that much in three days? Maria: Sometimes we have lots of money, sometimes we have none. Grandmother: Lots of people live like this now. ER: So, they said unless you get permanent state employment, you would not see your child? 114

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Petr:

Yes, they asked, how are you going to feed your child? I told them that I have two small plots of land for growing vegetables, I can fish for halibut in the sea, and so on. She says, Vasiliy is allergic, he needs a special diet. I said, why do you care? If I am collecting him, it means that I have figured it out.

Hence besides the doctor in the Maternity Home and the Guardianship Department, the Baby Home director also participated in the distancing of the parents from Vasiliy. Some of this important information was reflected in documents supplied to the court, but which did not find their way into discourse, including a report by the Baby Home on the living conditions of the family that indicated the following: ‘Maria categorically refuses to write a letter of rejection of her son.’ The date of the document shows that the suggestion to reject her son was made by the Baby Home when the boy was only two months old. The circumstances of the child’s transfer to the Baby Home were still disputed. The judge now tried to find out more about Maria’s household, since one of the reasons why the baby was not allowed to join his family was the inadequate ‘living conditions’. The authorities’ and the family’s understanding of the ‘norm’ in these issues differs significantly: what the former considers to be unsuitable for the child rearing, the latter will insist on being normal: Judge: Maria: Judge: Maria: Judge: Maria:

What conditions are you living in? Normal conditions. What kind of housing do you have, how many rooms? Two rooms, a kitchen, and a corridor. Do you have heating? Cold and hot water? Yes. Well, no, the heating elements are hot, but I bring cold water from the river nearby. Judge: What is your income? Maria: My husband works. [Note here the expected sort of income.] Judge: What kind of income does your husband have? Is it stable? Monthly? Maria: In winters he works as a street sweeper or a dockworker. In summers he collects scrap metal with friends. Judge: What prevents you from finding a job?

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Maria:

There is no job for me. If there is a job as a cleaning lady in hospitals, I don’t have money for the medical exam. I need this money for food. Judge: Have you ever tried to come to the Guardianship Department and ask for help? Like to pay for your medical tests, so you can find a job? Maria: Do they help there? I didn’t know. Judge: You don’t know anything when it comes to your own and your children’s well being. They help, for your information.6 Do you have education? Maria: Seven classes. Judge: Couldn’t you find a job that doesn’t require a qualification? Maria: I can work only as a cleaning person. Judge: Did you go to the Unemployment Office? Maria: No, I don’t have time for that. Judge (sarcastically): Is that so? And what were you so busy with? Maria: I looked after my child, I bring water so I could do washing. I was stoking up my (wood) stove, cooking food, cleaning up my house. I couldn’t expect grandmother to come and do it for me, could I? Or you think it is so easy to live in a private house (without any modern amenities)? [Silence.] On one occasion Ekaterina portrays Maria as inadequate, but being amenable to improvement if she chooses to do so: GD:

During one of the home visits, one of the Guardianship Department staff members mentioned that Maria’s home is in an extremely poor state as far as hygiene is concerned. In such conditions, naturally, even if a mother wants to keep her child, it is impossible to allow her to collect her child and raise it there. It invariably means to … worsen the newborn’s health. These conditions however could be improved. We repeatedly talked to Maria. The last visit to her home was made by myself and the Head of the Guardianship Department. Inside the house the conditions were unsanitary, although if one is conscientious about the care of one’s housing and if one has a wish to have food and to somehow improve the nourishment of children … They have a hothouse, a small plot of land, and 116

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Judge: Maria:

Judge: Maria: Judge: Maria:

Judge:

Maria: Judge: Maria: Judge: Maria: Judge:

GD:

overall the house is suitable for the residence, it is not a shack. It’s just that inside it is dirty, filthy, and I don’t know how one can live there. Maria herself doesn’t see this filth. We show her the child’s crib and ask her, how can you? And she answers, ‘there is a pillow there!’ [the GD is speaking with indignation]. But this pillow stinks! It’s soiled with urine and faeces, even a dog wouldn’t sleep on such a pillow, and here a child is sleeping on it, and they feel that this is all right, it’s normal! They were snapping at our suggestion to somehow correct and change the existing conditions, and said that they feel their conditions are normal and we are just picking on them. In September of 1999, were your living conditions evaluated? Yes. The Guardianship Department came to the kitchen and told me that my conditions were not suitable and I should give up my son right away. Did the inspector go to the rooms? No, she just came to the kitchen and said the conditions are not suitable. When did they come? When I had just placed Vasiliy in the Baby Home and then about a week later. They also came in August to collect his birth certificate. Did you read what they wrote after the visit to your home? I’ll read it for you: dirty run down place, practically no furniture, the eldest child sleeps on the floor, younger child sleeps in a bed. No table, furniture is austere, no toilet or bath. I don’t agree with this. What did you have at home at that moment? First of all, my house is quite clean. And why do they say there was no fixing up done, I do it every year. So, are you saying that you have better conditions at home than described? Yes. My older son never sleeps on the floor. During the period of time the Guardianship Department had the files of both boys, did the Guardianship Department find out what she has as income? Yes, we made an inquiry. Her cohabitant helps her. But he himself doesn’t have a permanent job, only occasional temporary jobs, although his irregular income is not too bad, 117

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Judge:

GD:

if he used this money wisely. Earlier she was receiving child benefits. It may not be a large amount of aid, but they managed to get it and exist on it. They also have a plot of land for growing vegetables. When we were there, they had some fish, some greens, potatoes. So, they manage to have some food for themselves… But they don’t work! [She sounds condemning.] … And she has never worked! [Very condemning.] What is your opinion with regard to Maria’s evasion of care for her children, Volodya and Vasiliy? Is it due to her lack of financial means or is there another reason? My opinion is that Maria’s evasion of care for her children is due to her infantile attitude towards life, not because of her financial difficulties. She is quite satisfied with what she has, she doesn’t do much in order to improve her life, such as find a job in order to visit her children. She lives … as if she is going with the flow. If she has potatoes today, this is fine. If she doesn’t, this is fine too. She is a young, healthy woman. If she cared, if she would have done everything she could, she could have been raising all three children. She could have tidied up her home, she could have made not two, but more land allotments thus having more vegetables [so even working on the allotment is not good enough], because much of her land is neglected. No, I think it is entirely her indifference to the fate of her children, and the lack of ability and desire to work to her best potential and do something for her children.

The following is the GD’s conceptualization of what constitutes the state’s assistance to the family when it is perceived as having difficulties: it is taking the child away and caring for him separately, not helping the mother to care for her child in the home environment. This separation is not seen as a problem because what counts is not just the birth family but a good family: Judge:

GD:

Did the Guardianship Department offer any help to the mother, maybe help with finding a job, to improve her material situation? It is not the Guardianship Department’s responsibility to help the parents find jobs. But, in order to help Maria at the initial stage, so she could recover after giving birth, and find a job, for that purpose she was allowed to place her child in the Baby 118

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Home. So, there was no concrete, material help given to her by the Guardianship Department. In this case, help was expressed through the retaining of the child, feeding him, making him healthy, so the mother would have a chance to straighten up her own affairs. After the child completed the course of rehabilitation (in the Children’s Hospital), he was transferred to the Baby Home. For two or three months institutional placement of new-borns is quite acceptable for those parents, for single mother’s support, in order for them to adjust their lives, to get things going after the birth of their child. Maybe it is not a very normal practice, however, this is a practice that exists in our country. There is no reprimand against women who place their children in the Baby Home temporarily, for a few months, usually for no more than 6 months.7 In our difficult times, we feel that it is a normal thing to do in order to support a single mother. But in the case of Maria, the child has been residing in the Baby Home for over a year and the mother didn’t express any desire to collect the child. The issue of ‘home conditions’ is raised time and again: GD:

Maria: GD: Maria:

GD: Maria: Judge:

Maria, you are constantly telling us that you were not given your child back. But you have so many contradictions. First of all, you wrote a letter of request to place Vasiliy in the Baby Home because you didn’t have money. Then a visit was made to your house and the description was, well, we all heard it. Now you are telling us that you had everything! Why didn’t you collect your child in a few days then? Because I didn’t have enough for baby wraps. So you had everything but wraps. I said I had furniture, not like they wrote in the document. I also had food. I didn’t have money at home. I had everything but money. What can I do? I didn’t have my own milk, so I had to buy soya milk. And he is allergic to dairy milk. My husband told me that when he went to see Vasiliy in Baby Home. Do you know that milk is free? Soya milk is not free, only cow’s milk. Why did your husband go to the Baby Home? Why does he 119

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need your son, why don’t you need him? I can’t understand you! And I have to make a decision! Any more questions? A few minutes later, the GD asked the following question: GD:

You repeated a few times that you were told that Vasiliy will not be given back to you, and this is why you didn’t come to the Baby Home. But was it explained to you why he would not be given back to you? Maria: I was told that I have little furniture. GD: Just that, little furniture? Maria: Yes. GD: But what furniture? Maria: I was told that I have only one bed. I don’t agree with that. I have two big and two small beds. GD: When did you acquire a second small bed? Maria: I always had it. It was folded up. GD: Did you show it to the Guardianship Department and the Baby Home people? Maria: Yes. [Note the switch] GD: Do you drink at home? Maria: Sometimes in winter. GD: Does your husband drink often? Maria: No. GD: And you don’t have fights and scenes … Maria: We used to have earlier. GD: When? Maria: Maybe two years ago. Later, in the interview with me, the family added further: Petr (partner): Why did they say we don’t have furniture? We have a refrigerator, South Korean furniture; we bought kitchen furniture just recently. Yes, that’s true, we didn’t yet fix the place up … Grandmother: They have two beds. Maria: They said that we all sleep in one bed, and Volodya sleeps on the floor … 120

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Petr:

We have two rooms, two beds, it is warm at home, I shall buy wood for the stove. In winter, Klava runs there without underpants, that’s how hot it is …

Now the court hearing proceeds: GD: Maria: Judge: Maria: Judge: Maria: Judge:

Why do you think somebody would write a document like this? Maybe somebody wants my children? Which you left in the Baby Home? No, I didn’t leave him. I was advised to do that. Maria, why are you objecting to the removal of your parental rights in regards to Vasiliy? Because I want to bring him home. What you are saying is absurd! You have not seen your son for one single day, and you are saying you have an intention to collect him! It sounds like you are still in the seventh grade for the tenth time, and you are explaining to the class mistress that you are going to correct your bad grades. You are 25 already!

Volodya The second strand of the court hearings was in regard to the deprivation of parental rights of Maria for her older son, who lived with his grandmother. The Grandmother filed a court suit together with the GD in order to receive state financial assistance as a guardian. Maria gave birth to this boy when she was 18 and still living with her mother. For two years, Maria, her baby son Volodya, her mother and stepfather lived in the same household, raising the boy together. The judge’s questioning of the Grandmother reveals that after Maria moved in with Petr, her mother convinced her not to take the boy: Judge:

How long have you been raising your grandson Volodya? Grandmother: From his birth. When she started to live with her cohabitant, I told them, live your life, this child is not Petr’s son, and he is not going to bother us here, so you can live separately. Judge: How would Volodya bother them? Grandmother: Well, he is not his child, he is by another man … They have their own daughter now, he loves her … Judge: Was it your decision to keep Volodya? 121

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Grandmother: We decided together for Volodya to live with me, and they would live separately. Judge: Does Volodya miss his mom? Does he want to live in her family? Grandmother: We go and visit them, but mostly he is with us in our house. Judge: Does her cohabitant try to be friendly with the boy, play with him? Grandmother: Well, you understand … he is somebody else’s child … you are a woman yourself, you understand… somebody else’s child…He [Petr] sometimes plays with Volodya, disciplines him. I myself lived with my cohabitant for 18 years, we are not officially married. Volodya doesn’t want to sleep there. I sometimes take him there. Judge: Maybe it is because you substituted yourself for his mother. Grandmother: No, I never say anything bad about her. Judge: I am not implying that, I am saying that you spent more time with him, you became like a mother to him. Grandmother: We read together, and go to a library. I am constantly with him. I don’t imagine myself without Volodya, he is like my own son. And he is also attached to his grandfather, although he is not his blood grandfather, he takes him to and from the kindergarten. So do I. The Grandmother tries to avoid the issue of her initiatives in retaining the boy and for facilitating the detachment of her own daughter from her grandson, and instead explains how well she takes care of the boy. Note how here and below ‘blood’ relations play a significant role in the Grandmother’s explanation of attachment, or lack thereof, of men (stepgrandfather, stepfather and father Petr) to children and grandchildren, and in complete opposition to the official ‘environmentalist’ view. The Grandmother manipulates this fact to her advantage, i.e., her cohabitant, who is not related to her grandson, is able to provide love and care, while Petr, who is also not related to her grandson, cannot. It is also worth noting the degree to which the Grandmother was able to get involved in and manipulate Maria’s affairs in an authoritarian way. The judge asks the Grandmother whether or not her daughter Maria brings anything to the boy: 122

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Grandmother: She does not bring money, but she recently bought him a coat, a toy truck, and slippers. It was in the last four or five months. Before that she bought a beautiful car. When she has money, she brings him presents. The judge is asking if Maria’s and Petr’s two-year-old daughter has toys: Grandmother: Yes, she has lots of toys. She has everything, a separate space, and a bed. All the toys that are left from Volodya we give to Klava. Judge: What about her daughter? Does she care about her daughter? Grandmother: Yes, she loves her. She treats Volodya as if he is an alien (chuzhoi), but they [she and her partner] love Klava. Judge: When Maria was pregnant with Vasiliy, did she discuss family matters with you? Grandmother: No. With Volodya I told her, this is your first child, if you have an abortion, you might not be able to have any more children. Judge: So after Volodya arrived, you took all the care upon yourself? Grandmother: Well, for the first year after Volodya we lived together and I was helping her, and this is the fourth year she is living separately from me, and he is living with me. I thought, she needs to take care of her own life and not have Volodya be in her way, so he will live with me. We were visiting each other. It was all right. But then Klava was born. With Vasiliy I was forcing her to abort. When I returned to Magadan two years later, one GD staff member told me that later she learnt from the gossip that the Grandmother simply kicked her daughter Maria out while retaining the boy. She disapproved of her daughter’s boyfriend taking this family problem to the state to be sorted out. The Grandmother came to the GD frequently and informed them that Petr did not want the children and was a bad influence on her daughter. During the original court hearing, the Grandmother took care to portray the relationship between Maria and Volodya as inadequate, so that she could keep raising the boy. According to some documents, however, the relationship between Maria and her mother was not smooth. Written 123

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statements collected from the neighbours accused Maria of being a bad mother and stated that ‘Volodya’s mother collected her son from the grandmother by force and refused to return him’. Two other neighbours wrote that ‘whenever the mother comes there is always a scene. She collects the boy by force’. It was evident from the hearings that there was tension in the relationship between Maria and the Grandmother. These were family matters, some of which were briefly described in the documents and some of which were not. However, the court was not interested in examining the history of the family relationship in terms of cause and effect in any serious way. It dealt with the available fragmented ‘facts’ that became known. It could be argued that what this family needed was family therapy to work out the relationships between the family members, yet family counselling is not routinely accepted due to the newness of this profession and practice. During the first court hearing, the judge asked Maria the following question: Judge: Maria:

Why didn’t you participate in Volodya’s upbringing? Why didn’t I? I did, I lived there for two years and was raising him. Later, when I started to live separately, he didn’t want to live with my cohabitant because they didn’t get along very well. Judge (irritably): At what age may a child not wish? [Raises her voice] At two?! Who participated most in his upbringing, granny or you? Maria: Both granny and I equally, while I lived there. Judge: Then why isn’t the child living with you? Maria: He wants to be with her because she was always with him. Judge: What about you? Maria: I had to make money. Judge: So you worked then? Maria (hesitates): I worked illegally. Judge: What do you mean illegally? Maria: Private work.8 Judge: Private work … But you are the mother of this child. Grandmother is grandmother. How did it happen that the child is more attached to his grandmother than to you? Did you walk with him? Play with him? Maria: Yes. Judge: Did your cohabitant make any effort to win his friendship? Maria: He tried … until Klava came along. Judge (irritably): Until Klava came along … What happened when she came along? 124

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Maria: Judge: Maria: Judge: Maria:

She is his own blood, he feels closer to her. Volodya, is he attached to his grandmother? Yes. What about to you? He is attached to me, too.

In the concluding part of the court hearing there was an increasingly heated debate between the authorities (the GD and the judge), the Grandmother and Maria. Having lost patience with Maria’s stubbornness, the court threatens the Grandmother with taking away her grandson, forcing her to beg Maria to agree with everything the authorities say so that the boy will be left with her: Judge:

The Guardianship Department is removing parental rights from your daughter in order for you to receive state guardianship benefits. What do you think of this? Grandmother: My daughter agrees. I am raising him anyway. Judge: No, your daughter does not agree with it. She tries to prove to us … Grandmother: We come to her anyway, visit her. Maria (addressing the judge): Are you asking her [Grandmother] if she agrees to the removal of my parental rights so she will be the guardian? Judge: She is already the guardian. Maria: Temporarily. Judge: There is no such thing as temporary guardianship! Maria: She [Grandmother] doesn’t have the right to have guardianship over my son without my permission unless I am deprived of parental rights. GD: Look at her! She knows the laws better than I do! Maria: I saw a programme on TV about guardianship. GD: You have to watch TV less and look after your children more! Grandmother: She knows more about it than I do, it is just because he lives with us … let him live with us, where else can we put him? Judge: In a children’s home where your other grandson Vasiliy is! Grandmother (visibly terrified): No, no! I am not going to let him go! Judge (mockingly): And what are you going to do? You are not his legal guardian, as your daughter Maria implies! Your 125

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youngest will be in the Baby Home, and the oldest will be sent to an internat! Grandmother: No, you can’t do that … He cried for two weeks when he was in the hospital, and you want to take him away from me … Judge: Why not, what can you do about it, nothing! Nothing! GD (calmly): It is good over there [in the Children’s Home], children are clothed and they have shoes. Grandmother: What are you talking about? Maria, please agree with this! GD: What do you mean, agree? Then she’ll tell everyone that we were threatening her! She always turns everything upside down! The last few sentences were spoken together. The judge was shrieking that the Grandmother couldn’t do anything about it if they decided to take Volodya away. The Grandmother was in tears, saying that she would not let the boy go. The GD was mockingly saying: ‘If you have such a wonderful daughter, who as she says, helps and provides everything for the boy, why are you depriving her of parental rights?’ Finally Maria buckles: Maria: GD: Judge:

I agree with her being the guardian … Why do we need your consent, if she is already the guardian? You are a healthy mother, who should bring up her own child, if you gave him life! Maria: But what if he doesn’t want to live with me? GD: Then you are a bad mother and you have to be deprived of parental rights! Why in the world did you have children? It is only cockroaches that multiply and reproduce, people think before they have children! Grandmother: I am not going to give him to anybody, even if they will try to take him away by force … Judge (continues): It is only in internats for the mentally ill that they only follow their instincts, they have instincts, not intellect. And you are a normal woman, at least you are supposed to be. And we have been sitting here since 11 am today playing games, asking why a healthy woman doesn’t want to raise her children? Because she has a difficult financial situation, because she doesn’t work and doesn’t want to work, but watches TV! [Pause] Any more questions? 126

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GD:

Yes [asking the Grandmother]. What do you think about removing the parental rights of your daughter with regard to Volodya, who doesn’t live with her, and Vasiliy, who is under the state provision? Grandmother: I agree with regard to Volodya, remove her parental rights, and let him be with me. When it comes to Vasiliy, if my husband finds a job … GD (interrupts): No, we don’t need that! If she is not deprived of parental rights, nobody will give Volodya to you. One is connected to the other! And we don’t need her consent! Judge: Are there any more questions? Let’s stop influencing the defendant! Grandmother: I agree with the removal of parental rights with regard to Volodya, please let the boy live with me! Maybe I will adopt him. Judge: Does the defendant agree with the witness? Maria: Yes, I agree. Judge: Thank you for coming to the Court. You are free to go now. The court has decided to require the Guardianship Department to conduct another home visit to evaluate the living conditions of Maria. The final request by the Guardianship Department conveyed the following: GD:

The representative of the Baby Home has shown that the mother of the child is not interested in her son Vasiliy. His health is apparently good, and if a different legal status was established for him, a normal family could be found, and there is the probability that he could end up in good hands. However, it is premature to talk about it, because until the legal status of the child is established, that of a child without parental care, he will continue to belong to neither his parents nor the state. In order to help Volodya, whose guardian is his grandmother, a pensioner without means of supporting the child, the mother, Maria must be deprived of parental rights, and then the Guardianship Department will be able to help Volodya financially. Thus, in the best interests of the children, to help them now and provide protection to them in the future, the Guardianship Department is asking to finalise this 127

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case today and remove parental rights of Maria in regard to her sons Vasiliy and Volodya. Based on the agreement of the GD, the guardian, and the Prokuror, the judge removed Maria’s parental rights according to article 69 of the Family Code. The legal basis for the removal was the fact that the authorities established that Maria ‘evades her responsibility for bringing up her children, and that she, without a sufficient reason, refuses to collect her child from the Baby Home’, corresponding to that stipulated in article 69: reasons for deprivation of parental rights. Volodya would now have his grandmother as a legal guardian, allowing her to receive financial help from the state. Vasiliy was subsequently adopted abroad. His health was reportedly good, with no allergies. In these court hearings we have come across some issues that we have encountered before, such as the sharing of childcare among an extended family, unresolved family tensions, marginalization of the father, and recourse to state childcare by both parents and the authorities. Yet if the Grandmother, as in Natalia’s case, was able to use (and manipulate) the state assistance to her own advantage, Maria failed to do so. However, new issues also emerged. The importance of ‘home conditions’ assume a prominent role, justifying the authorities’ decision to retain Vasiliy in the Baby Home (i.e., invoking social ties to provide childcare) and revealing the authorities’ environmental view on child development. Two points merit attention here. Firstly, the emerging importance that both the Grandmother and Maria attributed to the idea of ‘blood ties’, the foundation of true attachment and love. None of the state representatives entered into a discussion related to this topic, in contrast with the hotly debated issues of the sufficiency of ‘home conditions’ or particulars of employment. The ‘blood ties’ model will again be evoked by other state employees in different circumstances, making it a parallel and often contradictory existence of two models. Secondly, notice the role reversal between the Grandmother and Maria, and the court’s role in finalizing this in legal terms. The sharing of childcare between extended family members is widely practised in Russia, yet the mother is considered to be the main carer, with grandparents and the state constituting additional, albeit often substantial, resources. Here the Grandmother became the main carer, with Maria playing a grandmother’s role of an additional provider. Although grandmothers taking over their motherly responsibilities from their daughters is a widespread phenomenon, usually they do not deprive their daughters of parental rights and the child still ‘belongs’ to the mother.9 So, there exists an unspoken boundary which neither party oversteps. The Grandmother’s court 128

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suit against Maria only contributed to the court’s view of Maria as a poor parent, although the Grandmother’s motivation seems to be to serve her own needs to keep the boy and have the state support her. As far as the state’s choice is concerned, economic rationale is not applicable here: both guardians and parents were underpaid for months on end during the 1990s, so the court chose not a cheaper but a better parent for the child. The Grandmother not only takes over Maria but brushes the father out; for her he does not exist, creating a family without a father, which exists entirely as Grandmother’s progeny.

Deprivation of Voice and Disempowerment of the Parent The participating actors formed two sides; Maria and the rest, the state representatives (the judge, the GD and the Baby Home, with the Maternity Home and the Children’s Home implied) and the Grandmother, engaged in a power battle over the control of the children. The state agents spoke the language and concepts of the law and legal court procedures, which they all understood as they understood each other. They also spoke the language that reflected cultural values, which we shall examine in the next chapter. ‘Neglecting parental duties’, ‘immoral lifestyle’, ‘alcohol abuse’: all are examples of this type of language. Throughout the hearings, the judge and other state representatives were well disposed to one another – the judge never interrupted them and, despite many inconsistencies in their testimonies, she did not question them with the same degree of impatience she expressed when questioning Maria. Like relay race runners passing the baton to each other, they carried forward each other’s line of questioning to what seemed to be a predetermined end, in the process being indignant at the same faults in Maria’s character and behaviour, while equally finding the same things incomprehensible. With striking congruity, they spoke with one voice. But there was nothing harmonized between their shared discourse and that of Maria; on the contrary they are in an oppositional relationship to each other, they did not mix. Employing Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia is helpful here for it reflects the diversity of social experience, conceptualizations and values (Morson and Emerson 1990: 140). Heteroglossia appears in characters’ dialogues and in the utterances through which the power asymmetry plays itself out. The court and Maria often talked right past each other as if speaking different languages, a phenomenon increasingly present in post-Soviet society, where 129

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income polarization and social division have created two Russias, counterposed and drifting further apart in their behaviour, preferences and orientations (Rimashevskaya, in Murav’eva 2002). Their ‘social languages’, i.e., languages of a profession or class, reflected not only differences in their economic and social positions, but their positions within Bourdieu’s ‘field’, which are tied to the relationship of domination and symbolic power. I am reminded of a short but devastating story where the conviction of a man was made possible during a trial when a judge and an uneducated peasant, both speaking French, were presumed to speak the same language, thanks to ‘the myth, which is always used abundantly by all official institutions: the transparency and universality of language’ (Barthes 1973: 44). Barthes insists that the disparity of both languages, that of an educated judge and an uneducated farmer, and their impenetrability to each other produced ‘two particular uses of language that confront each other. [But] one of them has honours, law and force on its side’ (ibid.). In sharing a common conceptual basis of their indignation, the court members shared an ideological (as in the ideology of child welfare) basis of their dissatisfaction with Maria. Apart from the Family Code requirements for a ‘correct execution’ of parental duty, the state representatives’ understanding of how a mother should relate to her baby seemed to be common sense: a child should be fed, clean and loved; after all, who wants to see children growing up hungry, dirty, sick and neglected? Their collective indignation towards Maria indicated that they treated their view on what constitutes good mothering to be normal. Common sense is of course not value-free. As Norman Fairclough maintained: Institutional practices which people draw upon without thinking often embody assumptions which directly or indirectly legitimize existing power relations. Practices which appear to be universal and commonsensical can often be shown to originate in the dominant class or the dominant bloc, and to have become naturalized. Where types of practice, and in many cases types of discourse, function in this way to sustain unequal power relations, I shall say they are functioning ideologically. Ideological power, the power to project one’s practices as universal and ‘common sense’, is a significant complement to economic and political power, and of particular significance here because it is exercise in discourse (2001: 27, original emphasis). In other words, for Fairclough, assumptions are ideologies which are linked to power and to language, since language (often) rests upon common sense 130

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assumptions that can be ideologically shaped by relations of power (ibid.: 3). In his analysis of symbolic power, Bourdieu (1991) examines symbolic domination seen in linguistic exchanges, lending us a helpful tool in trying to understand why one voice carries more weight, and is able to perform symbolic imposition, than another. He maintains that ‘the weight of different agents depends on their symbolic capital, i.e. on the recognition … that they receive from a group’ (ibid.: 72), and this recognition is the basis of their authority. Moreover, since performative utterances do not exist independently of the institution which gives it its raison d’être, it is not possible to separate the act of speech from its condition of execution. Morris, paraphrasing Bakhtin, states: The authoritative word demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own; it binds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally. It enters our verbal consciousness as a compact and indivisible mass; one must either totally affirm it, or totally reject it. It is indissolubly fused with its authority – with political power, an institution, a person – and it stands and falls together with that authority (Morris, P 1994: 78–79). In Maria’s case, the institution in question is the state and, following Bourdieu, the power of (the court’s) words resided not within words themselves, but in a delegated power that this institution vested in the state representatives, with language representing and symbolizing this authority. Thus, although Maria spoke with the ‘state representatives’ as concrete individuals, in them she dealt with the authority of the powerful institution of the ‘state’. Clearly Maria was defeated, but not without resistance on her part. The ability to dominate, wrote Philibert, ‘derives in part from imposing one’s construction of reality as the natural order of things’ (cited in Morrow and Hensel 1992: 38). But if the common sense assumptions were taken for granted, the attempt to impose what seemed to be mainstream values underpinning these assumptions was faced with quiet and steady, although futile, resistance on Maria’s side. Maria refused to subscribe to the state representative’s view on her and her family as something deviant from the mainstream, to be positioned in ‘a determinate place in the order of discourse and the social order’ of the court work (Fairclough 2001: 25). This place was that of a neblagopoluchnaya family and an uncaring mother, which was how Ekaterina described Maria’s family in the very first minutes of the first hearing. ‘The institution of an identity is the imposition of a 131

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name, i.e. of social essence’, wrote Bourdieu, ‘To institute, to assign an essence … is to signify to someone what he is and how he should conduct himself as a consequence’ (1991: 120). Echoing this insight, Fairclough states that social practices do not merely reflect reality but create it (2001: 31). The category of neblagopoluchnaya family was (and still is) being recreated on a continual basis every time it is invoked as a descriptive tool. However, ‘the essence assigned through naming is, literally, a fatum … because they enclose those whom they characterise within the limits that are assigned to them and that they are made to recognise’ (Bourdieu 1991: 122). Much of what Maria had said was seen through the lens of the essence of the neblagopoluchnaya family which cannot possibly be right in its behaviour and reasoning. The discourse originated by those categorized as neblagopoluchnaya, and the category itself, are mutually self-reinforcing. Power asymmetry made the subversion of dialogue between the court and Maria possible, in Bakhtin’s sense, imposing his ‘official monologism’. We saw how selective listening and acknowledgement of Maria’s utterances, specifically when she spoke of the participation of the third party in first separating and then keeping her away from her son, had effectively silenced the issue, making the third party invisible while the parents’ and particularly the mother’s faults and inadequacies were constructed to show their sole responsibility for the child’s placement and continuous residence in the Baby Home. The same happened when the judge, while acknowledging the fact that the oldest son of Maria was retained by the Grandmother on her own initiative, and was raised by the Grandmother regardless of Maria’s attempts to get the boy back, downplayed this knowledge, making it sterile and ineffective. Some crucial pieces of information, although available to the court, never made it into discussions, such as the fact that the father of the baby came to the Baby Home and was told to adhere strictly to the administration’s view of what kind of job the parents are supposed to have in order to get their child back. Instead, the picture of inadequacy was crafted from piecemeal and not quite accurate information, and was made pointedly visible to paint a picture of bad parenting, such as the parent’s alcohol abuse, their lack of interest in the children and tension in the relationship between the family members, which were used to Maria’s disadvantage. Maria, as with many women like her, fell into a legal trap: to provide the legal basis for a custody transfer, mothers must write a ‘request’ for placement even if events leading to her decision had a coercive element to it. But it will be repeated many times that Maria placed the child on her own request, the statement which is at the same time true (she indeed wrote the request) and untrue (the initiative to do so was not hers). 132

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Thus, many women appear to want to reject their children. Returning to Bakhtin’s concept of the dialogue, the authoritative discourse, which accused Maria of moral inadequacy, is marked with finalizability. This is where the authorities subvert the possible dialogue between Maria and her children in a second wider sense, in which it is the whole of life: The dialogic nature of human life itself [sic]. The single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human life is the open-ended dialogue. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds. He invests his entire self in discourse, and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life (Morson and Emerson 1990: 293). For Bakhtin, only dialogue reveals potentials (ibid.: 55). By assuming the authoritative discourse, the authorities turned the possible dialogue into a monologue. We saw how the judge, by sidestepping her statements, tried very hard not to enter into a dialogue with the defendant. It appears that the court was not interested in establishing a negotiated kind of truth, for it already had a ‘readymade truth’ (ibid.: 60). There is no scope here for the idea that ‘truth is not born, nor it is to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of dialogic interaction’ (ibid.: 110). Following Bakhtin’s insight, we can see that by monologizing a dialogue and turning it into an authoritative moral discourse, and by suppressing Maria’s voice and not providing her with a lawyer who could represent her view in the court hearing, the outcome for Maria was perhaps predetermined, finalizing the dialogic nature of the relationship between Maria and her child. The relationship between the mother and child ought to remain unfinalized for the rest of their lives. Yet we see how the potential for development of the relationship between the parents and their baby, what Bakhtin called ‘unfinalizability’, was not allowed to develop. There are two kinds of relationships in which the questions of finalization matters: the mother’s relationship with the court and her relationship with her child. Quite brutally, the court, in an undialogic (pseudo-dialogue according to Bakhtin) way, finalizes its relationship with the mother and her relationship with her child. It finalizes everything, not just a case, but everybody’s lives. This deprivation of voice represented the disempowerment of the parents. Here it is negation of her agency: Maria tried to assert it but they crushed it. 133

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Notes 1. 2.

3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

The list of documents supplied to the court by the GD and the Baby Home can be found in Appendix 1. Financial assistance to the family, such as child benefits or guardianship allowance, was often not paid for months on end due to a lack of money in the city budget. The Grandmother could not receive Maria’s allowance because it was paid only to mothers; however, the fact that Maria claimed child benefits when Volodya lived with his grandmother indicated to the GD that Maria was interested only in money that her son might bring (child benefits). One may find a contradiction in the authorities condemning Maria for not providing financial support to Volodya while at the same time condemning her for wanting to get the child benefits, which might have been used to provide such support. Later we shall see that when Petr came to the Baby Home to exercise his parental ‘rights’ and collect the child, he was refused (paternity derives not from a biological fact but from a registered marriage or a joint petition). Note that the judge asks for more detailed information about the family, while the Baby Home representative not so much answers these questions as restates the opinion that Maria’s family is unsuitable. Meaning that his name was recorded in the baby’s birth certificate as indicated by the mother of the baby (i.e., not supported by any documentary evidence). The GD doesn’t provide this type of help. The Judge is mistaken. This contradicts the view of the Baby Home, which suggested that Maria should reject her son when he was two months old. Until 2000, when a new 13 per cent tax was introduced, a person who wished to become self-employed had to register as a private business. However, the taxes were so high that many either did not register, thus working illegally, or had to produce a double accountancy to lessen the tax. Maria worked as a cleaner, unregistered, thus breaking the law. Being already under prosecution, she did not readily disclose the fact. Yet deprivation of parental rights by older women of younger mothers to establish guardianship over their children (sometimes with subsequent adoption) is far from atypical. The mothers of course had to be neblagopololuchniye and invariably in a difficult financial situation with no place of their own to live and raise the child. Some have been to prison, which by default constituted an additional black mark. The children were either related to these older women or in no relationship at all. The latter is the case which I observed quite closely where a former institutional resident, while being pregnant, came to a church to ask for food. One of the parishioners took care of her and became the godmother to the newborn baby. However, as this godmother told me, this young woman was essentially a bad mother, and after a few attempts to help her to straighten up her life, the godmother, who was in constant communication with the GD, terminated her parental rights. 134

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The ‘Best Interests of the Child’: Moral Judgement of the Parent Conditions The authorities maintain that it is in the best interests of the child to live in a family that is able to provide suitable ‘social-living conditions of upbringing’. The court hearing allows us to identify the major requirements of the state, these being the stipulations under which the state will return the child back to the parents. Underlying these requirements are the safety and wellbeing of the child. The ubiquitous use of the concept of ‘conditions’ by most state agencies and the importance assigned to it implies the crucial role of the environment in which the child grows up. Children need adults to create this environment because interaction with adults is seen as a prerequisite for normal child development and because of their financial dependence on adults (Rybinskiy 1997, Rimashevskaya 1999). Therefore, it is not merely a case of any adult raising them, but an adult who can form the child’s correct and positive personality consciously and purposefully. These ‘conditions’ contain two components, which are seen as indispensable and interrelated. First, there are the value-oriented conditions or moral aspects of the life of the family, i.e., secure, loving environment, with caring, working parents. Secondly, there are the material conditions, such as adequately furnished living quarters, clothes, food, cleanliness and orderliness. Children must be protected from material deprivation, and parents must subscribe to a specific set of values corresponding to a positive image of parents who are judged as being able to provide a suitable environment. As the expected ‘norm’ is outlined, so inevitably is a deviance 135

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zone, expressed as a non-correspondence to this ‘norm’. Natalia and Maria’s cases are representative of neblagopoluchniye families who, due to their inadequacy, cannot provide suitable conditions, resulting in a poor home environment and child neglect. In the absence of ‘good’ home conditions, children are transferred to ‘children’s homes, adoptive or guardian families viewed as more capable of creating suitable conditions for their normal upbringing and education’ (Rybinskiy 1997). Ekaterina from the Guardianship Department (GD), although speaking for herself, expressed similar views: ‘The family is better for a child than an institution, but only a good family. If I were to prioritise placements, I would first put a good family, then an institution, and only then a neblagopoluchnaya family.’ How do the authorities evaluate these conditions to make their decision about leaving the child in the family or taking him or her away?

Creation of Artefacts In the case of Maria, the court hearings, the number of inaccuracies, errors and the plain lack of information regarding her alleged behaviour (such as alcohol abuse, fights and scenes), along with ensuing assumptions based on opinions of neighbours, indicate that the authorities and administration were not that familiar with Maria’s lifestyle. They recorded what they saw briefly based on four home visits to review the living conditions and their talks with Maria. For these inspectors, things become known only when they are visible. Parents must prove that they are good parents by demonstrating signs and evidence of being such, even if only in a snapshot. The main actor, the mother, must demonstrate her maternal love through the creation of artefacts and atmosphere, producing simultaneously, on multiple levels, the required signifiers: material sufficiency signals income and employment; cleanliness and orderliness mean that the mother understands the importance of these virtues for the parents and the child; and a separate space allocated to the child means that the child was expected and desired. Similarly, the performance of love during the mother’s visit to an institution signifies her conscious desire to raise the child. These signifiers are ticked and recorded, and unless something else arouses the suspicion of the authorities, and may be sufficient to release the child back to the mother; this likens the post-Soviet setting to the ‘audit culture’ (Strathern 2000) characteristic of the Western post-modern state, except it is applicable only to the family, and not to the state’s actions. The following is how a junior staff member of the GD had been taught to evaluate the living conditions: 136

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If everything is all right there, if it is clean, if everything is prepared for the baby, then tell the father to come to the Guardianship Department to obtain our permission to take his baby from the Baby Home. But if you see what we have seen last time, then tell him: ‘Sorry, my dear, you don’t deserve to be a father’. This approach may well be called by an old Soviet term, formal’niy podkhod, that is, being correct in form (outward compliance with the state’s demands), but not necessarily in content (do orderliness and cleanliness ensure good parenting?). If one can appear to be blagopoluchniy, one can get away with all sorts of things. A prominent philologist and writer Lidia Ginzburg wrote back in the 1940s with regards to acts (deeds) and motives: ‘In the beginning [of the life of the Soviet state], the state did not care about motives; it demanded certain behaviour…What earlier was called “a good deed”, a private moral act that was kept to oneself, that was valuable precisely because it was kept to oneself and done as a private moral act, this action was not only not counted, but was even not allowed. The kollektiv needs, not such private acts, but exemplary “good deeds” that could be proclaimed and publicised… There was a precise inventory of these “good deeds” to report to the higher authorities, to be published as articles in newspapers, and for rewards’ (1992:180–181). According to the GD, Maria’s family did not meet any of the requirements. The court started with one set of accusations: poor living conditions, indifference towards her children and poor performance of love. Maria disputed some of the accusations, stating that her material conditions were better than indicated, that she was advised to place the baby in the Baby Home and was not given the baby back when she was ready to bring him home. As the authorities’ accusations were counteracted by Maria’s attempts to refute them, they employed another line of reasoning: it was now stressed that the family lacked permanent employment, abused alcohol, had fights and scenes at home, and lived in a common law marriage. All these facts were characterized as a failure, a lack, and they were based on a negative characterization, drawing on a set of values: the economic and moral value of work and of having a permanent job with a guaranteed income; of being in a registered marriage rather than in a common law marriage; of material sufficiency with living comfortably in a clean, orderly, adequately furnished flat; of good education; and of being a hard-working, self-reliant, conscientious and purposeful individual. The acceptable family ‘conditions’ were therefore underpinned by value judgements of the parents’ lifestyle. Here, moral qualities were expressed 137

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through the outward form of material sufficiency, which was assumed to ensure the psychological and emotional wellbeing of a child. The two concepts, performance of love and ‘conditions’, serve as a resource to the state: proving the lack of either or both would automatically point at a mother’s inadequacy. Some were more vulnerable than others. Being young, unmarried, unemployed and/or poorly educated contributed to the state agents’ suspicion that such a mother lacks the vital qualities and resources to ensure the wellbeing of her child. With the stress placed on one’s will and ability to overcome, there is little tolerance for mothers who cannot make it on their own. So, Maria was insufficient all-round, as a woman and a citizen, the judgement possibly stemming from competitive womanhood between moral state agents and immoral Maria. She is a failed housekeeper and entrepreneur; an individual with an infantile attitude towards life, wrong lifestyle and behaviour, poor home, and a lack of motivation to move onwards and upwards, all signs of the inversion of the values of her judges. She failed in her actions. But important as these combined moral/material considerations have been, the source of Maria’s failure laid elsewhere: it was her failure of (attributed) essence that finalized the case. A failure of action was readily interpreted as an index of a failure of essence: a mother whose lack of performance results in child neglect is judged to lack a vital maternal quality. So, what the state agents seemed to condemn Maria for was the act of anti-motherhood,1 which is to let her child out of her hands. By agreeing to the separation in the first place, she failed the main test for mothers, the test for the presence of what was expressed through the local diffused idiom of ‘maternal instinct’, seen as an inherent trait and not a learnt skill. Maternal duty is viewed as the immutable biological nature and destiny of any ‘normal’ woman (Attwood 1985, Pilkington 1996). If it were present, her maternal instinct should have guided her through any difficulties to ensure that her children stayed with their mother. But if it is absent, then the child is in danger. As such, a seemingly innocent offer of an institutional placement is not just a state assistance, but also a precaution (if not suspicion) with a covert test written into it. Once the initial act had occurred, regardless of whether it was the doctors who suggested it or whether she did it out of love, it is very difficult to get out of it; she now had to demonstrate through her action of compliance (with the authorities and their demands) that her maternal instinct was there. The other trials to which she was subjected were a further ‘testing’, which she consistently failed through her inability (apathy or passivity) to overcome her problems, such as being 138

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employed, fixing up her house and visit Vasiliy, all within the stipulated timeframe.2 This was seen as further proof of the absence of her maternal instinct. This is why Klava was in less danger, because Maria had not voluntarily given her up; the original act of anti-motherhood had not happened. Hence, in this interplay between the ideas of failure of essence and failure of action, it would take a conspicuous action to correct a suspicion about a mother’s essence, while failure of action might readily indicate failure of essence. The Grandmother, although of limited means and in a civil marriage but appearing as mature, hard-working, with suitable conditions and in rapport with the GD, passed the ‘mothering’ test. This test is a recognition of biological ties within a family that is seen as a bloodbound unit, with emphasis placed on a mother-child bond that is deemed natural. Social ties (the care of children by non-related adults, including in institutional settings) acquire prominence only when the supposedly primordial biological connection fails. However, the state does not help the family maintain these biological ties. They are either there or they are not. Hence moving the child from ‘such a family’ is not seen as breaking a tie between mother and child; the tie was not there in the first place.

Middle-class Values As already mentioned, the judgements regarding Maria’s maternal essence seen through the lens of interdigitated morality and materiality are underpinned by a particular view on how the family must be. It evokes an ideal of the family with married parents living together, with the father in guaranteed employment and an employed mother, with a strong interest in their children’s welfare and education, and an emphasis on high moral standards, especially in sexual matters, valuing economic success and personal responsibility. This family ideal corresponds to what in other societies may be called middle class, bourgeois and Protestant (Berger 1983, 1996, Rollins 1972: 33). Vera Dunham (1976) demonstrated the shift that Soviet values have undergone during Stalinist times, converting from Bolshevik virtues of selflessness, devotion to the party and asceticism to the achievement of social status via upward social mobility, attainable through education, to material values that include consumer goods, comfortable living, luxury and leisure time. She maintains that a ‘Big Deal’ was struck, an alliance between the political regime and the middle class, which she called meshchanstvo, for the achievement of each one’s goals: the former needed support and contented citizens, while the latter sought material incentives 139

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for good work and a possibility to pursue self-interests. Both were interested in stabilization, normalization, material progress, affluence and social mobility. At the end, the entire system underwent embourgeoisement: A rich family life began to be praised. There was, though, one thing where no limits were imposed, and it was work. Someone resembling a middle-class careerist appeared in the form of a vigorous manager, progressed in his career, was content in his family life, aspired to a private house, and drove his private car (ibid. :19). Some values developed at that time continued throughout the Soviet era and into the present – but mostly in older generations. Thus, kul’turnost’, or ‘cultured behaviour’, a code of proper public conduct, took its place in the system of values (see Volkov 1996). Dunham’s kul’turnost’ is a ‘fetish notion of how to be individually civilised’, which at first denoted personal hygiene and abstinence from spitting and cursing. One example of such ‘civilising’ process was the movement of obschestvennitsy and specifically the movement of wives of managers and engineers. In the 1930s, they conducted socially useful work, focusing their activities on children’s facilities, improving stores and communal dining, cleaning up living quarters and liquidating illiteracy (Schrand 1999). In particular, cleanliness and a level of hygiene was linked with a cultural level, which in turn was treated as necessary to sustain the labour force and Soviet society in general, to provide ‘industrial workers and managers with the fundamental necessities of modern industrial life, such as adequate supplies of food and clothing, warm and hygienic living quarters, basic healthcare and child care facilities’ (ibid.: 5–6). Seen as more advanced due to the social status of their husbands, obshchestvennitsy were charged with promoting ‘cultured behaviour’ among working-class women: ‘As well as being upholders of cleanliness, order and neatness,3 wives were supposed to be moral guides and promoters of decent values’ (Buckley 1996: 573). This civilizing role of women became one of her responsibilities in a household gender division in the time of mature socialism. Maria had notably failed that as well. Dunham argues that under Stalinism, kul’turnost’, admonitory and educative, became a familial and feminine affair. It had grown out of its mores and in turn began to shape them in accordance with the regime’s predilection for meshchanstvo, helping ‘to bestow on material possessions attributes of dignity and of virtue’ (Dunham 1976: 23). Dunham used meshchanstvo4 as a metaphor for a middle class, which for her, as for most scholars writing on the issue of class in socialist 140

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societies, is ambiguous: ‘It [meshchanstvo] can also be applied to an attachment of specific values, to a way of life which partly cross-cuts differences of position, of occupation and of income and which is, therefore, somewhat amorphous and difficult to anchor in any one sharply defined social group. Symbolically, … it expresses embourgeoisement of Soviet manners, values, and attitudes’ (1976: 4). Whether classes existed in a rhetorically classless society is a moot point – certainly not in a Marxian sense. If defined as ‘a social group with a similar socio-economic status whose members share certain attributes or interests’ (Sirk 2007: 100–01), a way of life and behaviour (ibid.), in Soviet society, some 43 per cent of the population reported themselves as belonging to a middle class (Shlapentokh 1999: 1171). Shlapentokh describes the similarities in the level of comfort and social benefits afforded by most of this ‘middle class’. Included here are a type of housing, car ownership, small private plots of land, similar holidays, leisure time, reading the same periodicals, free medical services and free education. In the Soviet context, social stratification did not necessarily entail economic stratification, due to upward and downward mobility between different social strata of ruling nomenclatura,5 intelligentsia and mass intelligentsia, white and blue collar workers, and collective or Soviet farmers. Some consider that a heterogeneous class of mass intelligentsia, together with a large chunk of the blue collar working class and peasantry, constituted a massive middle class (Shlapentokh 1999, Rywkin 1989, Fitzpatrick 1988a, 1988b, Zukin 1978). The living standards of most Soviet intelligentsia6 did not significantly differ from workers and collective farmers, while the income of certain privileged worker categories and wealthy collective farmers considerably exceeded that of ordinary intellectuals (Sirk 2007). What is important for our discussion is that social mobility and admixture, as well as the ability to maintain a certain standard of living, including income coming from engaging in entrepreneurial activities in the unofficial ‘second economy’, was accessible to a large proportion of the population, helping to homogenize expectations of what is achievable by an ordinary individual. Besides the requirements for a particular level of material wellbeing and kul’turnost’ as far as cleanliness, orderliness and neatness are concerned, a high value is placed on work, on being hard-working, self-reliant and a thrifty individual, all Protestant virtues that were part and parcel of the Soviet family ideal. Here, a chain of cultural influences takes us from Hegel’s philosophy, which in many ways was a secularized form of Protestantism, to Marx’s philosophy of history inspired by Hegel (Halfin 141

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2000: 69), to the strong impact of Calvinism on work ethics during early Soviet industrialization,7 carried out in part by the intelligentsia, including Lenin, who adopted value codes borrowed in part from industrial European culture (Luke 1983). As Keane maintained, ‘[d]espite its wellearned reputation for social authoritarianism, Calvinism implicitly linked social change to self-transformation, and this in turn to self-consciousness’, inspiring dreams of dramatic transformation of manners, morals and social order, while ultimately throwing humans back on their own resources (2007: 57–58). Halfin (2003) considers that it was possibly the introduction of this peculiar, post-Reformation form of secularized Christianity that made the Bolshevik Party so effective, as previously the Tsar’s largely passive servants, the Soviet subjects, were compelled by the new regime to become masters of their own destiny, particularly through selftransformation in the project of producing a ‘new Soviet man’. Thus, Maria, an individual with an unbecoming status of a ‘simple’ person, with no education, material wealth and a lack of desire to move ‘onward and upward’ towards a better life, constituted deviance from the core middle-class values of those who judged her.8 Some of these values existed in the Family Code of 1969 and interpretative literature, the latter still in use in post-Soviet Magadan, where parents could be deprived of parental rights for an ‘immoral, anti-societal’ lifestyle, which negatively influenced their children. The categories of ‘immoral’ and ‘anti-societal’ (anti-obshchestvennoye) lifestyle were assigned many meanings: ‘alcohol abuse, fights and exposure of children to the intimate aspects of life’ (Metodicheskie rekomendatsii 1991), ‘the absence of permanent work and leading a parasitic life style, use of foul language, having in one’s house men and women who have lost their human appearance [!], and making children into witnesses of one’s intimate co-habitation with their bottle mates’ (Dzugaeva, Kuznetsova and Larionov 1989: 149). Some examples of anti-societal behaviour were as vague as contempt towards the rules of socialist obshchezhitie (communal living) and values of society, spekulyatsia (reselling goods for individual profit), which taught children that the main thing in life was money, thus ‘maiming children spiritually’ (ibid.). Parents were deprived of parental rights and their children sent to children’s homes for religious beliefs, as described by Kim Moskovskiy in his memoirs. In the new Code of 1996, such normative value terms were abandoned, eliminating the reason for deprivation of parental rights on moral grounds, though it added refusal to collect a child from institutions. However, reports on the living conditions of Maria written by the Baby Home inspector in 142

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2000 still read, ‘The mother does not work, leads an immoral lifestyle, and abuses alcohol’. The correspondence between official Soviet moral judgements and the implicit use of similar moral judgements in post-Soviet times is quite remarkable. It appears that these values continue to exist in the minds of people, governing their judgements, perception of the family and ultimately their decision making.

The Child’s Biological Family: The Severance of Ties and ‘Symbolic Death’ of Parents Binary Division and Treatment of Deviants The state employees on one side and the likes of Maria on another represent two communities: the moral and the deviant that came to a stand-off during or even before the court hearings. Maria’s problems became known, she was expected to solve them and, during this liminal period, when she was neither viewed as neblagopoluchnaya nor confirmed herself as blagopoluchnaya, she was admonished to take steps necessary to bring up the standards of her living to an expected ‘norm’. When she failed, her parental rights were terminated, expelling her from a moral parental community. Durkheim treated deviance as universal and functional (Heiner 2008), playing a variety of roles, one of which is for the community to establish its moral boundaries and therefore its identity (ibid.), as ‘casting out of evil onto you not only renders you my enemy; it also accomplishes my own innocence. [I]n manufacturing an evil one against whom to battle heroically, I fabricate a good one, myself’ (Aho 1994, cited in Argounova 2001). For political purposes, deviance is created by legal order and the social hegemony, and is there to serve the needs of the powerful; when required, it can be produced almost as an industrial commodity (Oplinger 1990). Maintaining a distinction between ‘norm’ and ‘deviance’ is to maintain a distance between ‘us’, the moral community, and ‘them’, a community’s internal or external ‘other’. Soviet official sources, such as the Moral Code of the Builders of Communism (1969), outlined moral values constituting the ‘norm’ and the way to treat deviance. Among the most important moral principles were love for the socialist Motherland, conscientious work for the benefit of society, a conscientious attitude towards public duty, mutual respect, responsibility, and assistance, brotherly feelings towards people of the 143

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USSR, honesty and truthfulness, moral cleanliness, simplicity and modesty in public and private lives, mutual respect in the family and care for the children. As far as the treatment of enemies and human vices were concerned, what was required was ‘intolerance of violations of the public interest; irreconcilability with injustice, parasites (those who do not work), dishonesty, careerism, money-grabbers, enemies of Communism’ [my italics] (Bol’shaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopedia 1970). Thus, the line that separated ‘norm’ from ‘deviance’ required a shift in attitude from acceptance to intolerance and irreconcilability with those who violated the societal norm. The division between ‘us’ and ‘them’, friends and enemies, with a differential attitude and behaviour towards each, is obvious. These principles did not exist in a social vacuum, but were further supported in everyday life by the similar requirements in the state’s hegemonic representation of social reality, where ‘most of the signifiers were crossreferentially linked in an inter-textual and even inter-discursive way, i.e., even signifiers from different discourses were meaningfully interconnected with each other’ (Yurchak 1997: 67). Yurchak accurately depicts that this hegemony of representation: Is not simply a collection of diverse and manifold institutions, discourses, and practices united under one dominant ideology, but is a system in which all official institutions, discourses, and practices are always, already produced and manipulated from the centre as one unique discourse … The hegemony of representation can be visualized as a symbolic order of tightly interconnected signifiers that were exclusively state-controlled and permeated most aspects of everyday life in the official sphere (ibid.: 166). It could be argued that many people hardly lived by this code, as many if not all of these principles had been variously negotiated in everyday life. Yet we should not dismiss them out of hand. In a recent book, referring to the seeming paradox of post-Soviet nostalgia in the context of binary accounts of Soviet reality, such as oppression and resistance, the state and the people, official culture and counterculture, truth and lie, reality and dissimulation, morality and corruption, etc., Yurchak maintained that: What tends to get lost in the binary accounts is the crucial and seemingly paradoxical fact that, for great numbers of Soviet citizens, many of the fundamental values, ideals, and realities of socialist life 144

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(such as equality, community, selflessness, altruism, friendship, ethical relations, safety, education, work, creativity, and concern for the future) were of genuine importance, despite the fact that many of their everyday practices routinely transgressed, reinterpreted, or refused certain norms and rules represented in the official ideology of the socialist state (2005: 8). Perhaps it is not surprising that many people embraced not only values but also attitudes, including those of ‘no compromise’ and ‘unyielding opposition to’ built on polarization of binary divisions ‘good’ and ‘evil’, or ‘moral community-deviant’. This tendency for dichotomy was characteristic of the dynamics of Russian cultural development long before the Soviet period, as has been shown by a well known semiotician Yuri Lotman and his colleague, a philologist, Boris Uspenskiy who studied the role of dual models in Russian culture up to the end of the eighteenth century (1984). They saw Russian culture as marked by binary opposition between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’, an opposition that dictates diametrically opposed modes of behaviour. They compared this binary structure to a European ternary structure, which allows for a neutral middle ground, where new systems could develop gradually, not catastrophically (Craig 1988: 586). This cultural situation ‘evidences little tolerance for transitional stages and describe a process whereby “a new culture” is created by “turning the old culture inside out”, by re-arranging what has previously existed but with a change of signs’, that is, by defining positive as negative. The past is rejected but not forgotten, for it survives as an ‘anti-culture’ (Ziolkowski 1998: 7). Although binary opposites are present in many societies in the balances between law and freedom, personal choice and state control, they are taken to a point of absolute non-compromise in Russian thinking (Kaminski 2005). Situated within this cultural milieu, early communist conceptual architectonics was especially full of black-and-white oppositions: proletariat vs. bourgeoisie, health vs. degeneracy, knowledge vs. ignorance, good vs. evil; however, it is not this moral dualism itself that is significant, but the concept of historical progression leading through an ever-changing antithesis to the teleological goal, the elimination of evil and the creation of a classless society (Halfin 2003: 14). According to Halfin, the Party identified a panoply of adversaries scheming against the proletariat, both within (kulaks, wreckers, oppositionists) and without (spies), describing them in the Soviet press at various times as baleful, pernicious, ‘evilmongers’ (zloumyshlenniki), malicious and malevolent. The collectivization and industrialization 145

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campaigns of the First Five Year Plan intensified the drive towards social and individual purity, and when Stalin declared in 1936 that the foundation of a classless society had been laid, the imperative to weed out elements likely to be a liability during the upcoming universal also intensified the hunt for enemies. In the 1920s, various adversaries were viewed as ‘corrigible’, so ‘could be brought back into the fold with a good dose of enlightenment and persuasion’ (ibid.: 32–33) and, if isolated from society, then in such a way as to give the offender many opportunities for moral regeneration. In the late 1930s, when ‘society had been declared perfect, only the individual could be blamed for negative actions. Since it stood poised on the threshold of a Communist paradise, the new self was healthy and mature’ (ibid.: 244). If previously the object of scientific investigation had been the relation between the environment and self or between the body and self, the key question was no longer ‘How?’ but ‘What?’ – not ‘How to produce a new self?’ but ‘What is the inner self of this or that individual all about?’, turning a genealogical question into an ontological one. The Soviet theoretical establishment announced that the Soviet society had been perfected, provoking hermeneutical tribunals, including the Soviet legal system, to use the blueprint of the New Man as a measure of men. The implications, states Halfin, were ominous: psychological clinics were replaced by courts, diagnosis – by judgment. Thus, in the late 1930s, the time had come for demonization affecting the way in which oppositionists would be punished: no longer would they be simply ‘purged’; henceforth they were to be arrested and isolated (ibid.: 246), and as we know from the history of Stalinist repressions, sent into exile to a quick death or shot. In the New Testament, Christ’s polarizing stand ‘He who is not with me is against me’ (Matthew 12:30) used in Soviet discourse had been transformed and hardened into, in the words of a prominent Soviet writer, ‘If an enemy does not surrender, he must be destroyed’ (Gorkiy 1930). The historic events of the 1930s might look far removed from the 2000s when I conducted my study, but the calls for cutting away and ostracizing those who are not with ‘us’ have been widely used throughout Soviet history: hatred towards enemies of the Motherland was a part of the Pioneer pledge in the 1950s, and calls to disown the likes of Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn occurred as recently as the 1970s. A 1990s study of people’s experiences of Stalinism demonstrated how firmly implanted these feelings are in some. Philologist Saraskina has observed how, during perestroika, a newspaper of one of the first political groups, the Christian Democrats:

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[Was] unrivalled in its lavish use of words like ‘eliminate’, ‘unmask’, ‘liquidate’, ‘dispossess’, ‘put an end to’, ‘bring to court’, ‘political prostitutes’ … Not to properly argue with the opponents, but to put a derogatory label on them, to refuse even to see the possibility of their good intentions and honesty, to see evil-mindedness in him (Hochschild 1994). Igor Yakovenko, a senior researcher of the Institute of Sociology, also observes: One of the peculiarities of our culture is that we do not have a chivalrous attitude towards the enemy. Remember how in Russia we always described the Germans as ‘Fritz waiting to be finished off ’, ‘Fascist hordes’, ‘bands’. An enemy (an opponent, adversary) is always scum, filth. Have we ever heard of such a thing as German heroism during World War II? This combination of words is inconceivable to us (Aksenov 2002). Whether the enemy is an external force (the West) or an insider group, as soon they were found and identified, it was clear what to do with them. Alcoholics, ‘parasites’, bichi (tramps) and criminals were all potential ‘deviants’ who should be excluded. Tsarist Russian society’s widespread charity towards marginal groups, such as prisoners (Dostoevsky 1983) or the disabled (Smirnova 1997) was not reflected in Soviet attitudes towards deviance. In a rhetorically egalitarian society there was no place for pity, as it was seen as a sign of inequality (Ginzburg 2002). In post-Soviet society, which initially positioned itself (again!) as an opposite of its socialist predecessor, mercy was entering as an alternative to no compromise, but the remnants of the latter persist. Neblagopoluchniye families constitute one such group in the category of ‘them’ and, when proved to be unfit, the attitude towards them is similar: exclusion. In Soviet times, Child Welfare Inspectors were required to apply disciplinary measures to the parents for evading their parental responsibilities. The first step an Inspector was recommended to take in this case was to place the child in an institution or a hospital (Dzugaeva, Kuznetsova and Larionov 1989: 140). In actual post-Soviet practice, the GD does not necessarily remove the children right away. They warn the mother of the importance of correcting her ways and the possible consequences in the event of non-compliance, which is removal of the child. As Foucault maintained, disciplinary punishments have ‘the function 147

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of reducing gaps, and therefore should be corrective’ (1977: 178). Normalizing a deviant family by reducing the gap between the binary categories of blagopoluchnaya and neblagopoluchnaya families, and bringing a deviant individual or family back into the boundaries of the ‘norm’, normalizes both the individual and society. It is indeed a goal of the GD and other state organizations concerned with child welfare, because they can only release a child into a ‘normal’ family, in order to prevent him or her from growing into a deviant adult. The question is what happens in this gap, that is, how is a punishable departure from correct behaviour addressed? As we shall see, in the post-Soviet period, there are fewer resources that would facilitate the process of normalization for many Soviet social welfare networks, and enterprise-based social security has been devastated, producing a considerable number of individuals who have been dispossessed (Humphrey 2002). The failure of normalization ends in a similar fashion for many neblagopoluchniye families. If visibility assures the automatic functioning of (disciplinary) power, the binary division (blagopoluchnaya-neblagopoluchnaya) ensures branding and exile (Foucault 1977), exemplified by Maria and Natalia’s cases. The tendency is for the relationship between the children and their parents to be severed, producing family discontinuity on a large scale, both in Soviet and post-Soviet society. My data shows that when parents are placed into the category of wrongdoers with regard to their children, the state tries to protect their children by limiting contact between them. According to the director of a Children’s Home with 25 years of experience, in Soviet times: Instead of working with families, the state got carried away with deprivation of parental rights. Neighbours reported families to the police because there seemed to be problems within the family, but sometimes that was a way to settle problems between neighbours. A single mother is defenceless, she is an easy prey. Once the children were in institutions, communication between parents and their children, or returning the child back was absolutely forbidden, despite parents begging to spend time with their children. Now we have more relaxed views but now parents do not want to visit their children. I read a letter written from a father in prison. While in prison, Sergei wrote letters to different children’s institutions in an attempt to locate his children, due to their placement in institutional care. Sergei and his common law wife had two boys. She was registered as a single mother in order to receive child 148

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benefits. For the authorities and paediatricians, she was a typical unfit mother who ‘did not provide adequate care, left children ages one and three at home without supervision’. On one occasion, when an ambulance delivered the younger son to the Children’s Hospital, he was transferred to the Baby Home. Sergei wrote to the GD, the Children’s Hospital and the Baby Home, but, as I read in one of his letters, he had not received any replies from any institutions or officials concerning their location, except once from the Baby Home, stating that they were considering depriving him and his wife of their parental rights. This letter was written by the director of the Baby Home who, while relating a part of this story to me, mentioned that some of her staff were against writing to him; however, she felt that he was a father and that she felt obliged to reply. Devastated, Sergei wanted to preserve his rights and insisted on the Baby Home providing some information about his children’s location. He said that he did not want them to repeat the same experience that he had, having been abandoned by his mother at birth, growing up in institutions and now serving time in prison. Commenting on his letters, one Baby Home careworker said: ‘Ah, they always write from prisons these teary letters. But they disappear after they have been discharged from prison. Why don’t they come and pick their children up?’ Sergei, however, did not disappear. We shall meet with him again in Chapter 7. A single mother told me a similar story about being cut off from her son, who had resided in institutions since he was six. The authorities documented her use of physical punishment on her son on several occasions. She said she agreed to the suggestion to temporarily place her child in the internat for low-income families because she could not find a job and, without a job, kindergartens refused to take her child. Yet, without being able to place her child in a kindergarten, she could not find a job. She felt that because the internat has an option of five-day boarding, she would be able to have the child home for weekends: Soon after the placement they moved him to another children’s home without telling me. I went to see him and he was not there. I went to the Guardianship Department and they talked to me rudely, saying I would not see my son in the same way I cannot see my own ears. I was hysterical, I was asking, where is my son? Only after my third visit did they tell me he is in the Children’s Home. I wrote to him but there were no answers. I did not have any information about him for about a year. I was coming to the Guardianship Department, but they did not allow me even to enter the office. I did not know that, by that 149

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time, they had already transferred him to another internat. I learned about this only at the second Court hearing. One Guardianship Department staff member accidentally blurted out that he had written to me, but I never received any letters. The last internat filed a suit to deprive me of parental rights, and I can understand why, they have not heard from me for that long, they think I do not care. The last Court hearing was the fifth one, and it has been five years since the beginning of this ordeal. For most of this time I did not know where my son was, and they did not tell me, although this is their duty. If parents do not persistently follow their children and have lost contact with them, it is not easy to find them again. In some cases the authorities resort to lies. I know of a few cases when parents tried to find their children and were told by the authorities that their children had been adopted; because of the Secrecy of Adoption Law, the authorities did not have to disclose any more information. Some were told their child had died. Meanwhile, the children were residing in institutions. One young man was being brought up in institutions, and at the age of 15 had an unexpected visit. A social pedagogue gives this description of what took place: One day I was sitting in my office when a man walked in. He was the father of N. and he asked whether or not he could see his son. I asked him where he had been all these years? Why did you not come earlier, why all of a sudden now? He replied that he tried for many years, but was told that his son had been adopted. I was so surprised. I could not promise him anything because I did not know whether or not the boy would want to see him. I talked to the boy, asked him if he would like to see his father, and he indicated that he would. I invited the father, and my God, the father comes in, approaches the boy and falls on his knees! He hugs the knees of the boy and starts to cry, saying, ‘I was looking and looking for you’. Well, after that the boy went to visit his father and his aunt, but did not like it there because his father likes to drink. He told me that when he receives a flat, he will not take his father in, but who knows? I noticed that he became much calmer since then. He still does not envision his father in his future plans, but he looks and sounds much more assured. However, it should be mentioned that not just birth families but guardian families are treated in the same way. Once I heard Marina advising a 150

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colleague from another regional community. The latter asked Marina what to do in cases where a guardian speaks roughly to a child, ordering the child around? Should they invite a psychologist to sort out the problem? The Head of the GD answered: Why, don’t you have anything else to do but vospityvat’ (admonish) these guardians? Here, if something is not right in the guardian’s family, we simply take the child away. The guardians must vospityvat’ the children, and we have a right to demand that the guardian bring a child up the way that is customary in our state. It is not our responsibility to vospityvat’ the guardian. In Moscow I was told the same, that if there is something to worry about we can warn a guardian once, but the second time you simply go to the school and take the child to a shelter. If they cannot work out their relationship [the guardian and the child], then the sooner you take the child away, the better.

Power Battle: Strategies The case studies reveal a number of strategies that the state and mothers used to reach their goals. The three examples I discussed, Natalia, Maria, and Tamara, differed only in the degree of resistance during the court hearings: silenced and agreeable Natalia, reluctantly defensive Maria and fiercely combative Tamara. What they lacked was effective (as far as retaining their children) action. There were, however, mothers or families who were more proactive, although the choice of tools at their disposal was outnumbered by those of the state. Of course, the most desirable and successful tool was to follow the demands placed upon them by the GD, as we have seen with Grigori and Arina. If that proved impossible, some women whose children ended up in the Baby Home or a children’s hospital resorted to kidnapping them. They took the child for a walk and never came back. State employees, on the other side, have a range of tactics. The ‘soft persuasion’ approach, expressed as caring advice to leave a child temporarily in state care, may lead to prolonged mother-child separation. Indirect forced separation entails keeping parents at a distance and away from their children once they are placed in any kind of child welfare institution. We have seen this in the case of Maria, where the baby was kept apart from the family, with the administration of the Baby Home simply refusing to allow contact. Direct forced separation involves the literal application of force. The GD retaliates by removing the children from homes of those mothers whose 151

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parental rights were terminated, but who managed to get the child back. One mother was hiding away with her last child, as the other four were already in various institutions. As soon as the GD learnt about her being back in town with the child, they came into her house and, when an adult (the mother was absent) allowed them in, dressed the child and took him to the Baby Home. Parents can be kept apart from their children even on suspicion of possible neglect, as in the case of Tamara (Chapter 3). In a number of cases, the parents’ agency was subverted by the state regardless of their attempts to bring the child back home. Svetlana, a 17year-old mother of a 10-month-old boy, made many efforts to comply. She was a single mother, and the boy’s father, with whom she was still in a relationship, was from a neblagopoluchnaya family and had served a short prison sentence. Svetlana lived together with her mother in her mother’s two-room flat. Her son resided in the Baby Home for a few months and a social pedagogue made a visit to the flat to evaluate her living conditions. I came along. The rooms were simply furnished but clean. The social pedagogue checked the availability of food. There was baby formula and the refrigerator was stocked with some basic foodstuffs. Svetlana’s mother worked as a cook in a cafeteria and assured us that there was no problem with access to food. Svetlana was visibly nervous but very hopeful. However, the Baby Home administration decided to ‘hold the child back’ and finally terminated Svetlana’s parental rights as she had too many things going against her. She did not have her own accommodation or a job, she was too young and her partner had a criminal record. Extended family members are even less guaranteed to have children returned to them. Anna and her sister Nastya lived in a small regional community. Their mother became disabled and her disability benefit was not sufficient to support the family. The girls were placed in an internat. Their mother died a few years later. Anna in particular was bitter about the authorities’ decision to remove them from their mother instead of financially supporting the family. When I met Anna, she was a 20-year-old mother of a two-year-old child, and was trying to gain custody of her youngest sister Ira, who resided in a children’s home. However, the GD had other plans for that girl, as they found a suitable couple who wished to first take guardianship over her and perhaps adopt her later. Anna was trying her best to combine looking after her child, study and work as a cleaner in the Maternity Home, but her family income did not reach 2000 roubles, the stipulated amount per person that constituted the official minimum income at that time. The GD felt that although Anna had a job, she would not have 152

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the right ‘conditions’ and enough money to raise the girl. Marina pointed out that Anna lived in a dormitory, her conditions were ‘not bad but could be better’ and she was unmarried. The GD, together with the Children’s Home, did not allow Anna to collect her sister for weekends and holidays, instead sending the girl to her future adoptive parents without notifying Anna. Anna was devastated and first wanted to file a court suit to gain custody, but after an agonizing deliberation she considered that her sister was already emotionally attached to her new parents and, because they were ‘perhaps good people’, she decided not to pursue it. She asked the GD if they would at least allow her to see her sister, but the GD ‘categorically refused’ (in Anna’s words) because, they said, the new parents were against it. The GD told her that her sister had been adopted and she must forget about her, although, said Anna, ‘nobody told me that they are preparing documents for adoption’. ‘It’s very simple’, she said, ‘they have more money than we do. We would be able to provide for our little sister on a minimal level, but not fully.’ When I discussed this case briefly with Marina, she waved her hands and said, yes, according to the law it was necessary to ask her permission and notify her, but ‘We shall do without her consent. All we need to do is to collect enough convincing documents that will make a strong case proving she is not suitable to raise this girl’, and that is exactly what happened. Thus, although Anna made many attempts to reunite with Ira, she lost the battle and Ira was adopted by a local couple. In another case, Larisa was ready to remove the five-year-old child whom she found alone during one home inspection, and whom she was prepared to drag from the window if only, she said, that window was big enough. However, state agents also understand their limitations. As Larisa, commenting on the selectiveness of the police in detaining children from families, said: ‘They know who to touch and who to leave alone, because if a child is from a respectable family, the parents will give them hell.’ I was told that there are cases of deprivation of parental rights of families that are not financially vulnerable, such as businessmen who are involved in their work to the point that their children become neglected, but that this happened infrequently. Therefore, the state as a composite actor reveals itself as a force to be reckoned with. Consider its weapons: the ‘rules of the game’ of institutional placement are known only to the state agents. During a court hearing, language becomes a resource for the state, and it is not merely a case of knowing the legal language of the court, but knowing what will work in the court, what ‘cards’ could be successfully played. In Maria’s case it was the 153

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card of morality dressed in the legal terminology of the Family Code. Finally, there is the willingness and ability of the GD staff to break the regulations, especially when one knows how to dress the violation. These are all power devices. Using such devices to reach one’s goal might indicate that the state agents do not necessarily believe in what they do. From this viewpoint, theirs is not a quest for truth but a quest for power. However, the mystery of the situation is that, at the same time, the state agents are being very sincere in their indignation of the likes of Maria, indicating that they believe in what they do. In order to save a child from a neblagopoluchnaya family and ensure a better home environment for him or her, the state agents might resort to doing what feels and looks right for them (i.e., a child should live in a loving caring family able to provide well for him or her), and not what may necessarily be lawful. One GD member remembers how a five-year-old girl was left alone in a flat on the fifth floor of an apartment building. She was seen on a window sill and the GD’s attention was drawn to that. A GD staff member went to the flat and when the girl opened the door, she collected the girl. This staff member was given a reprimand by a Prokuror, who said, ‘Do you understand that you should not have done this?’ ‘Yes’, the staff member replied, ‘I do. But what if I would have gone through all the hoops of gaining lawful access to this flat, while the girl would have plunged from the fifth floor?’ The choice of whether to follow various regulations depends on their estimation of a situation: if it feels right not to leave the child in the family, not following regulations feels right too. Given their clientele, this choice is more often in favour of an institution, not the family.

The Cost of (In)visibility The above description may give out an impression that the system is totalizing, but this is not so, for many neblagopoluchniye families remain invisible and unknown to the authorities. This happens when the GD receives no ‘signals’ regarding children in need. Also, one lesson some mothers learn while dealing with the state is to have as little interaction with them as possible. However, to receive child or low-income family benefits, parents inevitably have to interact with the social security bureaucratic offices. Dealing with bureaucracy is an art to be learnt and not everyone can master it. Once in a quarter they have to collect numerous supporting documents, standing in line for many hours in long corridors without chairs, or even outside the building for those who arrive a few hours before the opening time. Along the way, the various governmental 154

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offices and departments fuse into one entity that spells queues, hassle, effort, time and humiliation, unless one has some form of privileged access to this system. One mother told me that she decided not to bother because the sum is so insignificant that, being an educated working mother, she can support her child without state child benefits. But many neblagopoluchniye mothers could have used some of this financial help; if they decide not to apply for child benefits, they are being condemned for being lazy, uncaring and depriving their children of much-needed financial support. However, for those who have already come into contact with the state child welfare institutions, there is another underlying anxiety: exposure will make them subject to a force, engagement with which could bring about unpredictable consequences for a mother (or parent). A family’s visibility is important for the authorities, as it will allow the latter to act upon the family, almost like having a rock in water onto which one might step to keep one’s feet dry. But without this rock there is nowhere to step. At the same time, a disciplinarian approach motivates many parents to stay invisible to the authorities with their problems and to fight off the state ‘intruders’ with whatever agenda they might be bringing. Once she becomes known, ‘they’ will not let go. Fear of state representatives follows many of these women right into their homes. This avoidance may lead to tragedies. Invisible to the state institutions, children get killed either due to physical abuse or accidents, as in one story published in a local newspaper. A four-year-old child scalded his leg, but his relatives did not call an ambulance until 24 hours later, when the boy was dying of pain and shock. An investigation into the family’s circumstances revealed that besides his grandmother, who worked as a cleaner, his 23-year-old mother and his stepfather, the mother’s cohabitant, and the father of her baby daughter, did not work, nor did they receive child benefits. The newspaper referred to them as a low-income and even poor family, although it was reported with some surprise that the family was sober. When asked why they did not at least apply for child benefits, the dead child’s stepfather said, ‘What for? As soon as you get [into their hands], they will start coming here, poking into our life, taking away our children, and we don’t want that’ (Magadanskaya Pravda, 14 July 2007, see also Kuznetsov 2002). It is from such families that the GD is trying to save children, while fearing, suspecting and trying to prevent the worst. In this section I have demonstrated that it is in the best interests of the child to grow up in a good environment. I have sought to show that many social orphans are children from families viewed as neblagopoluchnaya, due 155

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to the persistence of various family problems precluding them from creating ‘normal’ family conditions for the ‘normal’ development of their children. It could be argued that the authorities’ understanding of what constitutes these conditions and who can provide them views such families as being unable to change to correspond to this vision of how the family ought to be. If deprivation of parental rights and, in particular, charging child support of an already impoverished mother (while institutional care for children from ‘good’ families is free) could be interpreted as punishment for ‘bad’ parents for not being able to correct their conduct and adopt the required values, then we could read in the attitude of the authorities the implicit internal court that separates ‘right’ from ‘wrong’. Self-identification with ‘good’9 serves as a powerful incentive to condemn ‘wrong’, the enemy. Perhaps the overall internalized goal of the socialist society to make life good for everyone, striving towards the perfectibility of society and of the individual, believing in one vision of what is ‘good’ and ‘correct’, meant that those who subscribed to it were treated as good, while those who did not must either be converted if they were naive or ignorant, or destroyed if they were ‘evil’. Having failed to be ‘converted’, such parents had to be ‘destroyed’, the ties between them and their child were severed and, through the mediation of the state, the parent and child were dead to each other. In Chapter 7, we shall examine how such children have to start their life from zero when their past has been cut off. The separation of children from their mothers takes place based on two contradictory philosophies: that the best place for children is in the family, yet separation appears to be the norm and is not treated as anything harmful or consequential. Two points emerge from my ethnographic data that at first glance seem unrelated. The first is a tendency for polarization of binary divisions, with moral values attached to them; a party with an ascribed negative moral value is excluded. The second point is the apparent ease with which children could be separated from their families and retained by various state institutions. While observing court hearings of the likes of Natalia, Maria and Tamara, I caught myself thinking that it is as if these children do not belong to the family, which is seen as disposable, of no consequence. To make sense of and connect these two points, I wish to introduce the concept of ‘virtual kinship’ or ‘social kinship through ideology and institutions’, which seems to enable some of the practices of child separation and negation of certain kinds of family evident from my ethnographic data.

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The Construction of Family by the State: A Society of Virtual Kin In the Introduction, I brought in the concept of a hybrid ‘social’ sphere, a hybrid, as it were, between public and private. One of the effects of the reconfiguration of public and private was the construction of socialist societies as quasi-familial, while an individual family was constructed as semi-autonomous. This reconfiguration led to the development of what I call a society of virtual kin and the positioning of childhood halfway between the family and state-shadowed society, where children were supposed to be treated as ‘our’ children, with a sense of collective responsibility for all children being instilled on at least a discursive level. In socialist Poland, according to Frances Pine, the ‘state took over many of the functions of the house in terms of child-rearing, healthcare and education’ (Carsten 2004: 54), while in the German Democratic Republic, ‘the state-family relationship became … more tightly planned, more predictable, stable, and transparent, so that individual efforts of parents were no longer so significant in controlling [children’s] lifecourse trajectory’, so ‘children became dependent on state agencies and not on parents’ (Borneman 1992: 103). Soviet family theoreticians (Kharchev and Alekseeva 1977, Kharchev 1979, Kharchev and Matskovskiy 1978) and some Western researchers (Lynd, in Mace and Mace 1963) insisted that the Soviet family as an institution was different from its Western counterpart, thus proposing that the Soviet attempt at redefinition of the kinship relationship facilitated a specifically Soviet construction of the family. A number of studies argued that the family in the Soviet Union was characterized by the increasing role of society in the rearing of children (Alt 1959, Geiger 1968, Kurganov 1967, Bronfenbrenner 1972). In regard to childcare, the relationship between the state and the family has been described as a partnership (Alt 1959, Madison 1968), where the state took the role of a super-parent, with the parental rights of the family as delegated rights (Alt and Alt 1959); an alliance between the state and mother (Issoupova 2000) at the expense of the father (Kukhterin 2000); and a cooperation between the family and the state (Heitlinger 1979). Not surprisingly, these changes were valued differently. The supposed undermining of the family by the state (Geiger 1968) was categorically denied by Soviet family sociologists, who maintained that, on the contrary, the family was strengthened and supported by the state, which protected motherhood and childhood through extensive support. From childhood and into 157

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adulthood, it was believed that the unity of social and personal goals gave personal happiness a social dimension, and therefore there was no opposition between the state and the family. The essence of the state’s attitude towards the family and public upbringing was expressed by Kharchev, a prominent family theoretician in the time of ‘mature’ socialism. He stated that, during the development of Soviet society, the process of child upbringing became lengthier due to the labour laws, which prohibited children from working and obliged them to study to successfully function in an increasingly complex society. Family upbringing alone, even with all its potential, was inadequate in principle due to the limited means and ability of the family to adequately provide materially, and to bring up their children correctly. Stressing that a socialist upbringing must be collectivist, he pointed out that a family upbringing might lead to the development of individualistic characteristics. Because of this, he maintained, the family needed greater moral and economic assistance from society and, as a result, family upbringing became increasingly intertwined with public upbringing through the provision of all forms of institutional childcare, such as nurseries, kindergartens, schools, extra-curricular activities, etc., for all children. Inadequacy of the family was seen in material and moral terms. Since the family is seen as a part of society that serves as a ‘channel of social influence’ for their children (1979: 298), this influence was directly linked to the type of the family children grew up in. He inveighed against families ‘who make “moral freaks” out of children rather than bringing them up properly. These are families of alcoholics and of immoral parents’ (ibid.: 294). The consequences of such a configuration between the state and the family are disputed. Antonov, regretting the loss of the ‘traditional’ family, reflected on the ‘de-privatisation of individual life’, attempts to standardize lifestyles and thought, and the interruption of cultural transmission of family values where the youth received information about what was going on (including the past) not from the family members but from public sources. The propaganda efforts were aimed (indirectly) at breaking up family values rather than strengthening them. The system of pre-school and school education, parental full-time employment outside the family and the reduction in the number of functions that were previously carried out by the family but were transferred to other social institutions had led to an alienation of parents from their children (1990: 20–21). Changes in the family resulted in the erosion of family privacy in the Soviet Union and the lack of autonomy of the family as a social unit (Harwin 1996) or ‘breaking open the nuclear family’ (Verdery 1996). However, 158

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alternative views maintain that ‘[A]s public life became increasingly stressful and alienating, an appreciation of the family home as a refuge from public life developed’ and ‘continuing emphasis upon the role of parents in inculcating discipline and morality meant that parents in practice exercised a good deal of authority, and enjoyed a considerable degree of autonomy’ (Kelly 2007: 11). Hooper stressed that in the 1930s, although ‘intimacy was not a site of private, individual experience that existed outside the reaches of the state’ (Kiaer and Naiman 2006: 14), nevertheless, ‘by assuming the indelibility of small family loyalties, the Terror paradoxically worked to harden kinship networks, rather than eliminate them’ (ibid.: 77). Whether producing resistance, compliance or most likely both, the strong links between family members and the state were undeniable. Generally, family members in urban areas came to depend less on each other for survival, and more on the state, to which they were tied in a number of ways. There was a considerable official10 economic dependency, that is, being obliged to work in state enterprises, thus deriving one’s income from state sources. The state provided housing for the family, which rented it for small maintenance fees, although cooperative flats were available for those who could afford them. Everyone was (and still is) obliged to have a propiska (police residence permit) at their place of residence, and internal passports, which contained much personal information such as place of birth, place of propiska, marital status and children. Social welfare, including education and medical care, were staterun and financed. Education and the upbringing of children was provided, controlled and determined by the state, either through formal education or through the carefully crafted content of available educational material for parents and adults. Despite a pronounced social stratification, an attempt at conspicuous standardization of living conditions and an intended uniformity of lived experience made family life transparent to others. The resolution of some of an individual’s problems was often done in the public sphere (Kharkhordin 1999, Harwin 1996), which further contributed to this transparency. On issues related to marital and family problems, such as alcoholism and adultery, people had to rely on advice from friends and relatives, or on themselves. To help the family, employees working in healthcare (doctors), education (teachers) and work (trade union representatives) were thought to be able to listen and provide advice. In practice, in many cases this proved ineffectual, as they often lacked any aspect of professional expertise and often were younger and less experienced than the individual seeking help. An alternative would be to 159

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take the problems outside, into the public sphere of kollektivs. Although designed as a small penal court, these public discussions of personal problems often served as a substitute for more severe punishments, often making it possible to avoid a prison sentence for lesser offenses. Yet, however suitable or inappropriate it might have been, the very existence of such practices curtailed the full development of individualized professional assistance to a family that could have provided interpersonal, marital, family and youth counselling to individuals who needed to resolve problems, while keeping them confined to the family; such programmes were virtually non-existent. Thus, no agency became intimately familiar with the problems of a family on a long term basis, trying to help it in a non-judgemental way. As a result of this specific construction of the boundaries between the state and the family, the family was a unit with limited opportunities to outline its own goals, tasks and means for attaining them; a unit that was compelled to take its private affairs into the public sphere of society or solve them on its own, if at all. The boundaries that would outline its private space were hard to define, and thus the concept of ‘intervention’ into family affairs was minimal: instead, general moralizing instructions were given on the ideal of family life, leaving concrete families to attain this ideal on their own. The state agencies did not intervene, even when such intervention was needed. Police, for example, rarely investigated domestic quarrels or cases of domestic violence and sexual abuse (Human Rights Watch Report 1995, 1998). Family life, then, was simultaneously transparent and opaque.

Childhood Belonging However, where is the place of children in such a semi-autonomous family? From immediately after the Revolution, childhood as a category was given a priority status. Since then, the notion of childhood never lost its primary core: children are conceptualized not just as a stage in the lifecycle of an individual, but as a special social phenomenon (Rybinskiy 1998), the determining element in the development of Russia (Breeva 1999) and a special social stratum: ‘The priority of childhood is absolute: children must have higher qualitative characteristics [health and education] than their parents. This is a self-evident condition for development. Children’s level of education and socialisation, cultural and health levels will materialise tomorrow into the health of the nation … and into the authority of the country in the world’ (Rimashevskaya 1999: 7). During Soviet times, for 160

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this special category of citizens, society tried to create a separate world, one of purity and innocence, positive and future-oriented, shielded from the hardships of adult life. Filled with normative examples, children’s literature, cartoons and films promoted such values as kindness, honesty, discipline and love for work and beauty. Although not promoting aggression, violence towards the country’s enemies was enjoined and rationalized. Always comparing the supposed positive nature of contemporary Soviet childhood with the negative experiences of childhood in pre-Revolutionary Russia and capitalist countries (Gorkiy’s My Childhood, Dickens’s Oliver Twist), the state crafted and propagated the image of Soviet childhood as happy, fun, carefree and unburdened. The aspiration for a better life for children was not only an aspiration, but also an opportunity for the family and society to make it happen. Indeed, for many children, whose families stayed within the boundaries of mental, moral or societal ‘norms’, childhood was indeed a positive experience. Connected to the future of the country, such a special category was not left in the hands of the individual family. Outlined by Kharchev, the increasing need for ‘societal upbringing’, which really meant the increasing participation of the state in child upbringing, although far from allembracing and totalizing, had nevertheless produced tangible results. Childcare for pre-school children was distributed between family and public organizations, while children of school age spent much of their time outside the home, involved in various school and extra-curricular activities, including work for the public good and participation in young persons’ political organizations. Most disabled or gifted children were educated in residential schools.11 Harwin describes a heavy involvement of teachers in the family’s affairs that related to issues in child upbringing, using ‘discussion, persuasion and if necessary, admonition’ as well as direct counselling. In matters of child protection, ‘the dysfunctional family was the public property of the workplace, the place of residence and local community’ (1996: 46–48) and, when measures of support proved unsuccessful, schools could apply sanctions, including comrades’ courts and other agencies, such as the Committee for Juveniles (KPDN). Since children are a part of the family, in the same way as some family problems were the subject of public gaze, problems associated with raising children were often taken into the public domain as well. The Soviet family could not sort out their disputes with regard to child upbringing by taking their case to court, it had to be done only through the GD (Chechot 1984). Parents or relatives appealed to the GD and a local KPDN for advice on how 161

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to deal with the ‘difficult’ children and teenagers. These two agencies are still places of authority which some relatives come to in post-Soviet Magadan. Two cases come to mind: one was of a grandmother who came to the GD to ask for advice on how to deal with her unruly grandson, and a paediatrician who asked me what to do with a ‘difficult’ teenager. We both knew that, outside of the KPDN, no one else addresses these problems, but accessing their help meant being put on the register, making her problems visible and therefore dangerous, which was best avoided. Medical establishments watched out for signs of poor parenting (as in the case of Natalia), referring the family to the GD. As I indicated earlier, institutions have the right to retain the child if left in (any) institution for three or more days. As such, the responsibility for the child’s upbringing became a shared responsibility, both private (individual, family) and public (state) or coparenting. It is here that the boundaries between private and public have been blurred, since the public domain reaches out to the private domain and vice versa. This dispersed responsibility created problems of accountability, a process still continuing throughout the 1990s, now seen as a consequence of the previous paternalistic state. If things did not turn out the way they were intended, the family was routinely blamed for not being able to carry out its parental responsibilities adequately. Likewise, under the conditions of diffused responsibility, not only the family but also ‘some members of the collective’ (although not the state system) were blamed for not fulfilling their duties properly. A common utterance on the part of parents when something went wrong was: ‘Why doesn’t the school watch over children as it should?’ Teachers would say the same regarding parents: ‘Why don’t parents watch over children as they should?’ One director of a children’s home reflected on this ambiguity: In the Soviet times, on the one hand it was said that all depends on the family, but on the other hand we had a directive that the school is the centre of vospitaniye. The state distanced the family from their own children. Not surprisingly, the issue of the lack of parental responsibility has a strong presence in the discourse of institutional staff and administration, such as in this quote from a director of a children’s home: The parents do not feel responsible for their children. After perestroika, there are more parents that found themselves in difficult 162

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situations. At times they do not just ask, they demand a placement. Of course, it is free for parents. The child’s relatives also prefer to leave him in a children’s home, making occasional visits. There are so many such children! The issue of childhood belonging gave rise to much ambiguity as early as at the inception of the Soviet state. In 1926 A. Lunacharskiy stated: I remember the time when some workers of socialist construction expressed their wish to demolish as many families as possible to produce as many abandoned children as possible in order for the state to bring up and educate children in big quantities (Tizanov 1926). If this utterance seems radical and corresponding only to the years of postRevolutionary extremism, consider the following excerpt: One care-worker of our boarding school, when she was seeing off the children for their winter vacation was pleasantly surprised when her pupils did not want to go to their families. This means, that we managed to turn our internat into their rodnoy (own) home, she said, and immediately felt guilty saying such things, because we need not only save but also nurture the feeling of love for one’s family, one’s home, one’s land (Afanasenko and Kairov 1961). Forty years later in 2000, in post-Soviet Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, the director of a children’s home told me that her goal is: To make life in the internat better than in the family. Any family. Sometimes children do not want to go home because it is better for them here, and I feel proud. It means that our work of looking after children brings results, it is successful. However, this attitude is in contrast with the views of others. On a few occasions I heard children’s school directors, while reflecting on the wisdom of such easy requirements for, and the process of, institutionalization, express a strong conviction that placing a child in an institution on some occasions was wrong. They felt that after careful and thoughtful consideration, some children should have been left with their parents, especially if some assistance had been provided for the parents. 163

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However, the appropriate assistance was not there. They also felt that by retaining the child, the state frees the parents from their parental responsibility and facilitates further irresponsibility. Regarding children from a neblagopoluchniye family, once the child is in a children’s home, nothing would prevent a parent from continuing to engage in anti-social behaviour because they have nothing left to fight or hope for.

Concepts of Co-parenthood and ‘Social Kinship through Institutions and Ideology’ So far we have looked at the family as a unit with strong and multiple links to the state, where the responsibility for children was partially moved from the private sphere of the family to the public sphere of state institutions and society. Many studies of Soviet-type societies describe an opposite process, that of construction of society as a family. They are permeated with ‘familial’ metaphors and most often the state and Party are placed in the position of a ‘parent’ (Verdery 1996, Clark 2000). If in East Berlin kinship was related to nationness and citizenship (Borneman 1992), Verdery employs a concept of ‘socialist paternalism’, which she envisioned as a quasi-familial dependency of a subject on the state, positing ‘a moral tie linking subjects with the state through their rights to a share in the redistributed social product’ (1996: 63). Using Romania as an ethnographic example, she describes socialist paternalism as ‘constructing its “nation” on an implicit view of society as an extended family, composed of individual nuclear families, but these were bound into a larger familial organisation of patriarchal authority with the “father” Party at its head’ that made all the family’s allocative decisions as to who should produce what and who should receive what reward – thus a ‘parent-state’ (ibid.). This configuration, she argues, led to the breaking open of the nuclear family, socializing the significant elements of reproduction even while leaving women responsible for the rest, and usurping certain patriarchal functions and responsibilities, reconfiguring gender roles and reorganizing family roles. The state-family relationship was seen as a partnership where the state took the role of a super-parent, with the parental rights of the family being delegated rights (Alt 1959), an alliance between the state and mother (Issoupova 2000) and a cooperation between the family and the state (Heitlinger 1979). All these conceptualizations imply a sense of equality, independence, autonomy and choice, although Alt’s expression ‘super-parent’ and Verdery’s ‘parent-state’ carry the implication of a power relationship. The ‘parent’ metaphor apropos the state is appropriate, for the parental rights of the family were certainly conditional. The practices adopted by the 164

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GD in 2000 followed the recommendations outlined in a textbook published in 1989, and these are still in use for decision making. It defines parental responsibility as follows: ‘the right of the parents to raise their children is the possibility for the parents as a citizen to act in the direction, indicated by the legislative acts.’ The content of the rights and responsibilities of a parent: [O]utlines the correct behaviour of the parents (and therefore also outlines undesired behaviour), making it into exemplary behaviour. If a parent deviates a little from this model, the behaviour of the parents may be corrected with advice. But a complete lack of correspondence between the parents’ behaviour and the model of proper behaviour leads to deprivation of parental rights. The state has delegated parental rights [emphasis added] to the parents. If the parent uses his/her parental rights against the best interests of the child, the state deprives them of their rights, which it has given to them [emphasis added]. This is the key to understanding the meaning of parental rights and the conditions under which they can be taken away (Dzugaeva, Kuznetsova and Larionov 1989: 142–43). However, I would like to take these familial metaphors a step further, for my data invokes a rather different association: that with kinship. I interpret my ethnography as showing: (1) to what extent the state actually became a part of the family, beyond the symbolic figure of ‘father’, into a practical fusion with the family where the relationship with the family regarding children could be termed ‘co-parenthood’12 based on the concept of care (Borneman 2001); and (2) this process could not have happened without the development of a kinship-type relationship or ‘social kinship through ideology and institutions’ (‘virtual kinship’) across the whole of society. The ‘virtual kinship’ concept echoes David Schneider’s attempt to rethink kinship that is not a part of relations of blood and marriage (1980, 1984). He argued that different symbols of American kinship were all concerned with unity of some kind, whether expressed as the unity of substance or the unity required by code or conduct, and provide for the relationships of diffuse, enduring solidarity. He maintained that other domains such as nationality and religion produce the same relationship and are defined in the same terms as kinship. ‘Virtual kinship’, with its language of unity, relatedness and solidarity, could be viewed along the same lines as Schneider’s American kinship and Anderson’s imagined community (Anderson 1983), except that the latter two are based on 165

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nationality, while the Soviet virtual kinship is based on the assigned identity of the ‘Soviet people’. Kharkhordin maintains that Soviet society was to be run like a family almost from its inception. Certain Party officials called for the Party congregation to be run like a family; later the family-like mechanism of comradely admonition was imposed on all of society (Kharkhordin 1997: 359). Indeed, it seems in a monolithic public Soviet discourse as if the whole country had taken on the form of an extended family, the ‘brotherly family of nations’. The relationship of citizens to the country was expressed in terms of a vertical type of kinship, with terms implying kinship based on birth (rod), like Motherland (Rodina-mat’). Between citizens themselves, relations were expressed in terms of horizontal kinship: the Russian people as ‘big brother’ to the ethnic minorities (however ironically), citizens as comrades, brothers and sisters. Children addressed adult strangers on the street as dyadya and tetya (uncle and aunt). Older women were often addressed by strangers as babushka (granny), while older women addressed younger men as synok (sonny) and women as dochka (daughter). A feeling of the country as a big family was facilitated by the existence of the external enemy, capitalism, ‘the Other’, while ‘we’ as a country had a language of unity, cohesion, togetherness, and egalitarianism. This goal-oriented monolithic ‘family’, which was inherently collectivist and was progressively moving ahead in time to a known destination (communism), was discursively associated with happiness. Janet Carsten suggests that we should carefully scrutinize the ‘blurred boundaries’ between kinship, nation and religion. Drawing on the works by Delaney and Das, she demonstrates that these studies contradict the conventional wisdom that the occurrence of a language of kinship in the political discourse of nationalism is straightforwardly metaphorical. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue, ‘the metaphors we live by’ structure our actions and our experiences and translate into a quite literal reality (Carsten 2004: 160). Language is a code plus its history; it creates its own world (Lotman 1992: 13) and forms images. This world is not devoid of emotions as not only does a person relate emotionally to an existing image, but the image itself was formed through multiple channels using, among others, art, aesthetics, ethics, narrative, authority, trust and emotions. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the references to a feeling of belonging to this big family could be encountered in the post-Soviet media (Bakshiev 2000, Danilova 2002, Kara-Murza 2002) as a part of general nostalgia. Rodoman argued against an idea that a post-Soviet Russian society is ‘de166

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ideologised’. He demonstrated that multiple traditional concepts of the state were still being used, reproducing something akin to the ‘cult of the state’, the fetishisation of the Soviet/Russian state I referred to in the Introduction. These images included the state as a household, where citizens are members of the big family who use its collective and not quite divided property; an alive being that is close, our own, requiring love and care as mother and father; and finally, as a male (Fatherland or otechestvo, someone who defends and protects) and female (Rodina, someone who is patient, suffering, victimized). Rodoman shows that many of these images elicit a tensed and emotional attitude to the sacred state; it is the source of fears and anxieties, and they are not harmless. He suggests that, to some individuals, these idols are mortally dangerous because they are bloodthirsty, pointing ‘at recent events resulting in the death of hundreds of people in the name of the [Russian] territorial integrity’ (1997: 302–08). The kinship-type relationship within the country affected the configuration of boundaries between the state and the family. A discoursive field was created for kinship terms to circulate and put in practice. ‘Policy transformations,’ writes Borneman, ‘are informed by a fairly consistent use of master narratives, which the state inscribes as models that give form to the everyday experiences of the citizens’ (1992: 77). The master narrative of society as a big family, coupled with the complementing view on the individual family as being incapable of bringing up children on its own, facilitated the development of another important element in the ‘virtual kinship’ concept: that of infrastructure. As powerful as emotionally charged concepts and images can be, they can carry one only so far. This is where the network of state agencies and institutions come in. Public care, education, healthcare and leisure for children were (previously exclusively) regulated, subsidized from the public purse and controlled by the state, with concern for child welfare and children’s moral development being the responsibility of state employees (teachers, medical doctors, police, mass media) and society (i.e., neighbours). As a society, ‘we’ raised children together, bringing them up in a variety of state-run institutions (creches, kindergartens, schools, medical care, residential homes, the KPDN, etc.) with the involvement of many professionals, making children the responsibility not only of the family, but also of society. These institutions could not have been built, staffed and run without a particular ideology regarding the place of childhood in society and family that normalized such arrangements. By assuming many responsibilities for the social and economic welfare of the parents, and parental responsibilities (as a co-carer) for the children, 167

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fulfilling parental obligations not only along with the family and through the family (as a responsible moral agent providing primary childcare) but also through children (via education and socialisation) as civilizing agents rendered the state a ‘full member’. In this co-parenting, an idea of the dominant role of the state had been constantly propagated, as it was recognized that the specialist scientific knowledge of professionally trained state employees was superior to the individual’s (family) knowledge, just as state provisions for care, availability of food, clothing and quality of living space were better than those in some families. This new type of ‘virtual kinship’ had far-reaching consequences. Undoubtedly, allowing this Soviet-type role-sharing was a consequence not only of mythologies-at-work, but of pragmatics: after all, when parents were in full-time employment with no extended family nearby (or when it was unavailable), using institutional networks was a default choice, letting the burden of childcare, a considerable part of already substantial load of domestic work, be carried out by somebody else. Others seemed to have internalized the role-sharing. Teachers commonly complained that many parents decided that merely giving birth to a child was the fulfilment of their parental obligation, and the rest was the responsibility of the state. Still other cases involved the straightforward application of force, as in the case of the ‘civilising project’ of Northern Native peoples, where residential care placements were sometimes made against the expressed wishes of the parents as late as the 1980s. In one way or another, this meant that a part of the parental responsibility carried by the state did not have to be carried by the mother. Therefore, parents were placed in the position of having limited personal parental responsibility, limited that is by the state’s assumption of part of the parental responsibility; this meant that they were not responsible for what was carried out by the state. Therefore, parents yielded to the state the role which it was actively seeking and promoting for itself. Parenting without the intense involvement of the state became either impossible or very difficult. I think that if we see the state as an extended family member, specifically where state institutions played the role of a parent wherever biological parents or relatives became unavailable, or were viewed as ‘unfit’, we can explain many features of my data. Included here are the existing and working childcare and child welfare infrastructures, the acceptability of institutional placements even though other ways of resolving a problem could have been found, the absence of individualized social services, the semi-public nature of the family and the state’s priority of treating children 168

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instead of the whole family. In short, the family was seen as a necessary unit, provided it stayed within the boundaries of the moral community; outside of them, the family unit was dispensable and substituted by the state as a social parent. The continuous process of cutting off failed families should not be seen as contradicting the proposed concept of virtual kinship. Writing on the issue of ambivalence in kinship, Peletz argues that ‘symbols and idioms of kinship and gender are invariably “about” differentiation and exclusion, as well as commonality and inclusion, and are … key components of system of morality and virtue that encode hierarchically phased and heavily value-laden difference’ (2001: 432). As Verdery pointed out, [in Romania] while striving to homogenize the entire ‘family’ under the Party’s patriarchal leadership, a new set of discriminations was introduced – between good and bad Party members, or Party members and others (1996: 66). This also affected childhood. Many experienced childhood in a far less positive way than the official ideal intended, and if their negative experiences did not conform to the required image, they were suppressed and muted. ‘Justified suffering’, such as that resulting from the events of the Revolution, the Civil War and the Second World War, had been acknowledged, so long as other forces (i.e., ‘enemies’, once again separating ‘good’ and ‘bad’) could be blamed for it rather than the state, the pattern dating from Stalinist times. For example, the suffering due to the Revolution being necessary for the struggle for a better future life or that due to the Second World War as being imposed on the country by Germany were acknowledged. At the same time, many other forms of childhood suffering, and the reasons for it, were silenced. The scale and reasons for famines of the 1920s and 1930s in Russia and the Ukraine have been revealed only after perestroika, and the victims of Stalinist repressions constituted submerged knowledge. The book Children of the GULAG (Vilenskiy 2002) documents the fate of children orphaned at this time. It is comprised of official documents, letters and memoirs of people who had gone through children’s homes, children’s prison camps (koloniya) and the children’s department of police (detpriemnik). Thousands of children were sent into exile with their families during the process of collectivization, where many of them died of starvation and illness. Many were sent to orphanages after their parents were arrested during the Stalinist purges or were intentionally separated from their parents by NKVD guards on their way to their place of exile. Many of them have never found their parents and siblings. Documents testify that the conditions in various children’s homes were appalling in terms of the poverty and hunger encountered, and the inadequacy 169

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of many careworkers and teachers, who lived off children’s homes. Orphaned and hungry children were often convicted of theft and vagrancy for collecting ears of grain, escaping from vocational schools or being late for work. The same split between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ childhood experiences took place in a time of relative political stability of the 1960s and 1970s. During my fieldwork, I was fortunate to be entrusted by Kim Moskovskiy, a former director of one of the children’s homes in the Magadan region, with a copy of his unpublished memoirs. In these, he remembers how, in the beginning of the 1960s, a teenage boy arrived at his children’s home from Magadan: He had stolen a round stamp from the director of the evening school where he was a student, and had thrown it in the school toilet. At the meeting of our Children’s Home kollektiv, we condemned his behaviour and suggested that he should retrieve it from the toilet. That’s what he did, although we thought it was next to impossible. But some teacher from the evening school informed the police. We begged the representative of the police to leave the boy with us, because, as the children were arguing, ‘he had found the stamp, he wants to stay in the kollektiv, he understood his mistake and he has learned his lesson’. The boy was crying in front of all of us. But he was taken anyway and sent to a koloniya [a children’s corrective prison camp], from which he escaped a few days later. Thus, instead of leaving the boy in the care of our kollektiv so we could work with him, now the difficult teenager is a runaway, hunted down like an animal. That was not the last case when we tried to take care of a difficult child only to have our wrists slapped by the police and prokuratura with their ‘police pedagogy’. A social pedagogue from a boarding school in the 1980s worked for many years in a corrective labour camp in the Magadan region. She remembers a young man, a former internat resident, who was first imprisoned for a petty theft. After serving his sentence, he was discharged, but he never received the small financial allowance that was due to him in order to allow him to buy a ticket home and gain sustenance. Apparently, it was retained by the administration. Not having any money at all, he stole some food in a buffet on the way home, was caught, tried and sent to prison. In 2000, according to the interview with the director of Centre for Temporary Isolation of Juvenile Delinquents (TSVINP), many juveniles get there because, being hungry and unsupervised, they steal food. The criminal law stipulated that children can be tried for stealing and sent to the 170

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children’s corrective colony (vospitatel’naya koloniya) upon reaching the age of 14. For more on the treatment of children viewed as being outside the ‘norm’, this time diagnosed with mental illness, see Appendix 2.

The State as a Sole Parent The child residential care institutions are not simply last resort possibilities for child placements. On the contrary, institutions were (and still are) intertwined with the social tissue of the community; they are an integral part of the child welfare network, a logical continuation of the state’s parental responsibility beyond the family, an extended arm of the state. An institutional placement, then, is comparable to moving a child from one family member (family) to another (an institution), where a child would receive better care. An ‘unfit’ family is indeed disposable because cutting them off is enabled by the existence of ‘social kinship through ideology and institutions’ and the child welfare infrastructure that was built on this idea. Whether accepted (Liarskaya 2004) or resisted (Bloch 2003), used enthusiastically, reluctantly, or resigned to using it, residential care institutions became a part of the infrastructure through which the state’s parental care had been operationalized. In post-Soviet society we are dealing with the legacy of multiplicity that is the (Soviet child welfare) state system – a phantom state – where infrastructure had been developed to fit a particular ideology and policy. What seems to be important is the work of creating relationship, however fictional, but existing both discoursively and institutionally, that is, possible to act upon. This relationship represents kinship. As long as the system is in use, regardless of what people might think about it, the relationship is reproduced as if it exists, simultaneously recreating the phantom state. This may also explain why the state representatives feel that institutional placements are ‘a normal thing to do in our difficult time’. It was a normal thing to do even before the difficult times; come to think of it, there was not a period in Soviet history that had not been difficult, and the extended arm of the state has been there to receive the disadvantaged (or the manufactured disadvantaged) children that were still within the realm of the moral community. When a child was moved to an institution, the state shifted from being a co-parent to being sole parent. A new relationship was created, that is, a direct ‘child–state’ relationship where the state substituted itself for the family completely, and cut off the child’s ties with the biological family, becoming the only parent, calling on various teachers and carers in state institutions to accept and love children in their care as their own children, 171

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and expecting the children to reciprocate. Individual (family) upbringing was here replaced by collective upbringing in its ultimate form, that is, without one or even a few permanent individuals who would care for a child in the long term. The children became exclusively the state’s children (gosudarstvenniye deti, detdomovtsy).

Notes 1. 2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

Thanks to Barbara Bodenhorn for her insight. Usually six months, in some cases up to a year. Themselves values inherited by Leninist high modernism from as far back as the Imperial Russia of Catherine the Great, with her love, as a Prussian, of order and efficiency (Scott 1998: 194). I tend to agree with Dunham’s sharp eye regarding the striving towards a better life, but question her conflation of embourgeoisement and meshchanstvo. The latter refers to a thin stratum of pre-Revolutionary urban dwellers. In her interpretation, much of Soviet society subscribed to values that were marked by ‘fervour for possessions’, meshchanstvo’s key trait, a comfortable lifestyle, materially underpinned pretensions, complacency with the regime, and a lack of higher aspiration. I question her assumption that striving for material acquisitions and higher aspirations are mutually exclusive, even if they did not translate into political action (the latter two being definitive of intelligentsia). I also question to what extent striving towards material possessions and kul’turnost’ were characteristic of specifically meshchanstvo and not, for example, the bourgeoisie or dvoryanstvo (nobility); why among the many social strata existing in the pre-revolutionary Russia, Dunham selected only one and not the most numerous stratum while, equally, the influence of peasant culture on the urban environment could be examined (see for example Morozova 2007). Finally, in a country devastated by ruinous wars and revolutions, striving for material possessions is hardly surprising. Although ideological propositions held that working class was a superior class, the bearer of the highest consciousness, many considered intelligentsia to be the leader. Members of this group, defined by Dmitriy Likhachev, a prominent academician, as professions based on mental labour, i.e., doctors, teachers, scientists, engineers, artists or writers, were thought to be the nation’s leaders, adhering to moral values rather than material possessions, although the vast army of Soviet white collar professionals did not strive to assume such a role (Parts 2004). On strong parallels between Calvinism and Leninism, see Luke 1983. For more on Protestant values in Soviet society, see Taivans 2001. After all, despite the stress on collectivism and enterprise-based provisions, much of the upward movement and acquisition of material sufficiency had been based on entrepreneurial activity and private initiative (i.e., Turovskaya 2002, Yurchak 2002). 172

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9.

To reassure themselves that they are not failures (or, if they are, that it does not count), they need to identify ‘bad’ and punish it. 10. Unofficially, many people engaged in the shadow ‘second’ economy. 11. There have been separate residential care institutions for children with mental, physical, and sensory disabilities. Since no individualized assistance was available, placing children in residential care was seen as in their best interests, as the family at home could not look after such children properly. 12. Marilyn Strathern alerted me to the fact that in Euro-American concepts of kinship, parenthood presupposes emotional involvement. As will be shown later, that was the normative, albeit unrealistic, expectation of carer-child relationship in institutions, which nevertheless happened in real life.

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PART II

BEING A SOCIAL ORPHAN

Chapter 6

The State as a Sole Parent

Po Etapu: The Child’s Journey through Residential Homes To study social orphans is to study a separate self-contained world. For those who grew up in institutions from birth and did not manage to find their relatives, the experiences of ‘home’, ‘family’ and especially ‘parent’ are markedly different from those children who grew up in their birth families. A detailed ethnographic study of one institution, let alone three, would entail a separate project. Not being able to describe even a fraction of my observations, I tried to understand an institution as a model of a parentchild relationship, since the purpose of many of them is exactly that. Most children’s homes conformed to Goffman’s definition of total institutions as ‘a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life’ (1961: xiii). While Goffman insists that ‘total institutions are incompatible with a crucial element of our society, the family’ (ibid.: 11), the idea of children’s homes endeavours to prove the opposite. Otpravit’ po etapu, an expression used occasionally by various people, is rooted in the experiences of prisoners in pre-Revolutionary and Soviet Russia when they were sent to labour camps, making their way from one community with transition camps to another until they reached their final destination. Used with regards to social orphans, this expression refers to the child’s progression through a succession of institutions. Children can get into the residential care system at any age from birth to 16. Depending on the point of entry, a child may never experience home and family life. This happens when he or she is moved from the maternity home into a children’s hospital, then transferred to the baby home, and from there to the 177

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children’s home, internat, summer camps, vocational school or (infrequently) higher education institution dormitories. In this chapter I shall examine the cosmology of some of the residential care institutions through which children progress.

Negotiating Institutional Space: Home or Work There is an inherent ambiguity in the status of both residential care institutions and of the children residing in them. Children’s institutions display signs of duality, of being simultaneously public and private. For the employees it is a (public) place of employment, yet the kind of work undertaken implies bringing up unrelated children in a manner similar to that of parental children, a diffused expectation that produces a whole range of outcomes, from expression of love and care on the part of carers to cases of child neglect and abuse. For the children, it is their home, a problematic concept as children may not have just one, but at least three consecutive ‘homes’ with multiple carers as they grow up (baby home, children’s home, internat). After leaving the internat, the possibility to return to one’s ‘home’ depends on the administration: while some directors keep the doors of their institution open to their former residents, others keep them closed. This struggle for the meaning of ‘home’ between a director (keep open) and ruling regional administration in the 1970s (keep closed) was one of the many conflicts reflected in Kim’s memoirs. If private property is treated with care, attitudes toward gosudarstvennoye (state property) are reflected in a sense of lessened concern and responsibility towards ‘public’ children and institutions, regarding them as public property, that is, belonging to everybody and nobody in particular. The Magadan Baby Home is a rundown building with peeling paint and a bare play yard. There is no money in the city budget to improve its appearance. The attempts to build a playground for children resulted in it being vandalized by some unknown youths to the point where it became unusable. Items in the Baby Home that were meant to be used for and by children often become the possessions of employees. Some staff members complained about widespread theft by other employees: ‘They are stealing toys, clothes, everything they can put their hands on, for their own private use.’ Many treat residential care institutions as a place of work and income: We depend on these children and we need children in institutions. We receive our salaries here, and if caring for children with some deviations in their health, we get paid more. All children are 178

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diagnosed with ‘delayed mental development’. Nobody removes this diagnosis because for care-workers it is a source of higher salary (director of a Baby Home). I asked one doctor why the teachers do not use more developmental activities. She replied: ‘Who cares? Everyone’s basic concern is their salary, and it does not depend on the quality of their work. Why should they bother if it means more work for them?’ There is a generalized expectation that the institutional staff treat children as their own. At times this is unexpectedly shown in reprimands. Thus, in an official letter, the Vice-Head of the Department for Education (our ‘gatekeeper’) admonished particular upbringers for ‘not treating children with genuine motherly love and care; when children from the remedial internat were placed in a hospital, no-one visited them for a year, nobody sent them letters or gifts’. This was found to be unacceptable. Others are concerned with making it a real home for children. As mentioned previously, the director of the Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy children’s home was happy when children did not want to go home because it was better in her internat. To her it seemed to be the fulfilment of a personal ambition. The Temporary Shelter was elaborately decorated, making it so home-like that children did not want to leave it and go home. Kim Moskovskiy invested himself completely into his ‘home’, caring for these children as his own. Being an orphan himself, and never having had his own family, this Children’s Home was his home and family. These people treated their workplace as their ‘home’, thus developing a sense of belonging and professional identity, feeling responsible for a children’s home and children. The feeling of ownership and a caring attitude is acquired through love of their work and children, many years of experience working in an institution, and identification with it both personally and professionally. Perhaps this duality of institutions, the place of work but also the striving to make it a real home for the children and the sentiment of feeling a part of this ‘family’, is what made Nikolai, a director of a children’s summer camp for social orphans, speak of podmena, or substitution of an institution for a ‘family’ and ‘home’. Starting with the Baby Home, I shall describe institutions that set a paradigm of institutional culture, following children’s progression of age, and from most isolated to increasing, albeit limited, involvement with the outside world.

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The Cosmology of Institutions The Baby Home If a child enters an institution before the age of three, he or she goes to the Baby Home (Figure 6.1). The Baby Home, a three-storey building in the centre of the city, has a typical standardized kindergarten layout characteristic of many Soviet-style children’s institutions, along with the administrative structure and personnel, and daily operating plans and schedules. The Baby Home functions as a self-contained unit: it has a kitchen, a laundry room and a medical isolator. The Baby Home looks no different from any other kindergarten, giving out a sense of familiarity. Each floor has a long corridor with doors leading to units called ‘groups’, of which there are eight groups altogether, including two for babies. The capacity of the Baby Home was 70 children; at the time of my study there were 65 children and 135 staff, including 47 upbringers, senior upbringers and a social pedagogue. This social pedagogue indicated that although there should not be more than six children per adult, at times there were as many as ten or even twelve. Financing for this institution was seen as inadequate. The Chief Doctor complained that she needs 60 roubles per day per child for food, while in reality she gets only 7 roubles; for medicine, she says, ‘we need 13 roubles a day and I have only 1 rouble’. They calculated that the cost of a child in this institution was 6,000 roubles a month.

Figure 6.1. Magadan Baby Home. 180

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All units are virtually identical in layout, equipment and furniture, consisting of a hall with lockers for outside clothes, a playing/eating room, a bedroom and a bathroom with potties, wash basins and a bathtub. The doors to these units are locked, and children see a part of the larger building only when they go outside. Upon reaching a particular age, children are moved to the next group, having little change in physical environment, regimental, disciplinary and ritual elements, stretching into the Children’s Home and further into internat settings, thanks to a sweeping standardization regarding most aspects of institutional life. A brief visit to the Baby Home leaves a very good impression. The facility is kept very clean; the rooms, which are spacious and orderly, have bright toys lined up on the shelves; carpets and plants make the rooms look cosy. This picture provides a snapshot of niceness frozen in time in its immediate, attractive appeal of an ideal environment for children. The staff consists entirely of women wearing white coats, while the children are clean in their faded cotton blouses and overalls. The sight of babies and toddlers sleeping in their cots, with warm fresh air and sunny rooms, gives a tranquil feeling to the whole environment. The women who work here put a lot of effort into making it look the way it does. The Baby Home represents the intentions of the administration to provide the best public childcare: clean, orderly, a safe environment, food, clothing and constant adult supervision, all in stark contrast with the unregulated, neglected, dirty and poor households from which many children came. What else can one possibly do to provide a better environment? Indeed, this was the concern of the director, who said that numerous inspections by the various higher authorities yielded only the highest marks given to the Baby Home. Cleanliness is required and strictly enforced in all children’s institutions, but especially in the Baby Home, where very young children are cared for and an outbreak of an infectious disease is a serious concern. Public health authorities regularly take samples of bacterial culture from the surfaces in all rooms. If the level of cleanliness does not conform to the required level, there would be reprimands, with orders to improve cleaning practices. Thus, the nice fluffy toys decorating the shelves will probably not be given to children to play with for fear of infection. The plastic toys, having been washed in chlorine on a daily basis, have lost their colour and fail to attract the children’s attention. However, for the staff, they are still ‘toys’, objects with which children are supposed to play, so the same few toys are used time and again. The initial tranquil picture starts to change when a closer look reveals the extent to which the individual lives of young children are subordinated to 181

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the external requirements of mass efficiency achieved by regime, control and discipline. The personalities of the children seem to live an unengaged life, parallel to the orderly, frozen in time, life of the well-cared-for inanimate objects. ‘When many children just come to us’, said one doctor, ‘with all the food and care, they literally start blooming, but after a few months, they start drooping (snikayut) again and start lagging behind in their development.’

Regime, Discipline and Control Regime, or division and control of time, governs the life of both children and adults. It constitutes a ‘grid’ whose ‘cells’ should be filled with certain activities. The schedule of all daily activities, the ‘building blocks’ of the regime, are spelled out in most residential care homes on bulletin boards, as they are in any kindergarten or summer camp. The times for feeding, sleeping, playing and going outside are meant to be strictly observed. The kitchen prepares and brings food at a certain time, collecting dirty dishes for washing and preparation for the next meal. This structure serves many purposes. Structure and order are values in themselves. Regimental moments are based on the ‘scientifically’ developed correct distribution of rest and age-appropriate activities. Appropriate care is usually rationalized and communicated through respective bureaucracies. For example, requirements for the health status of babies are developed by the Ministry of Health and disseminated down to the regional and local administrations, and are then disseminated further to specific organizations such as children’s polyclinics, hospitals and the Baby Home. Adherence to these requirements is enforced by the immediate higher authorities and a failure to adhere results in verbal or written reprimands, or other means of correcting undesired outcomes. Along with schedules, there are also statements of goals and tasks as required by the higher authorities. However, some claim they may have a declarative character, something visible to receive a checkmark. The existing structure is thought to ensure the wellbeing of children according to the accepted standards, and here the outcomes are measured, when measurement is possible, i.e., sickness rate of children, degree of cleanliness, orderliness, etc. The structure is also convenient because of its high visibility, always ready to be presented with minimal preparation time. When the outcome is not possible to measure, or when the authorities do not have expectations in relation to certain outcomes, then the employees do not have to produce results, and this constitutes gaps in the development 182

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of children. For example, children’s clothes are usually clean and babies’ bottoms rarely have nappy rashes (both measurable and visible). These are required and are consequently checked and evaluated by head doctors. At the same time, the norms and standards in language acquisition and the intellectual and physical development for children are based on the norms in development of home children and, although outlined in documents, are treated rather like an unattainable ideal. It is assumed that children will be lagging behind, suffering from ‘delayed mental development’, a recognized medical category. This particular aspect of the employees’ work is not evaluated, but even this is an improvement, as until recently the Baby Home, being a medical establishment, employed only medical personnel. To address the problem of children’s delayed development, the Baby Home established the post of an upbringer (vospitatel’), a pedagogue for children over 12 months. Often, however, nannies carry out as much work as these pedagogues do. This fact elicited a strong indignation on the part of the director of one children’s home, who, commenting on the declarative slogan, ‘Vse luchshee- detyam’ (All the best- to children), exclaimed, ‘What sort of ‘the best’ is it? That our children in children’s homes are brought up by semi-literate nannies?!’ Since adherence to the requirements for development is not measured, the employees may allow themselves to not stick too rigidly to the content of the ‘cells’ and produce only measurable results: the outward appearance of children’s wellbeing. The content of the ‘cells’ may appear as if it really exists, but the meaning of it could be quite different. The required physical tempering of children (zakalka), while existing on paper, entails nothing more than changing nappies. A nurse once explained: ‘What zakalka are you talking about? We could barely keep them warm enough so they won’t get sick.’ One teacher had lied in my presence to a head teacher about a lesson that she supposedly conducted, while she had not done it at all. A few teachers conducted lessons very thoroughly, talking to children and showing them toys, although a few times I caught myself thinking that some of them were performing especially for me. Regime allows carers to ensure the regularity of children’s lives and to fulfil their obligations to control a large group of children. Often this regularity of regimental moments makes them the most meaningful aspect of life. It produces rituals pertaining to the most common and permanent components of institutionalized life: feeding, sleeping and going outside are a sequence of operations well known to the children and are performed in a particular order. The rest depends on the individual carer and is quite 183

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arbitrary in application. As one teacher said, ‘If a carer is not very talkative, the children do not talk much either, and vice versa’. If a carer is tired, she may not want to fill the ‘cell’ with the required activity, such as going outside for a walk, or making it interesting for the children. She would rather sit down, talk to her colleague and rest. When a rude carer is on duty, children show signs of fear: she pulls, prohibits and yells more than others. Thus, regime structures children’s lives, ensures that the employees account for their work to the authorities, and allows carers to manage a large group of children. To achieve such efficiency and adhere to all the rules, the personal life of a child must be subordinated to the ruling order and authority. It is reached by exerting discipline, which seeks to control the behaviour of children to ensure their conformity to the regime and norms of behaviour by fitting any individual expression, wishes and intentions into the required divisions of time and space. Adults govern the use, division and control of time, leaving children with no choice but to conform, submit and follow. The younger the child, the less control and ownership of time and agency he or she has. Play may be interrupted because it is time to go on the potty. Children eat not what and when they want, but what and when they must. A child may have his or her food taken away because he or she ate too slowly and did not finish at the same time as everybody else. A child’s relationship to food is not that of defining the self through food exploration. The process of eating is not designed to be a relaxed, pleasurable, unhurried and uninterrupted experience. This experience is primarily functional: to fill the stomach. For the adults, the goal is to adhere to the regime, to do the required amount of work in a given time. Under these circumstances, the individual wishes of children are not important and consequently are not recognized. It is more important for a carer to feed all the children in the shortest possible time than to find out why a child is upset: while she feeds one child, others cry, waiting for their turn. A nanny will rush past a crying child, because she has seven of them in mind, and she needs to conduct a series of operations to complete her task: feeding the children. The same goes for dressing children to go outside, handling six to nine clumsy toddlers, making sure they do not leave without her, taking them down the stairs and not letting them go off in all directions. So, instead of individual children, she sees bodies to dress, bottoms to wipe and mouths to feed. Through no fault of their own, by denying children what they express their need for, adults tell them: ‘I don’t want to hear or see what you may want. There is enough for me to do and I don’t want to be distracted.’ They rush 184

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the children, not letting anything come between themselves and the discipline of the regime. Discipline included the physical manipulation of children’s bodies, moving them, stopping, holding and pulling, or using a loud and threatening tone of voice. In most cases, discipline is based on the use of force, not on verbal persuasion and explanation. This regime-governed environment compelled a few former residents to complete only nine years of secondary schooling.1 They told me that they did not want to finish high school in their internat because of over-regimentation: ‘At 16, I could not take it anymore.’ Another former resident, serving his sentence in prison, said: ‘There is no vospitanie in the internat. All you know is to come there at feeding time, like an animal.’ The ‘grid’ system was learned well.

Division of Space and Isolation: Circles of Confinement The space in the Baby Home is also divided. The Home could be seen as a number of circles situated within each other, with the largest being the fence around the building, and the smallest being the child, whose inner world is encapsulated by his or her inability to break the physical and mental boundaries imposed by the staff. The children rarely cross the boundary of the first circle, the fence surrounding the Baby Home’s area (Figure 6.2), unless there is a special

Figure 6.2. Baby Home’s playground. 185

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reason for this, i.e., hospitalization in one of the children’s hospitals. Children play on the Baby Home playground under the supervision of carers, who usually do not allow children to explore the play area at their will and keep all the children close to themselves. The carers chat while watching over the children, who are trying to find something interesting to do in the designated space. If a teacher allows children to pursue their interests, in no time the children will wander away, and to collect them back into one place is certainly a challenge. The Baby Home itself is another circle, as children may not leave the Baby Home building on their own. The units are locked from the inside, creating yet another circle, and children are not seen in the corridors of the building unless supervised by adults – usually leaving the unit (i.e., to go outside) or coming back to the unit. Within a unit, the hallway with lockers is off-limits to the children unless they are preparing to go outside. A closed door separates the hallway from the playing/eating area, which in turn is separated from the bedroom where children may go only at a designated time for day or night sleep. The bathroom is also used for hygiene purposes and children are not allowed in there at other times. The playing/eating area is where children stay during much of their waking time. Children who can walk are confined to this room, but the younger the children are, the more confinement they

Figure 6.3. In a playpen. 186

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Figure 6.4. In the medical unit.

experience: they may be restricted to a playpen, a walker, a chair or even a carpet. Children are rarely allowed to crawl on the floor or on the carpet. They are discouraged from leaving the carpet area, I was told, because doctors are afraid they could catch a cold, and couches are off-limits because children could fall off them or soil them. The final place of confinement is their cribs, which they are unable to leave at will (Figures 6.3 and 6.4). When the weather is cold, they are taken to a special empty unheated room, given plastic toys and, with a window open, left to play there as a substitute for an outside walk. As a special treat I would put them on the windowsill so that they could observe the outside world a little. Indeed, they were fighting to get on it and did not want to leave, looking from behind the windows and sadly reminding me of locked up inmates. Therefore, at any given time children are separated from a larger immediate space by either real or invisible walls. Real barriers include the walls of a crib, a playpen, a chair, the walls of a room, the building and the fence. Invisible walls are constituted by the bans imposed and enforced by the carers that gradually become internalized walls, being created in the children’s minds. The crossing of invisible walls depends on the child and on the presence or absence of particular adults: with strict teachers, children do not dare, but a less controlling or inexperienced teacher soon finds herself in chaos. The division of space facilitates isolation. Every time an invisible circle is drawn around a child, crossing the boundaries of this 187

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circle on his or her own proves to be difficult, unless permitted or facilitated by an adult. Thus, a child cannot leave a crib unless taken out at a designated time by a carer. Once put in a playpen, he or she cannot crawl out, unless taken out by a carer, which does not happen very often. When put in a walker, the child is again separated from the rest of the room by yet another barrier, the walker’s plastic rim, and the walker is often tied to a stationary object to prevent children from moving in it. Children are not permitted to leave the playroom. Put on a potty (starting at the age of 12 months), they may not get up unless they finish the job. The reaction of children differs: from submitting to the demands of adults and playing in a designated time and space or, if bored, just spending long minutes in a passive and immobile state, to protesting with cries and screams. Children are isolated from the outside world, and this especially affects those toddlers who reside in the Baby Home from birth. They may see a male only occasionally and rarely see people other than their carers. They do not experience cars, shops, streets with trees and bushes, or animals. One teacher told me she brought in a dog and a cat, but the children were afraid and cried, so she stopped bringing them. On one occasion, the social pedagogue of the Baby Home was comparing care in this Baby Home with what she saw during her tourist trip to Germany. She told me how a group of children was taken for a ride to the city in a special brightly coloured cart. She was lamenting as to why ‘our’ children did not have such an opportunity. I suggested taking them out to the city in regular baby carriages, used by the carers to take children within the fenced area of the Baby Home. She took a few seconds of silence and said, ‘I don’t know … I never thought about it’. The isolation of the children from the city is an unquestioned and unchallenged norm. The division of space and isolation are combined with total collectivization of all activities. Within a group, the limited ability to follow one’s interests, express wishes and move at will form a bubble around each child. Extending of the self into the surroundings to habituate it and, by doing so, define boundaries between the self and an outside space is limited. Another prominent feature of group living is the complete absence of individual and quiet time to oneself, and of space to flee from the forced interaction with adults and peers (Figures 6.5 and 6.6). This is one of the characteristics common to children‘s institutions and prison camps, and has been described as ‘one of the strongest torments of compelled communal living’ (Dostoevsky 1983). A child is expected to conform to the group’s activity. The proverb ‘seven do not wait for one’ illustrates a principle that had ruled the behaviour of individual children in relation to the group in any child’s collective in Soviet 188

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Figure 6.5. In anticipation of food. Children waiting on their chairs for lunch to be served.

Figure 6.6. A bedroom in the Baby Home. Nap time. 189

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times. The difference is in the degree of applicability: in the residential care home, individual conformity is expected all the time, while with home children, there is less rigidity and control, and more flexibility. At times, children living in a group develop the habit of being imitative. If one child starts rocking, while all the children are sitting on the chairs, in a matter of seconds, everybody else starts doing the same. When one child starts waving hands and making certain sounds in anticipation of food, so will everybody else. Riding potties is contagious too. This isolation lessens with progression through residential care institutions. However, the consequences of isolation constitute one of the most pronounced problems of former residents: difficulties in understanding how the outside world functions, in social adjustment and a certain defencelessness and naiveté in dealing with social issues.

Limitations on Physical, Emotional and Intellectual Activities We have established that to achieve the desired degree of control, discipline and regime, the system employs the division of space, isolation and the control of time. This is done by means of the carers limiting children by using physical restraints, prohibitions (including the prohibition of any unsanctioned activity) and limiting stimulation. Ubiquitous prohibitions, physical restraint and the interruption of intellectual inquiries are the three most pronounced features of life in the Baby Home, permeating the whole fabric of children’s lives. I have interviewed care-leavers of different ages, ranging from 26 to 60. Unanimously, they stated that in the residential care homes vse nel’sya, ‘everything is “forbidden”’. Here are a few excerpts from my field notes that illustrate what is regularly prohibited and how physical restraint is used: Tolya (13 months) is sitting on his potty. He starts ‘riding’ his potty, a favourite kind of self-entertainment. This is prohibited and the children are stopped from ‘riding’ and are moved back to where they started. Tolya is really interested in a piece of scotch tape on the wall. He ‘rode’ his potty to the wall, but as soon as he touched the tape, the nanny moved him back. She got busy with someone else, he started ‘riding’ towards the tape again. As soon as he touched the tape he was moved back, now a grouchy nanny yelling at him. She leaves him alone, he ‘rides’ towards the tape. Angered, she tied his potty to the leg of the bathtub. When he, unable to ride, started crying, she bangs 190

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loudly on the metal bathtub. This startled the kids. She claps her hands switching their attention to her, stopping them from trying to get free from the potties. Andrei (12 months) is in the walker. He moves towards the shelf with toys, reaching for a plush toy, which the nurse takes away. She puts it back on the shelf and moves Andrei away. He makes more attempts. She ties up his walker, he sits there for 1 hour 30 minutes with nothing to do, staring at space or observing what is going on around the room. The children are out in the Baby Home’s playground. The teachers do not allow them to go more than 2–3 metres away from them. There is nothing to play with except old plastic toys. Some try to pick little pieces of glass, metal cans, and paper, but this is not permitted: ‘Vladik, do not pick the flower! Do not pick the grass! Don’t sit on the ground! Vladik, come here!’ Vladik, a smart and inquisitive boy, finally gave up trying to busy himself with something meaningful, and just sat on the border doing nothing. This is what the teacher wanted in the first place, being less worry for her. When children, who cannot walk yet, are freed from their constraints, they enjoy their freedom immensely. They quickly crawl towards something interesting, but it is off-limits: curtains, windows, cords on the floor, neatly folded clothes in the changing table. If children persist in reaching the forbidden objects, they are put back in confined spaces. It is difficult to calm them down afterwards, so the carers prefer to let children be free for no more than 10–15 minutes at a time. Other children in the playpen get upset while enviously watching the lucky ones. Thus, for children space is divided into ‘freedom from constraints’ (volya) and ‘confinement’. At about 24 months, children should have two 15-minute lessons a day, and a 10-minute lesson with a speech therapist, during which they are given developmental and manipulative toys and have directed playtime (Figure 6.7). These activities are the closest that they come to the facilitation of intellectual development. Some lessons are based on verbal representations of the world, not on experiential exploration. Instead of taking children out to the city, the teachers show children pictures of what they could see in town, i.e., grass, dogs or parks. One young teacher even suggested in her diploma dissertation, ‘Children do not know what a street is. We should tell them more about streets’ (my italics). 191

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Figure 6.7. A lesson.

Children’s individual activities are very often interrupted without any explanation. From my field notes: The teacher gave Vladik (24 months) a book. After about 5 minutes she took the book away and gave him a plastic goose with rings to put on and take off. After about 4 minutes she took it away and gave him a toy car. This is his third toy in the past 10 minutes, which he didn’t choose. Tanya (23 months) was given a pyramid. After a few minutes the teacher decided that Tanya had enough of the pyramid, and gave her cubes. Tanya started rubbing her eyes, a sure sign of distress in many of these children. The teacher says, ‘Don’t you want to play anymore? All right let’s put them back’. But Tanya didn’t even have a chance to play with them. The teacher concludes that she is spoilt. Lack of sensory, verbal, physical, emotional and intellectual stimulation comes in all shapes and forms. During lessons, a speech therapist teaches children words and sounds, while during the rest of the day the children are not spoken to much, since nannies prefer to silently take, move or restrain the children, or use baby talk. There was no free play with developmental toys, drawing or book reading. One can see many brightly coloured toys in the office of the head teacher. They were not given out to the groups for fear of being stolen. 192

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If given enough time and opportunity, these children can focus on their object of interest for a long time. They did not have any trouble concentrating on drawing in my notebook, being curious about the contents of my purse, and scrutinizing my pen, notebook and necklace. The most insignificant things aroused their interest. The teachers consider only toys to be suitable for children’s play. Everything else was forbidden. I witnessed a great need on the part of the children to crawl and run, to pursue their interests, to explore their surroundings, to busy their minds. But in most cases, the adult/child ratio of one teacher and a nanny to every six to nine children makes it difficult to organize children in a group while preserving discipline. As such, children were consistently taught how not to take the initiative, but rather how to follow their carers’ demands to be quiet, still, regulated and controlled. Some teachers would reluctantly say: ‘Of course they do not develop. What do they see here?’ However, the employees do little to give children more, as if they themselves are resigned to the inevitability of the existing order. I have not seen many indifferent children. Most are so eager to get to an interesting object that they think only about themselves, pushing and shoving other children, grabbing and finally enjoying the object for a few short moments before it might be taken away by others, leading to fights. There is a serious competition for the scarce resources. This competition often gets to be quite violent in the Children’s Home, where the children are older and stronger. Curtailing the children’s initiative and exploratory behaviour was accompanied by discouragement and non-recognition of individuality. There have been no birthday celebrations for the children. Children might have an individual preference for food, a different pace of eating, or wish to have a snack; a desire to play differently, to get more individual attention from the carers. Expressions of individuality were often met with indignation and sarcasm. A child who behaves differently presents a carer with a new set of problems that have to be confronted. If a child asks for more attention, other children want it too, but a carer cannot possibly provide affection for all children equally. Therefore, no one should receive it. Any sign of disobedience, curiosity, will or individualized character draws a reaction from the adults with comments such as: ‘Look at him! Where did you get this idea! What an individualist!’ A child demanding attention is perceived in only one way – as being spoilt, which, in this context, is wanting more than anybody else. This is swiftly curtailed by either a harsh bellow or by merely ignoring the toddlers’ wishes altogether. Some teachers treat children as if they are dolls. A child’s body can be manipulated, moved and pulled. This non-recognition of individuality one pedagogue called ‘psychological non-existence’ (see Chapter 7). 193

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Children do not have any personal possessions. Their clothes and toys are communal. Certain items are assigned to them for their use temporarily, such as a bed, towel, a potty and a set of outside clothes (they wear different sizes). The problem of ownership persists throughout all their years of residential care. The older children manage to sustain more ownership of their body and space, becoming more resourceful in avoiding regimental demands and prohibitions. These young people effectively do not grow up with the ideas of individual ownership and caring for personal possessions, since they have only a few. It is theirs, but not theirs. It appears from nowhere, is here today, but worn out and thrown away or left behind for somebody else to use tomorrow. In internats, or a combined internat/children’s home, older children or stronger peers take away by force or steal gifts some children receive from relatives. Children leave residential care at the age of 16 to 17 owning literally nothing.

Affection, Interaction and Individual Attention Ekaterina’s definition of a ‘good’ family was a loving and caring family where everything is done for the child and for the sake of the child. Do children find this in the Baby Home? Normally when children cry, adults attend them when there is a suspicion that the matter is serious. In most other cases, the carers react to the toddlers’ cries in passing. They are usually too busy to find out what happened when a child is upset, sort out children’s conflicts or use explanations in support of their demands. If a child is very upset, there is no ‘safe’ person to go to, because adults rarely comfort children in time of distress. Children cry to themselves. Prolonged physical contact between children and carers, cuddling, kissing or hugging does not normally take place. There is such a void of physical contact, of body warmth and closeness, that when children do get it, they melt into an adult, and one has to tear them off. The intense intimacy of this connection is difficult to describe or overestimate. Trying to provide such individualized attention invariably infringes discipline. One teacher confided: ‘We can do whatever is required of us, and we can do it well. One thing we cannot do is to give them our love. Children know this, they feel that this is not for real, this is our work.’ This lack of interaction starts with newborn babies, who are fed from bottles propped up in their cots. When changing babies’ nappies, nurses use few words and even fewer smiles. The carers do not hold children for any appreciable length of time. The physical contact is absent even there, and from now on the children will be travelling between cribs, playpens, chairs and the floor with minimal contact from humans. 194

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An observer can easily detect this void in the interaction between carer and child. Children are longing for interpersonal contact with an adult, but the carers swerve around children, making themselves inaccessible. Adults and children live as if in two parallel worlds, although they exist side by side. Children patiently, or impatiently, look at the carers to come and pick them up, to give them some attention, while the carers are just too busy: Lena (24 months) is sitting on her potty. She follows with her eyes a nanny. The nanny is coming her way and for a moment it looks as if the nanny is coming towards Lena. Lena stretched her arms out in hopes of being acknowledged by the nanny. The nanny went right by her, because she hadn’t even intended to pick Lena up. Lena fought back tears, but gave in and cried. The nanny didn’t pay any attention, children here get upset all the time. Nikita was rocking for 30 minutes. When I asked a teacher about him, she said, ‘This is normal. This is how he calms himself ’. Possible interaction becomes a top down channel of communication whereby children are always on the down side. Winnicot’s mother-child interaction with ‘maternal mirroring’ (Winnicot 1964, 1965) by an infant does not happen here. Children’s individual wishes or cues do not usually elicit an appropriate response from the carers. Soon children learn that usually, with some exceptions, when they are hungry, it doesn’t matter, if it is not yet time to eat. If they are upset, nobody cares. If there is a conflict between children, nobody tries to sort things out and explain anything to them. An attention-seeking device is to do something loud, to cry, to protest. However, the response is often of a particular kind: scolding and curtailing of the child’s activities. Adults do not use appropriate verbal communication, and neither do the children. Language acquisition is considerably impeded due to the lack of stimulation, interaction with carers, verbal communication and isolation: Vladik was upset because his work with a speech therapist, which he always looks forward to, is interrupted, it is time for the group to play outside. He cries, but is crudely brought to a hall, dressed and off he goes. He cannot get over it, and all the time he spends outside he quietly cries ‘to nobody’, to himself. No attempts to comfort him. After the group was brought back to their unit, he runs to the door leading 195

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to the speech therapist and stands there, waiting. He has been upset for about an hour, not switching to other things he may have found interesting. He is lucky this time. The speech therapist took pity on him and he was taken back to the room to finish his game. Afterwards he looked a lot more contented. Without volunteers, the carers are overloaded. However, I have not seen a single volunteer, especially in the Baby Home. As a medical organization, it has special requirements for adult visitors. Providing love and affection to children under current conditions has two major problems. First, the carers feel they cannot really love all the children. Some teachers/nannies may have their ‘favourite’ child, which they treat somewhat differently, but to treat all the children affectionately and lovingly is not realistic. Given that the employees have to work 13 hour shifts, managing a group of six to ten children, the task to do all that is required and show love for the children is nearly impossible. The need of the children to be loved, hugged, listened to and played with is insatiable. But, as I found from experience, once one starts to be a ‘mother’ to one or two children, minutes later all of them want the same treatment and the room is plunged into chaos.

Attribution of Blame Some staff members recognize that delays in children’s development are the results of children not being loved. Others, most commonly, blame parents and the children in the same kind of switching argument as in Maria’s court case: the explanation must support the conclusion at all costs, it is over-determined. Consider one example. In the Baby Home, looking through the journal where the children’s developmental progress was recorded, I noticed a certain one-year-old boy who was considered to have ‘delayed mental development’. I asked the upbringer on duty why he was lagging behind the developmental ‘norm’ for children his age. My question was met with a surprised look: ‘But what family was he brought up in? What kind of development can he receive there?’ I noted that the boy was raised in the Baby Home since he was three weeks old. After a moment of confusions she replied: ‘But of course, look at his heredity. What kind of children could such parents produce?’ She did not attribute his ‘delayed development’ to limited stimulation in the Baby Home environment. Despite the different reasons for placement and the variety of family circumstances, as soon as a child is placed in an institution, he or she is treated as a human reject, coming from poor stock. Many teachers with 196

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whom I spoke dismissively waved their hands saying, ‘Ah, all these children are coming from families of alcoholics and prostitutki (promiscuous women). These children have neurological illnesses, their mental world (psikhika) is unstable. That is why they are not capable of focusing’. To them, if a child resides in the Baby Home, he or she must have come from a neblagopoluchnaya family, including those of former residents. These children are considered to inherit all the bad traits of their parents. Indeed, the discourse of genes is prevalent in rationalizing the failures of the system. Placing the blame on parents and children enables employees not to feel responsible for the children’s poor development. The view of children as inheriting the worst traits of their parents and therefore of being inherently evil stands in stark contrast with the official view of children as being in need of protection from their unfit parents – the view used as justification by the authorities to remove the children from the contaminating influence of their homes. This turn in perception happens exactly at the time in the course of events when ‘good’ children are placed in institutions to sustain their goodness, but this is when they start to be treated as inherently evil. Here we see the application of the same rationale concerning the importance of the biological model of kinship based on blood ties as we saw with Maria and her mother, and the view on adoption where adoptive children are not ‘real’ children. Blood is a substance that gives people their moral essence: it is the basis of motherly love and attachment but also of the ‘bad seed’, the ‘genetics’ through which parents’ ‘badness’ is passed. This view often contradicts people’s own observations to the contrary and becomes a topic of discussion. Since the parents are giving and the child is receiving, it is clear why many state agents say with regard to a neblagopoluchnaya family: ‘What can these parents give to the child?’ The worthiness of parents is measured by what they can offer in transaction (giving), and the neblagopoluchniye parents can either give a child their bad essence or nothing at all, because bad essence cannot produce anything valuable for the children. A consideration that children may love their parents only because they are their parents, who can give to their children something that may not be visible and possible to measure in quantity or even quality, does not count. Many officials and institutional staff are genuinely surprised when ‘problem’ families have good caring children who love their ‘unworthy’ parents. A nurse was telling us a story of a young man from a neblagopoluchnaya family who visited his pregnant mother in the Maternity Home, being very caring and tender, bringing her food and cigarettes. They also wonder why children run away from ‘good institutions’ to ‘bad’ parents. 197

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This widespread view was challenged by the Stroitel’ director who, speaking against the instances of unnecessary institutionalization and in favour of leaving some children with their neblagopoluchniye parents, states: I know some children who in an internat steal and hide bread to bring to their parents. Is it really better when a child lies in a clean bed, fed and clothed, but thinking at night about his parents who are at home in a position no way similar to his, poor, unkempt, and often hungry? The children feel very bad. Former residents who manage to make a good life for themselves elicit a really mixed reaction: Larisa half-expected it (otherwise why place children in state care?) but also, based on her experience, was surprised at it and felt respect for these young people. It is time to move on. Upon reaching three years of age (four in the case of disabled children), the PMPC, a special committee consisting of a psychiatrist, a pedagogue and a speech therapist evaluates the children’s development and assigns them either to a pre-school Children’s Home for normal children or a Children’s Home for disabled children. I made my observation in the former.

The Children’s Home I left the Baby Home to start my observations in the Children’s Home with mixed feelings. No doubt the children are well taken care of and are surrounded with things they might not have at home. At the same time, the crushing over-structuring and over-regulation of their environment at such a young age gave me a suffocating feeling of wanting to break out, to gulp for fresh air and freedom. The Children’s Home (CH) started its life in the 1940s as a facility for children of female prisoners in El’gen,2 one of the most notorious Stalinist female labour camps in the Magadan region. It was then moved between different communities before settling in Talaya, a remote town in the Kolyma interior a few hundred kilometres from Magadan. In the postperestroika period, it became increasingly difficult to negotiate such a great distance to provide transportation of children and supplies to this CH, and in 1999 it was transferred to Magadan. Presently it occupies a building formerly belonging to a kindergarten on the city’s outskirts. As compared to the Baby Home, the CH is an educational establishment that belongs to the Department of Education, paying greater attention to children’s 198

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development. Its capacity was 60 children, but often the capacity exceeded its limits by up to 12 children, the case with virtually all residential care facilities in the region except for the Baby Home3 (according to the reports prepared by the Guardianship Department). Children residing in the CH are from the Baby Home, but also from neblagopoluchniye families. They are divided into five groups, each having between nine and twelve children of similar age. Each group has its own unit, as in the Baby Home, consisting of a large room dining/playroom and a bedroom. The first three groups, for children aged three to seven, spend most of their time within the boundaries of the CH, with occasional group trips to the community or city centre. The last two groups care for children aged seven to nine, with the children from the preparatory group attending a mini-school within the CH, and the first graders going to the school in the community. This was an experiment initiated by the Department of Education to test a gradual introduction of children to educational system and to a wider society. Some teachers have worked there for many years. Among these, one teacher was a former resident here, while another was also a former resident but in a different institution. For 40 years the director had worked as a teacher and then as director. She resigned the same year I did my fieldwork. The Department of Education appointed a new director who used to work as a vocational teacher in the school for mentally-ill children. There were also many new teachers. Some of them had just got their teaching degrees, while others had worked in a regular kindergarten before finding new employment in the CH. Children’s lives are organized according to the same ‘grid’ principle, but with more freedom. The toys are now within the children’s reach, and there are books, puzzles and games for collective and individual play. Many toys are provided by foreign (mostly American) adoptive families. According to the law, adoption in Russia is free but ‘gifts’ are permitted. These gifts included new space heaters, boilers, computers, clothes and toys. In comparison to the Baby Home teachers now rely on verbal communication. Pre-school children have lessons in art, maths and Russian. Once a week, a volunteer comes to teach older children lacemaking. There is a large room for physical education with brightly coloured equipment and another room with a TV providing entertainment. There are also activities that take place outside the Children’s Home, such as trips to the city children’s library and theatre, and in these activities children participate only as a group. 199

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Figure 6.8. A teacher is conducting a lesson. A nanny is preparing for lunch.

Figure 6.9. Free play.

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Figure 6.10. Lunch.

Many aspects of life in here are similar to that of the Baby Home. There is regime, discipline and control; the same clean and orderly environment and the same rhythm to everyday activities. There is also an absence of individual space and, in particular, solitary time; the forced presence of other children and predominantly group activities (Figures 6.8–6.10); isolation from the outside world; lack of compassion and individual attention. However, as children grow older, control and discipline cannot be sustained as in the previous rigid setting. Children are no longer easily restrained as a result of their age, but also because some children come from families and bring with them diverse outside experiences, specifically from neblagopoluchniye families where they used to live in a less structured environment in often adverse conditions. Teachers often say that it is impossible for them to talk to these children other than loudly because the children do not understand the normal way of communicating. As one teacher told me: ‘Yes, I am strict with them and always on top of them. If I am not, they will very quickly take advantage of me.’ They must always show who is in control, reinforcing the power relationships. Many succeed in doing so, as discipline is preserved remarkably well, although some admit that they cannot control the children. A new reality of life is peer violence, whereby fights, conflicts and beatings of younger children by the older ones, the weaker by the stronger 201

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and girls by boys become everyday occurrences and continue into the internat years. Once I witnessed the beating of a three-year-old by a sevenyear-old boy while a teacher was busy helping a group of ten toddlers get ready to go outside. The incident went unnoticed. After that, my idea of having mixed age groups lost its immediate appeal. I observed what I thought was a good deal of anger on the part of children who came both from homes and from other institutions. The anger is expressed in numerous ways, verbally and behaviourally, and is directed towards children and adults. On the second day of my observation, I was repeatedly kicked and verbally abused by the four- to five-year-old children. Once one started and did not encounter any resistance on my part, the whole group joined in. In a separate incident, a four-year-old boy quietly approached me, saying, ‘You bitch’, ‘I shall pour my juice on your skirt’ (he grew up in the Baby Home from the age of 6 months). Another boy tried to bring his cutlet to my notebook to soil it and, when his attempt did not succeed, he smeared it on the floor.4 Children use violence in the form of beating (not just striking) with hands and kicking with feet if their victim is on the floor, strong hair pulling, crashing into a victim to knock him or her on the floor and biting. At times, the victim is the one who gets punished by the teacher, who was too busy to pay attention to the particulars of the fight. Numerous conflicts between the children went unrecognized. The teachers either ignored a conflict or shouted topping the outward expression of the conflict to preserve order. The issue that led to the conflict might remain unresolved. Usually the stronger child wins this silenced turbulence by a violent attack on the victim, accompanied by cold hatred. Once caught by an adult, the attacker played an innocent victim, or turned into a nice guy (podliza), demonstrating behaviour expected by an adult. The real victim was almost invariably treated with a lack of compassion and at times mockery by the carer, thus continuing the trend of the Baby Home’s emotional coldness when relating to hurt or offended children. Children get upset, but have to deal with their frustration by concealing it, choking on their anger. At times, when some of them are no longer able to do so, they burst out in seemingly unmotivated aggression, which a carer swiftly curbs. Many children were short-tempered and impatient, reacting with screams and temper tantrums. They easily move from aggression to calm and back to aggression. Many negative comments were used, i.e., ‘bad’, ‘to punish’, and ‘to scold’. One of the first questions a boy asked me was: ‘Are you strict in your punishments?’ The tendency of many (but by no means all) children for destruction, to break and to demolish, is noticeable. 202

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Cries and tears of another child often bring joy and satisfaction or, in the best case, indifference. Here is an excerpt from my field notes: Vladik made a wet print on Zhora’s napkin. Zhora is crying. Vladik likes it and he wants to do it again. Zhora screams no! No! The teacher came to Zhora trying to talk to him. Vladik was walking nearby enjoying the whole scene where Zhora was crying and the teacher was trying to take the napkin away from Zhora, although napkins were usually put away by the children themselves. I asked him, ‘Did somebody offend you?’ he yells, ‘No!’ I: ‘Do you want me to comfort you?’ He: ‘No!’ His eyes swell with tears. Vladik is happy, it is a spectacle! In a few minutes Zhora calms down, comes to me and says, ‘My napkin was wetted’, I asked him, ‘Were you offended?’ He nodded. The teacher was busy with something else, and so was Vladik. Isolation from the outside world continues into the lives of children in the CH, now creating an inevitable outcome. The new director told me: ‘I took the children to a grocery store. They started to poke their noses everywhere. I tried to collect and discipline them, but a friend of mine told me, “Leave them alone, let them look around. They do not know shops and what eggs in shells look like, and what cheese is like”. I was so surprised! I had no idea!’ My observations in different groups left me with an impression of varying degrees of chaos. Managing a large group of children for a long time in the confines of one room presents a teacher with a problem: she either constantly supervises a limited choice of games, activities and lessons, or organizes children’s individual play. When the teacher would leave the room, it would often turn into chaos with children running, tagging and pushing. I could count half a dozen chores the children could have done, such as watering flowers, cleaning, doing dishes and helping with meals. However, these were the responsibilities of adults, along with food purchasing and preparation, laundry and cleaning. Most everyday life experiences were taken away. Observations in the group of seven-year-olds sent me home longing for quiet and space. I found it suffocating, being locked up in a room for the whole day with the constant presence of one adult continuously giving orders, and with only two half-hour breaks, standing outside on the playground. However, my next group impressed me by manifesting an entirely different atmosphere. The eight-yearolds had just returned from school in the community. Their upbringer/teacher, a Native woman, calmly helped them to change from their outdoor clothes to ‘home’ clothes, asking if anybody needed to have a torn button fixed. A boy 203

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was given a needle and thread and began sewing the button, while other children were instructed to hang their school clothes neatly on hangers. The children in this group were more involved in the area of home chores than the other groups. A child helped the nanny to bring bread from the kitchen. The teacher told me that unfortunately, much domestic work that children could have done is prohibited due to the safety regulations, but she allows children to do some work. The children were asked to wash their dishes after eating, and later to wash their underwear, girls first, boys last. Some did their homework, while others read. The children in her group went to a local school and consequently had the possibility of going beyond the boundaries of the CH, seeing the community and interacting with other children at the school. These experiences may have helped them to alleviate the problem of compressed energy with no outlet. When I made a comment about the calmness and quietness of this group, compared with the previous group, I was told: The children are not at fault, they were made to be what they are now. Last year they were normal, manageable children. Some of our teachers come here not because they love children, but because it is a ‘job’. They see themselves as teachers. But this is not a school, this is the home of these children. They don’t have another one. And we should make it their home. To do so, it is not enough to just sit behind the desk and give orders to the children. We should do what a child’s mother would do. Her background is similar to that of these children. Growing up in institutions from a young age, she understands them and their needs. Many other teachers come from regular kindergartens with no need for (additional) parenting. Interestingly, having developed a vast institutional network, neither the Soviet Union nor the Russian Federation provided specialized training programmes for residential care staff. Although some staff members of the Baby Home and the CH admit they would benefit from specialized training, none were invited to the city-wide seminar on early differential diagnostics and remedial pedagogical work with children with delayed mental development, which was relevant to both residential care staffs. When I asked why, one director hinted that with the Baby Home belonging to another ministry, the city and regional Departments of Education somehow could not sort out problems between themselves and coordinate their plans: ‘They are playing their bureaucratic games, and we are outside of the scope of departmental concerns.’ The needs of ‘state’ 204

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children, despite considerable financial investments to the institutions, seemed to be on the periphery of the attention of the state, a bitter remark made by Kim Moskovskiy. He commented that local education authorities do not include children’s homes and internats into city competitions of schools for excellence; that there was little staff training and limited information exchange between residential care institutions; that the museum of his (different) Children’s Home had been ruined, and what little recorded common history it held for the children had been lost; that ‘children are pushed as if from a cliff, with limited knowledge and skills and without any support, plunging into poverty, because nobody cares’. The carers have complete control over the children but little transparency of their work, except for well-orchestrated visits from the authorities. As such, the extraneous variables of their personality, motivation and experiential background become extremely important, and thus we introduce the variables of arbitrariness and chance. Much of a child’s experience will depend on the combination of the children in a group, and on the personalities of their teachers and nannies. Anything could happen behind closed doors. From the narratives in Chapter 7 we shall see how the children encountered both very good and very bad teachers and how their age and the non-transparency of the system precluded their experiences from surfacing. However, even more concerned teachers have limits in what they can do, set by requirements from ‘above’, be it the local administration or the Ministry of Education. One teacher was indignant at the demand for her group, when they leave the grounds of the CH, to walk in a column with two little red flags at the front and back. As children finish their first year of schooling, they are again evaluated by the Medical-Psychological-Pedagogical Committee and sent to an internat – either a boarding school/home for normal children or for the mentally disabled, all being located in different regional communities. Internats differ in their arrangements. Some may have their own school, while others send children to a community or city school; they may have mixed school and pre-school groups, or have children without parental care mixed with children from low-income families, or parents living in another regional community.

Internats Internats present an even greater diversity. Children are more familiar and engaged with staff, including administration, teachers, upbringers, kitchen workers and drivers. If children attend a local school, they study together 205

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Figure 6.11. A bedroom in internat A.

Figure 6.12. Doing homework in an internat.

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with home children and interact with school staff. Children’s backgrounds are also diverse due to different influences exerted upon them by their family experiences, contacts with friends and occasionally with kin and the wider society. The relative isolation of life in an internat, together with the ubiquitous regime, control and discipline, is counterbalanced by these experiences and an impressive agency on the part of the children, who learn how to go around the strict requirements and social structure of the internat. Greater freedom of movement around the city, the possibility of escaping from the institution, school activities and friendship with home children, a possibility of shopping (even if limited) – all contribute to the relaxation of the previous tight and stifling environment of the conditions of the CH. Life in an internat is designed similarly to all typical residential care facilities. Regime sets the internal structure of activities, while control ensures an attempt at surveillance of children’s whereabouts, behaviour and activities. Discipline is by now more relaxed and is enforced by the methods of scolding, negotiation, explanations, at times verbal abuse. Adults use children’s peer control as a form of assistance to the teachers, and this peer control is often enforced by violence. We shall see the internal workings of this system in Chapter 7. Children again do many things in groups: they sleep in a bedroom of ten or more children (Figure 6.11), eat and do their homework (Figure 6.12) communally, except in the family-type internats, which have from two to six children per room. Even though children in the CH and internats have more contact with the outside world, the narratives of adult former residents in the following chapter will show that this is still highly restrictive and often maladaptive. However, contrary to the more helpless younger children, they are able to fill up these structural temporal ‘cells’ with things they enjoy doing, that become possible with age, independence and a developed sense of agency. As we shall see, children’s experiences of internats are very diverse, both positive and negative. Staff most closely engaged with children are upbringers (outside school hours) and school teachers, but also support staff, most of whom are women. Although they work together as a collective, each adult, especially upbringers who carry out ‘parental’ roles for a large number of children, have to deal with the problems arising from the necessity to manage, control and ensure the safety of a group of children, but also address their personal problems, school performance and many other aspects of their lives. There are no, and have never been, psychologists or counsellors working with these children. Tensions and conflicts are inevitable and this is where recourse to punitive measures using other institutions is employed, 207

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which is when children come into contact with police, psychiatric hospitals and corrective colonies. We shall hear more on this in Chapter 7. Yet, along with these tragic tales, there are stories of attachments, of genuine interest and concern, of help and care both inside and beyond institutions, resulting in some children benefitting greatly from receiving state care. This is where the parental arm of the state constitutes a kinship tie, providing care and support to the future generation of society. This leads me to another point which I would like to offer for discussion. In the past 60 years there has been a vast body of literature in the fields of anthropology, psychology and psychiatry on the theme of patterns in mothering and child development. Briefly, the highly influential attachment theory and the effects of maternal deprivation developed by John Bowlby (1952, 1953, 1988, 1998) and Mary Ainsworth (1967, Ainsworth et al 1978) stipulate that ‘the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship with his mother (or permanent mother substitute) in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment’ (Bowlby 1952: 67), the lack of which may have significant and irreversible mental health consequences for a child. The original attachment theory had been refined (i.e., Michael Rutter 1981) showed that attachment to other members of the family is as valuable as that to the mother, so a less exclusive focus on the mother is required), and critiqued, specifically by feminists (i.e., Holmes 1993). Yet attachment theory and maternal deprivation are still seen to support and re-enforce the emphasis on the primacy of maternal care and exclusive mothering characteristic to contemporary Western (including Russian) mainstream thinking regarding proper parenting (see discussion in Chapter 9) and its influence on child development. However, anthropological literature provides an abundance of ethnographic evidence from nonWestern countries where multiple carers are the norm. For example in India, multiple attachment is practiced while exclusive attachment to the mother is discouraged (Seymour 2010), or in West Africa what is valued is belonging to a group rather than bonding with single individuals (Gottlieb 2004, Gottlieb 2010), while in Aka foragers in Central Africa children interact with approximately 20 caregivers a day and care from allomothers is shown to be more stable than from mothers in the first three years of children’s lives (Meehan and Hawks 2010). So we have two distinct models of care and attachment: exclusive vs. multiple. Yet based on this ethnographic study, I wonder if we are limited to these two models. In the (post-) Soviet case of institutional care from birth, and with regards to adults, there is certainly no exclusive attachment to a mother or mother substitute, and no multiple 208

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attachments to a finite number of carers that would form a circle that would follow a child into adulthood. Throughout their childhood and into their late teens, children are cared for by multiple, but transient, carers, and although attachments do form, they are not assumed. In the future, the child is told he or she has the state as a parent (see Chapter 7). I conclude this chapter with my impression that, taken together, these institutions comprise a whole world of their own by virtue of substituting the institution of family for an enormous number of children, by employing an army of adults and by each institution having its own history and culture.

Notes 1.

2. 3.

4.

It takes 11 years to complete secondary schooling (11 grades). After the 9th grade a child could only enrol into a vocational school, and not a higher education institution. In the Soviet time that was 10 and 8 years, respectively. It was briefly described in Ginzburg 1982. Some people thought that this is why the Baby Home administration was so eager to place more babies and toddlers in their care since its budget depended on the number of children residing there. Perhaps a psychologist may see something else in these incidences. I detected attempts at interaction in any way the children could, and compressed energy ready to explode.

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Having observed and described some structural elements of the institutional system and the way various state agents make sense of it, in this chapter I will try to discover how the children actually experienced it. We shall learn not only to what extent the belief of the state agents in the ability of the state to serve as a parent is justified, but also what the ramifications of this particular view are for the children. What does it mean for them to have the state as a parent and what do such notions as ‘family’, ‘home’, ‘parent’ (which many of us who grew up at home often take for granted) mean to them? We shall also look at the concept of self and group identity that facilitates the state children’s division of social space into ‘us’ and ‘them’, resulting in their sense of distinctiveness from people in the wider society.

Experiencing Institutions: Narratives of Former Inmates I observed and talked with children in the Children’s Home and internats, as well as with former residents. Some of them I met by chance in the Guardianship Department (GD), in court hearings on deprivation of their parental rights and in dormitories of the vocational schools; others I found upon referral from friends and traced them to prisons. Altogether I interviewed over 30 people aged 22 to 75. They revealed a confusing array of opinions and experiences.

More Polarity In the first instance there appeared to be difference between institutional experiences of the older and younger generations. All five individuals who are now in their sixties and seventies had generally positive memories of their experiences of growing up in children’s homes. Kim Moskovskiy was 74 in 2000. He was a foundling raised in a private children’s home in 211

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Leningrad, run in the 1920s by a childless well-to-do widow of a First World War officer. She raised children of different ages and ran her home as a big family. He considers her to be his mother and has nothing but praise for her. In the 1930s, her children’s home was closed because it was not ideologically correct to have a private facility, and the children were distributed between large state institutions. Kim learnt to be a musician and, after a brief period of teaching at a Magadan school, he became the director of a children’s home. The parents of my other informant, Svetlana, also in her seventies, and her sister, died during the Second World War. Their relatives lived far away. The girls were aged 7 and 12; after living on their own for a few months and almost dying of hunger, they were placed in a children’s home where they stayed for a few years. Svetlana is thankful to the state for saving their lives. Life in her children’s home was not regulated to the extent of suffocation, which is certainly a recurring theme in the narratives of many other inmates who were able to compare life in institutions in the 1940s and 1950s with the period starting from the 1960s onwards. She received higher education and has worked all her life, having a family and children. Another informant, Zhanna, recalls that her mother died when she was five.1 A non-related granny raised her for a few years, but when granny got older, she brought the nine-year-old Zhanna to the Children’s Home, where she spent six years. She fondly remembers growing up in the Children’s Home where Kim Moskovskiy was the director: I remember our life in the Children’s Home with the warmest feelings. We were always busy, working, studying, participating in extracurricular activities, and reading books. We had a big library, an art gallery, domestic animals and big fields with potatoes. Kim was always with us, he is a wonderful person, and cared deeply for each of us. I had good relationships with the other children and with teachers. Nobody offended me. I remember one teacher, who was so beautiful and kind, smart and talented and another one who was strict but fair. As children when we were out in the community many people used to guard their bags and purses when they saw us, they were trying to get away from us. I guess we were all considered to be criminals and thieves. But in my adult life I don’t remember being treated like this. Kim helped Zhanna to get to the medical institute in Khabarovsk, which had a department for Natives (she is part Kamchadal). She worked as a 212

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doctor all her life and loved her profession. Although not married, she has a daughter and a granddaughter. Despite perceiving their experiences in children’s homes as positive with greater freedom and more work in their everyday lives, as well as having an easier time incorporating into the wider society (they all received either vocational or higher education and all were employed) than former residents do today, some of my informants reflected on the ambivalence of the communities towards them (Zhanna), in a similar fashion to the experiences of contemporary (former) residents. Their accounts of institutional life also bear similarities to the contemporary institutional environment. In particular, two remembered how, even then, in their children’s homes ‘everything was forbidden’ (vse nel’zya) and recalled the new feeling of freedom, being able to do what they wanted when they wished once they left their children’s homes. Being teachers in children’s homes themselves, they observed how it became worse in the post-Second World War time. It appears that from the 1960s, the increasing emphasis on regulation (zaregulirovannost’) of all aspects of everyday life by the ideologically minded bureaucracy – the further development of boundaries specifying what may and may not or should and should not be done; how to structure and conduct child upbringing and teaching, along with the enforcement of numerous inspections ‘from above’ – had eliminated many of the real-life aspects of life there, making the institutional culture isolated and rulebound. Kim’s memoirs are about his approach to bringing up social orphans, seeing them as inherently good and trusting them. His approach meant taking calculated risks and personal responsibility for his decisions, which turned into a battle with the official Party line of ‘how to’ bring these children up in officially prescribed ways. He evaluates this as the komandnoadministrativnaya (‘administrative orders’) system, with inspectors checking how well the Children’s Home adhered to orders from ‘above’. Thus, agricultural work and work aimed at self-provision of food (growing vegetables and fishing) were prohibited. This, however, was to the delight of a current director of that Children’s Home, who considered children to be too weak to participate seriously in agricultural work. In another internat, a social pedagogue considered it wrong that teenagers were prohibited from even washing floors and that a cleaner was employed instead. Although more comprehensive inspections in Soviet and post-Soviet times revealed abuses of children and of the system by carers and administrators of the institutions, many of the practices that I have learnt about from former residents went unseen. Their experiences were either muted, as the children 213

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were too small or too scared to voice them, or simply invisible to the inspectors. In many cases children were not believed. We shall see below some examples of these practices in the narratives of former residents. The experiences of a younger generation, former residents in their teens, twenties and thirties were a truly mixed bag. Depending on the personal circumstances of an individual, some young people had an overall positive picture of their life in institutions, while others felt so hurt that could hardly bring themselves to speak about it. Some remembered their internat fondly. Anna and Nastya (see Chapter 5), who were placed in an internat at the ages of nine and seven, did not experience ill treatment. Although being hurt by the GD’s decision to separate them from their ill mother, the girls have good memories of their internat years with good teachers and vospitateli, and many interesting activities. Nastya especially believes that the state gave her more opportunities than her mother would have been able to provide. My interviews with ten 15- and 16-year-old girls from an internat now studying in a vocational school revealed that many of them were very glad to be there, as their life at home with drunk and unemployed parents became unbearable. I heard the same from Inga, a mother of two in her thirties, who was taken away from an abusive father and drunken mother and placed in an internat, but decided to go back home. She regretted her decision and wished that she finished her schooling in the internat. As often happens in such families, her siblings that were left with the parents turned out badly, abusing alcohol and serving time in prison. Inga herself went through a difficult spell with alcohol and homelessness until her marriage and the birth of her two daughters. However, for many former residents, negative memories of their life in institutions prevail. A few of my informants, in their late teens, aspired for a better life despite some traumatic experiences in the Children’s Home and internat. One such young woman, Galya, got married to a former internat resident and they had a child. She finished her vocational training, found a job and received a flat, all with the support of the GD, their former vospitatel’ from the internat, and the head of Galya’s team at work. Although when she found herself pregnant she was advised to have an abortion and later leave her child temporarily in the Baby Home, she refused and when Maternity Home staff learnt that she has a husband, they did not raise this question again. Larisa from the GD spoke of Galya with respect and surprise, questioning why all former residents did not turn out like her. Indeed, many care-leavers had considerable difficulties adjusting on a social and personal level, finding employment, keeping their children or 214

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finding support in difficult times. Almost all the youth and young adults I interviewed, regardless of their successes or failures (and despite state material support), have had to deal with their ambiguous status and experience the numerous social implications of being detdomovets (children of the state). A few of my informants have been in prison. Vitaliy, Lyuba, Igor, Misha and Sergei have either served or are currently serving sentences for various offences, most commonly for theft and robbery. For these individuals, their imprisonment is a continuation of the Rake’s Progress from residential childcare institutions. We shall see how their institutional experience prepared them for prison culture. Although my older informants did not ruminate on negative experience, I do not imply that all former residents of older generations encountered only good in their institutional life. I believe that whether we talk about institutional life of older or younger generations, the actual experiences and their perceptions are moulded by a number of factors: it is a matter of chance; of personal circumstances, which resulted in a child being brought to an institution; the age of the child at the time of placement; and of the particular time in history when the placement occurred. The latter is particularly important in the development of the child’s self-perception and justification of institutional placement. There is a difference between being raised by the state because one’s parents died in the War and because one’s mother in the years of relative social and political stability was viewed as being a neblagopoluchnaya family. I shall highlight many signposts of younger former residents’ lives through their narratives.

Misha’s Signposts of Institutional Life Misha and his friend Igor came to the GD looking for their personal files that had either been lost or misplaced. They were in their mid twenties, unemployed and had no income, but did have families to support. A strong healthy young man, Misha, was asking for five roubles. Marina nervously dipped her hand in her purse and, handing over five roubles, said: For how long are you going to ask for favours? You have to be selfsufficient by now, the state has provided everything for you, it is time that you give back to the state, not the other way around. You are so ungrateful. All you know how to do is ask for more.

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The shamed young man was standing in the middle of the room, slightly bent forward, and speaking with a childish weak voice, just like a guilty child in front of his scolding mother, the only difference being that she was not his mother. He tried to explain that the reason why he did not have any money was that he could not find a job because he did not have registration (propiska). He did not have registration because he did not have a flat. To get a flat he had to show the evidence that he had the status of an orphan, and he could not do this because his file had been lost. She waved her hand and said: ‘Ah, you people always come up with some excuses’. The appointment was over and he left, but the problem was not solved. Two years later I found Misha and his sister Lyuba living in somebody’s flat: We gave up trying to find our documents. We were going between the Guardianship Department, our internat and the vocational school, and nobody knows where they are. They told us, go and find these documents yourself. At 25 they are no longer responsible for you. Nobody cares [nikomu eto ne nuzhno].2 The first day I met Misha and Igor in the GD, I followed them into the corridor and asked for an interview. They were surprised. Later on I asked whether or not anybody before me had been interested in their past lives in institutions. They indicated that no one had.

Abuse Misha does not remember or know anything about his parents. Earlier from his file he learnt that he and his two siblings, Lyuba and Oleg, were left in state care due to the illness of their father, who with his wife left the Magadan region. The children were given the status of orphans and had the state for a parent. His friend Igor has two siblings, all of whom grew up in different institutions. I asked them to tell me about their life in the institutions, starting from their earliest memories. Misha started with the account of abuse. His earliest memories of his life in the Children’s Home were not happy ones: Oh, you can ask anybody who was there with me, they would all say the same. The teachers were cruel. If a child did something wrong before bedtime, even the smallest offence, they would jerk the blanket off from you, and hit your heels so hard. During the day, if you did something wrong while in the group, the whole group would be 216

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forced to kneel, and I am glad that I don’t remember her name … I tried to forget … I still cannot forget it. Even at New Year, it is a holiday, there were good gifts. They did this on purpose, they put our gifts on the hot heater and when everything melted they would say (sarcastically) you may eat it now! We felt offended, hurt, when you open up this gift but everything inside is melted and messy. At bedtime one vospitatel’ would come into the bedroom and order everyone to get underneath their blanket, and if you were too slow, she would pull the mattress out from under you, put it on top of you, and sit down on you. You got up with the impression of metal springs on your skin. I think such teachers don’t like children, they are not normal. My good friend Igor, he is almost my brother, told me things even worse than this. A child who was badly burned, and children were forced to lick and eat what is in the toilet. We were not cared for and there was no vospitanie, they insulted and mocked us, as if we were animals, because they felt they could get away with this with impunity. When somebody would come to visit, they dressed us well to show us off, but as soon as the guests left, the situation changes right away, everything nice and clean would be taken off the children, and everything continues to be the same. Similar accounts of abuse were present in narratives of other former residents, including: putting a sheet soiled with a child’s urine, or underwear with faeces, on his or her head; tying children to radiators; depriving them of food; locking them up in the cold toilet room for minor offences; the daughter of a teacher forcing one girl to drink her own urine and put modelling clay into the girl’s ears; making children scratch the upbringer’s feet and clean her shoes; breaking the arm of a sibling of my informant; and beatings by upbringers (in the Children’s Home) and older children (in internats); name calling and verbal abuse; and sexual abuse of teenage girls by their teachers in internats, some of which resulted in pregnancies.3 The younger the children, the more control the adults are able to exercise over them. Most of the physical abuse remembered by these adults took place in the Children’s Home. The memories of internats were generally happier, although abuse by adults was often replaced by peer violence. The beatings and what the children perceived as the unfairness of adults, who would not acknowledge if they were wrong, are perhaps the most frequently remembered memories. Lyuba recalls her time in the Children’s Home:

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I did not have a good relationship with most teachers because of beatings that occurred almost every day. I was talking back because sometimes the adults were not right. There is not much good to remember, but this physical abuse I shall never forget. I remember telling some care-workers, ‘I will tell other people all about you’. They replied, ‘You just try and you shall see’. Indeed, when we were transferred to an internat we told teachers there what had been happening to us in the Children’s Home. They did not believe us. But we were fearful even when they raised their hand in a benign gesture. When I was undertaking my observations in the Children’s Home, I noticed the reaction of a seven-year-old boy when an angry teacher approached him: he covered his head with his hands. Nikolai, the director of a summer camp for social orphans, said ‘Many of these children do not feel pain anymore because the stuffing has been beaten out of them (u nih vse otbito)’. Children reacted differently to this violence. From birth, Sergei, a 40year-old former resident, grew up in successions of children’s homes and then went through a succession of corrective facilities: a special school for juvenile delinquents (spetsshkola), vospitatel’naya koloniya (VK) (a children’s corrective colony),4 ispravitel’naya koloniya (IK) (an adult corrective colony)5 and sledstvenniy isolyator (SIZO) (a pre-trial detention centre). He remembers his experience: I was beaten up until I reached the fourth grade. One teacher beat me with a cord. That was his understanding of how to instil fear. For taking vitamins, an upbringer hit me on the head with the leg from the table and I was bleeding. That is when I lied for the first in my life. I was afraid of adults, I did not trust them. They want to train you so to behave like obedient sheep. A child from a children’s home is downtrodden, he knows what fear and violence are. You become obsequious trying to avoid violence. Everything there is based on fear, beatings and threats. I am so tired of being sly, of trying to weasel out, of cheating so as not to get punished. Misha and Lyuba remember that ‘until the third grade we were handled with hedgehog gloves’ (indicating harsh, strict treatment). When Lyuba turned nine, they decided to fight back. To deal with this retaliation, the adults employed various strategies, including physical violence, threats and withdrawal of food. But from that time, they recall the violence from adults 218

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lessened, although they still had to fight it: ‘We have overcome this fear barrier. We decided to face whatever comes our way. Those who were unable to do so carry this fear with them.’ For many, verbal abuse was an everyday occurrence. Some girls were called shlyukhi (promiscuous) by their teachers. There were public fistfights and name-calling between teenagers and their teachers in the summer camp for orphans. One current internat inmate, a quiet 15-year-old Native boy, told me about a teacher who said to him: ‘You are a pig, you were born next to a trough, and you will die next to a trough.’ When I asked what he felt when he heard it, he replied ‘anger’. When children are small, anger stays muted, accumulating over the years, often turning into silent hatred by the time children become teenagers and young adults. One boy was taken from his alcoholic mother, placed in an internat and then adopted, but was returned back to the internat because his adoptive family could not cope. After that he became unruly. He confided to Nikolai, the director of a summer camp dealing with children from different internats: ‘I shall never forgive adults for giving me away to the internat. I shall use all my force to harm them.’ Anger is often directed at abusive institutional staff and muted anger does not mean that abuse is forgotten. Nikolai tells this story: A teacher comes to me and complains that one boy, Andrei, said to her, ‘Go to f***ing hell’. I called the boy, his nickname was Terminator, he is as big as I am. I asked him what happened? The boy kept silent. I let the teacher go. Finally, he managed to make the boy talk after asking him the following questions: Why did you insult a weak small woman? He answers, ‘once I was small too’, and broke into tears, which I didn’t expect at all. He left my room, I followed him, completely shocked. He sat down on grass, and was crying so hard! I sat by him and was silent, just sat with him there. I didn’t know what to say, he is almost a grown up man. After he calmed down, I told him – let’s go, no one should see you with the tears in your eyes. I think I also had tears in my eyes, although I cry rarely. Then he told me. Five years ago she was working in his internat. Once as a punishment she left him without food for three days! She didn’t work there anymore, and they met only here, 5 years later, and he took his frustration out and swore at her. I told him, there is a lot of injustice 219

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in this life; learn from this, forgive her and never do the same injustice to other people. There is not only her but also discipline and order. He said, I never broke discipline (and it is true). Since then he has never looked at this teacher. There are so many, a sea of such cases! This hatred is often turned against women in general. A teacher from an internat recalls her work in a colony for highly dangerous criminals, which she indicates contains a large number of former residents. Among them, many young men hate women, she believes, perhaps because most of their careworkers were women, or perhaps because they despise their mothers, blaming them for what had happened to them and for not bringing them up. Mothers become scapegoats for the state and objects of unresolved frustration and anger for children. The children’s bitterness is carried into their adult lives. Lyuba remembers how violence made her feel when she was a child: ‘I thought, when I grow up I shall kill them.’ Indeed, some young men get even with their tormentors: ‘When I was small, what could I do or what could we prove? But when I grew up, I beat his ugly face up.’ Misha did not encounter maltreatment from adults in his internat: In the internat teachers treated us very nicely. There was a huge difference between what was going on in the Children’s Home and in the internat. In the beginning there was still a shadow of our Children’s Home life, but later we got used to the system, it became much better. The teachers and care-workers treated us as their own children, they brought their children to play with us and invited us to their homes, fed us with home food. They celebrated our birthdays, and gave us gifts. However, they had to deal with ill treatment from older boys: The cruelty we experienced was only from the older kids. In a banya in the village the older boys would turn up the steam so you couldn’t see anything. When we, the younger kids come in, the first thing you know, a piece of hard soap is flying at you, leaving a bruise. We were afraid. They would come at night to torture us, demand money, line us up and mock us, or force us to fight each other. Lyuba remembers older girls beating younger girls, and boys beating girls.

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Social Stratification Peer violence, as indicated by almost all of my male informants, generally started in their internat years. Igor recalls that: In the internat, first graders are the most defenceless, anybody can bully and beat those kids. The eighth graders are the oldest, and all problems and questions were solved through them, there was such hierarchy. These beatings were either for ‘fun’ or they served a purpose. Vitaliy, a 24year-old inmate whom I interviewed in an adult corrective prison camp (IK), remembers his experience in the internat: The older boys would provoke a fight to check if I was man enough to stand up for myself. If you were unable to fight back, they will bully you relentlessly, take everything away from you. Our vospitateli did not know about these razborki [slang for sorting out relationships by talking and fighting]. Also each group had an otvetsvenniy [a boy who oversees a group], and if something is wrong, a meeting of the group would be called to try to correct it. However, even within one’s own class, it was necessary to negotiate one’s place: In my class I had to prove myself, establish my authority, to steal to prove that I had a backbone. Well, I did what I had to, I fought with the boys and we had arguments, but it was all right in the end (Misha). Two 15-year-old boys, current internat residents, were asked (by a teacher) to make sure that the younger children stayed within the internat’s rules (i.e., no smoking). When they felt that words would not work, they would use force, striking and threatening. A strategy of using older children to oversee the younger ones to enforce discipline and obedience is ubiquitous in residential care and prisons. This is a pathologized version of the practice in Soviet schools and summer camps of delegating responsibility to older children to help the younger children. Although it is still an individual child who has to negotiate his or her status against a group of children who are either older or of the same age, as children grow, their group becomes more visibly stratified. Sergei remembers such stratification taking place after the third grade, where a group of boys broke up into at least three subgroups: 221

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We had the king of the class, the strongest and smartest boy. Then there were his prikhlebateli, those who serve the king but also ‘have their word’ [have their own authority], and who put the king’s word out to the crowd. Then there is the grey mass, the average children. The children in authority make weaker children do things for them. When we got older, weaker children were beaten, were ordered to steal, to find and bring cigarette butts or get vodka. I earned the respect of other children by going against the king but I tried to be closer to those with authority, and was not interested in those who were weaker, I beat them up. I was always in the middle. In the internat this is not very prevalent. It is when you get to the children’s prison camp you see strong similarities between this correctional centre, the army with its dedovshchina6 and prison. Indeed, I noticed a similarity when comparing narratives of Sergei about rituals of initiation in the children’s prison camp (VK) or koroyedka (koroyed is a slang word for a child, also known as maloletka) and Misha’s army experiences. For the first six months in the army and the first year in the VK, a person is considered to be a newcomer, ‘a fool’, called dukh (army) and seka, short for sekator7 (VK). They are the most vulnerable group of individuals and have to negotiate their future status (place) with the older inmates. They are often beaten up and mocked (army) or do not have any say (VK). After the designated period, they pass into another status – prinimayut (army) and propisyvayut (VK) – in the army, young men become fazan by being beaten on the buttocks by dedy (‘grandfathers’). In the VK, a boy is ‘restored’ into patsan by each older inmate striking the face of the seka and asking ‘Understand?’, to which a boy should answer, ‘Understand’. Although the seka is being beaten, he cannot fall down and touch the floor, because he will become a chushka, the status given to the lowest, ‘dirty’ individuals. The lower are only petukh and opushchenniy, the untouchables subject to humiliations and rape. This is where social stratification and roles assigned to the groups likens the VK with prisons and adult prison camps described elsewhere (Samoilov 1993; Kabo 1993). Abramkin states that: The children’s departments in SIZO and in VK are among the least safe environments from the point of view of guaranteeing human rights. Mockery, torture, and rape are the mundane part of everyday life of juveniles. This all takes place with the knowledge and even 222

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encouragement of vospitateli, who use this ‘collective pedagogy’ [delegation of disciplinarian responsibilities to older and stronger children] to ensure discipline and order (2001). For Vitaliy, however, the internat was harsher than a prison: In prison, there is order. As you come in, inmates in the cell check you out to assign you the place that you deserve. If you know the rules, you may be all right. But in the internat children make up their own rules. For example, a group of boys gathers in the toilet to smoke. If I was offered matches, and there is the last match in the box, I was very cautious before taking it, because if I tried to light it and it would not light, the boys might beat me up. In another internat the rules may be different, you never know. But overall, avtoritet [the king] and opushchenniy [untouchable] are the same everywhere. However, the familiar structure and rules common to institutions are not preparing the children to survive in the wider society. Lyuba noticed that: ‘in these places [internat and SIZO] there is order, while outside you never know what to expect. I once greeted a woman and she hit me on the head with her umbrella!’ Misha served four years in prison, while Igor served two, both for theft. They think that the combined experience of beatings in the Children’s Home and the internat toughened them up. The overstepping of the fear barrier in the internat and being able to fight back allowed them to stand up for themselves in prison, taking the place of muzhik (the middle caste) rather than of opushchenniy (untouchable). Drawing on their experiences of institutional living, their understanding of hierarchical systems, regimentation, control and discipline has helped them to adjust to life in the army and prison. In their view, they were better prepared for the hardships of those environments than young men who grew up at home. Therefore, there are many parallels between the institutional structure and culture in children’s homes/internats and correctional facilities. To the similar layout of the facilities with long corridors and ‘cells’, collective living in large groups and going places ‘marching as a group’ (stroem) and the lack of personal belongings, we could now add morphological similarities in social stratification and the delegation of disciplinarian responsibility from a vospitatel’ to the older and stronger children to ensure order, discipline and adherence to the vospitatel’s requirements. 223

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There is also a closer proximity of the world of children from internats to former residents of mental institutions and correctional facilities, when compared with the world of family children. Children who escape are often picked up by the police and are either returned to an internat or are sent to the TSVINP or a mental hospital as a way of disciplining them, discouraging them from escaping again and acting as a lesson to others. Two of my informants, Galina, a 40-year-old mother of three, and Mikhail, a 22-year-old man, told me that their attempts to escape from the Children’s Home for Disabled Children ended up with them being placed in a psychiatric hospital and treated with neuroleptic drugs8 as a punishment for their escapes (see Appendix 2). Their story might be difficult to believe if it were not for exactly the same story taking place in a different region of the Russian Federation in May 2009 (Bogdanov and Kozlova 2009). This practice seems to be widespread. Misha, Igor, Sergei and others indicated that vospitateli continuously threatened to send them to the psychiatric hospital, a special school for juvenile delinquents and the VK. In addition, children, youth and young adults often steal, as is evident from the narratives of my informants. Theft and robbery are types of offence for which criminal responsibility begins at the age of 14 and for which children could be sent to juvenile corrective colonies. They also happen to be two major types of violations committed by internat residents and former residents, as well as by hungry children from some neblagopoluchnaya families stealing food, as shown by the Head of the TSVINP. I know a boy of 15 who was sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing two jars of pickles. The care-leavers are also in a precarious position because they are often alone. To keep them under control, according to some of my informants and as evident from the Bogdanov and Kozlova paper, police use the threat of accusing them of committing an unsolved crime that is still on file. I asked my informants to tell me approximately how many former residents they encountered in prisons. Sergei replied, ‘Half of the inmates here in SIZO are former detdomovtsy’. Misha estimated that ‘There are many who became drunkards. Most of my classmates have been to prison’. Former residents seem to be at an increased risk of being imprisoned. When former residents serve their time in prison, their children are often put in residential care facilities, as happened to two of Sergei’s children, and as indicated by the director of one internat: ‘Some children come from families where parents serve time in prison. Many of these parents are former residents.’ 224

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Stealing Misha admits that stealing was a normal part of their lives: There were vegetable fields nearby. We often stole vegetables. I think the community was suffering because of us. We grew up with impunity. When we stole, people from the community came to the internat and complained. What can they do to us? Scold us? We would listen, nod, and then continue to look for adventures. We didn’t feel that police would be involved and we would be punished. Of course they threatened us with correctional school, but I didn’t think that this can really be true. We stole from teachers. This was carried on for my whole life, if I like or need something I will make sure that I acquire it [priobretu, as a metaphor for ‘steal’]. I will not earn it by sorting potatoes on a farm. We had this understanding in our minds that we could just take it. When I asked him what he thought the internat administration should have done, he was convinced that: They should have punished us, not take pity. Internat residents get out of internat, and most of them end up in prison. Why? Because he goes to a store and sees something and just takes it. Perhaps the persistent lack of having one’s own possessions and the ambiguity of the boundaries between what to consider as ‘mine’, ‘yours’ and ‘ours’, among other things, played its role in stealing. Lyuba stole because she wanted to dress better, as she was ashamed of dressing like an internat resident. Misha served two sentences: I spent 4 years in prison. After my first theft the Guardianship Department helped me and I was on probation. I started working in 1996, and at that time salaries were not paid on time. When I asked for my salary, there was no money. They offered me some food towards my salary, but how can I pay my rent with food? They kept telling me there is no money. Well, then I went and cleaned out the first flat I laid my eyes on. Vitaliy also felt that he stole ‘for survival’. Upon graduating from a vocational school: 225

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I asked them to find me a job but they said, go and find it yourself. Well, I went to a few places but nobody needed me. My friends could help me with food, money and a place to stay only so many times. I despaired and then gave up. I spent nine months in SIZO [pre-trial detention centre] the first time. According to Kim Moskovskiy, stealing was a part of life in the Children’s Home. Children and teenagers were sent to his Children’s Home when, as he puts it, ‘family, school and society gave up on trying to make them good citizens’, and he considered stealing to be the remnants of the children’s difficult and often criminal past. But Misha’s experience shows that stealing was a part of their life as well, although some of these children had never been raised ‘on the street’ but by state institutions from an early age. Nevertheless, aside from stealing while living in an internat, what is a boy to do when, as Nikolai had pointed out, he ‘graduated from a vocational school and found himself being thrown away to a street, because there is no work for him, no home. He was promised a flat in Atka, since he was brought to an institution from there, but there are no jobs in Atka. So this young man was at the cross-roads … They can get what they can in churches, or someone gives them food, or they ask for food, and they sell their bodies for a bottle, especially now when everything is out on the TV screen, or steal’?

Psychology of Dependency (Izhdivenchestvo) Ozhegov’s Dictionary of Russian Language defines an izshdevenets as ‘a person who aspires to rely on other people in all walks of life’. The themes of izhdivenchestvo and being unprepared for life outside an institution came up every time I started to talk about institutional culture. My observations in the Children’s Home revealed that many of the home chores and other activities that children living in families would normally undertake are done by the adult institutional staff. In addition, children and youth receive state benefits, a monthly monetary allowance and clothing. Their right for their parents’ flats are secured for them by the GD,9 although often they do not know how to live in flats, they have school enrolment privileges and can receive training in two professions and a place in a vocational school dormitory, all free of charge. Although the children’s options are limited, the state literally pays for all aspects of a child’s life until they finish their education. This is perhaps what constitutes the GD’s understanding that ‘children have great life with us’; however, it comes with serious drawbacks. 226

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One director of an internat expressed her frustration, which was shared by many others: We give these children education, but we are not preparing them for life. A child in a children’s home has everything done for them, everything is given to them. They do not know how to be independent, how to wash, cook, mend, budget, run a family. All they know is how to demand what the state owes them. Through these institutions, we raise ultimate consumers. On one occasion, a teacher in the Children’s Home overheard a conversation between two children. One child was breaking a toy, another objected, and the first one said that they would bring another one. Misha thinks that, during their time in the internat, they were not taught life skills: If in the internat we were taught some skills, to take care of ourselves, to work, make money, to shop. I wish they explained more about what life is like outside of an internat. They did not give us any idea of what to expect, what one is going to experience and confront in life, what are the relationships, and how to solve problems. Over there we had a communist upbringing, all people are brothers, put rose-tinted glasses on our eyes, but when you leave the internat, these pink glasses are difficult to take off, they are more likely to be broken off, and life is seen very differently. In a family, a father tells his son, you better take this job, because you’d be better off financially, and you will step over this or that person and will make enough money for yourself. What have we been taught? Go and ask this or that person for help, do not step on anyone’s head, you must be polite, as if we were not people but Jesus Christ. Not only were they doing everything for us in the internat but the Guardianship Department helped us to get prepared for the army. We didn’t have to worry about a thing, just go to a store and choose what we needed. The state tamed, domesticated us, the state made us its own, and we cannot live without it anymore. It should be responsible for us. Igor further considers the problem of being izhdivenets, tying it up with the reliance on the state and lack of life skills, although there were some formal lessons in everyday life skills:

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For all the state care former residents, it is not laziness when a person is used to, rudely speaking, ‘sit on the state’s neck’, it is a habit to expect more to come your way. Since everything was done for us, we were not interested in other things, but just our own problems. We were left to ourselves to do what we wanted, living in our own world. We were not troubled that we had dirty clothes, or that we will have to find something to eat, or find shoes. Now we are paying for it. A home child is taught from childhood to help parents, how to do certain work and chores. These parents also think about themselves when they teach their child to do something, because they want their child to take care of them when they are old. For Igor, the relationship lacks long-term mutuality. As compared with parent-child relationships that may continue to the end of one’s life, the state is a parent that does not want its children around beyond a certain age. Thus, the GD staff members continued to support their own adult children by helping them to find jobs and places to live, buying clothing and helping with the grandchildren. Family children, while continuing the relationship with their parents, are expected to be more independent by gradually moving into adulthood. Former residents, having had the state as a parent, also continue to rely on it just like family children, after becoming adults, continue to receive material and emotional support from their parents. But the same staff members, when representing the state as a parent, do not see that their continuing support of these ‘children of the state’ is appropriate after they finish their education (at about 20–22). They feel that the state has fulfilled its obligation and is no longer responsible for the former residents, terminating its responsibility and quite abruptly leaving them without any support, having provided education that teaches limited independence and self-reliance, and no kinship network to fall back on. At the same time, as one state agent noticed, ‘these children don’t get a second chance; they don’t even have a right to be ugly or dirty because if our children are ugly, we pity them, if these children are ugly, we condemn them’. Children are expected to be grateful, and the feeling of obligation towards the state runs deep in the consciences of many former residents. Pavel, a 22year-old resident of the internat for the disabled (Appendix 2), was very aware of his responsibility towards the state: ‘I am striving towards a good life. I have a plot of land I can farm. I want to live, to have a family, and to be useful for the state, because I can no longer hang on the state’s neck.’ Some seem to find their way in the outside world better than others. Misha recalls two of his acquaintances, one of whom takes her parental 228

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obligations very seriously and is resourceful in solving her problems, while another is ‘so used to the idea that the state is obliged to give her everything, all she knows is “I want”, “give me”’. Misha, despite his laments on the lack of teaching of independent living skills, managed to learn on his own: We were taught vocational skills in school. We made soft cover stools for example. We were experimenting in different ways just as we went to the village store to steal something. Now I can do a lot of things to take care of myself, I can cook, sew, and even knit. My domestic skills are very good. Galya’s husband Zhenya also feels that: It is such a paradox that after the internat where we had vocational education, many former residents do not want to work. We had many interesting extra-curricular activities. I learned so much from there. I can do everything. Children learned more than merely what was taught, and here their resilience and agency increased with age, except in the realm of family life, which family children absorb through everyday living and internat children do not get to experience at all. In the Baby Home, due to total control over all aspects of their lives, the younger the children were, the fewer opportunities they had to assert their own wishes and individuality. As the children grew up, their ways of coping with the institutional requirements diversified. In the Children’s Home, the grip of the carers was less, as children’s increased physical development and maturation gave them greater scope to not follow orders and directions too closely. But it is in the internat where children developed their ways of dealing with unsatisfactory situations. The most radical form of protest was escaping from an institution, running, as the Head of the TSVINP indicated, from the cruelty of older children and because they missed home. Considerable distances between an institution and home did not deter runaways from flight, and they could cover many kilometres on foot or by hitchhiking. These runaway children (begunki) were often picked up by police and placed in the TSVINP. Misha and Igor recall that, despite the fact that they were well fed, they, together with other boys, escaped from their internat to nearby hills, exercising some control over their own lives:

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We escaped to cook something simple on a fire in the forest. We didn’t want to eat what was given to us. We wanted something different, diversity, and a variety of things. We wanted to experience freedom, to know that however simple the food was, I cooked this food all by myself and for myself. I once put some dill into milk, but we ate all right! (They laugh.) Puddles were of big interest. You want to measure this puddle, you want to feel like an individual, different from everybody else. The hills around the internat served as an alternative place not only for seeking self-discovery, but also for resolving conflicts through fighting, and for sexual encounters, because any expression of sexuality, which was seen as incompatible with the age of childhood, was not allowed in the internat. Therefore, in internats, the agency of children was often expressed as resistance to adult domination, developing ways to manipulate and circumvent the system. Often these violations went unnoticed, leading to a sense of impunity. In continuing these behavioural patterns while trying to solve their problems after leaving the internat, what was once the expression of agency inside an institution becomes a severely punishable offence outside it. Beyond the internat, former residents tend to coalesce and form their own ‘world’ outside the institutions. In this way, they have greater agency than their mothers did, since the latter did not form any support groups in their struggle with the state.

Unpacking Parent-Child Obligations: Dispersed Responsibility and Accountability A common reproach former residents hear from adults is that they are ungrateful. I have heard from many former residents that they do not want ‘to sit on the state’s neck’ and ‘we were, as usual, ungrateful’ – the internalized parental relationship whereby the state gives you everything, and when you grow up, you must start giving back to the state. This is similar to how they imagine the reciprocal obligation between a home parent and a child, although these utterances regarding obligations towards the state are not often heard from a home child. The children’s actual experiences are different from the perceptions of them held by the authorities and institutional staff. The adults see themselves as giving and the children as receiving; consequently, the adults 230

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expect a sense of gratitude, loyalty, duty and responsibility to the state as a collective parent. A lack of this gratitude angers teachers who work with social orphans. A social pedagogue from a vocational school told me that at times she feels that teachers are the ones who need to be ‘educated’ first, before they ‘educate’ social orphans: The girls often come to me in tears because their teachers publicly shame them for misbehaviour by saying that ‘the state provided you with everything, and look how you pay back the state by misbehaving’. These teachers are exasperated that their own children do not enjoy all this material well-being [blagopoluchie], yet these state children who have ‘everything’ turn out to be ‘good-for-nothing’. This discourse of the ingratitude of former residents, and the envy teachers feel towards state children, is a long-standing issue, according to Kim’s memoirs. Ironically, internat children feel that they do not have anything, while home children have everything; most importantly, they envy home children for having parents, a home and love. The teachers, however, think the opposite – that social orphans have ‘everything’ and undeservedly, without any effort on their part, while the teachers have to work very hard to provide for their children. The teachers look at the material side of the relationship, while social orphans long for the spiritual: love, care and belonging to home and family. The sense of loyalty and responsibility to their own families is absent, in the same way as an ‘unfit’ family is relieved of the responsibility to care for their children. Instead, a child’s loyalty is now transferred to the state. As such, in the individual-family-state (society) chain, the middle unit, the family, is eliminated, connecting a child directly to the state. The concept of the ‘state as a parent’ renders most issues concerning kin and family relations ambiguous: family, parents, relatives, home and belonging. However, the biggest problem seem to be not with the issue of ‘home’ (some children consider their last internat their home, or can make one for themselves), and not even ‘family’ (they manage to substitute it with their ‘brotherhood’, partners or their own children), but a ‘parent’ and a relationship with a parent, constituting an intergenerational break. The relationship between social orphans and the state as a parent is profoundly ambiguous, more so for the children who have never known their parents and family. There are actually two ‘states’ that carry out parental responsibility: an abstract state that uses the public purse to pay for children’s 231

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needs while they are brought up in institutions, and an embodied state, that is, those adults who work in the system of child welfare. From the social orphans’ point of view, both are problematic and the feelings of mutuality, responsibility and obligations towards an imagined state are very abstract. As far as the embodied state is concerned, depending on the age of the child, different adults have different responsibilities towards him or her, being temporary, transient and job-related in character. They do not focus on a single child but many children at once. The responsibility for the child-parent relationship on the part of a social orphan also cannot focus on one or a few people. An image of the state as a parent is now a depersonified and disembodied collage of all the faces of adults who have ever participated in the child’s upbringing over the years. As children grow, they have passing relationships with nannies, vospitateli, teachers, staff and administrators from at least three institutions, the summer camp and the staff members of the GD. The nature of contact in the relationships varies from close personal to distant, eliciting a range of feelings, from attachment and love to ambiguity, confusion and hate. There is no certainty in who is considered to be a ‘parent’. The transience of relationships entails multiple losses and gains, leaving children unsure of what type of relationship they can expect and have with each new carer and where to find support when they need it. In the official discourse, vospitateli were supposed to treat and love children as their own. In real life, it is a matter of chance. Most of my informants remember good and bad carers. Lyuba remembers calling a kind vospitateli ‘mother’, while the bad were called with derogative ‘vospitki’ or ‘gorilla’. But even having a beloved vospitatel’ and calling her ‘mother’ does not ensure that this feeling will be reciprocal and enduring. When the (abstract) state terminates its legal obligation towards these children, and the child-parent relationship may come to an end, it will depend on individual former carers whether or not to continue helping a former resident. Kim Moskovskiy gives an example of such a disjunction. There was a student of a particular teacher, whom she liked and called her favourite. In the 1970s, this teacher got into a conflict with the boy because he was disobedient, and repeatedly hit him on the head. Later they made up and she gave him a motherly kiss, which the boy was only too happy to receive: ‘my mother kissed me!’ Many years later he came back to the community where he grew up in the Children’s Home. By that time he was married to a girl from the same Home; they were expecting their second child. He wanted to meet his ‘mother’ to show her that his life had turned out well, that he made decent money and had a good family. They invited the teacher to visit them. They prepared a meal and were constantly looking outside the 232

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window in anticipation of her visit. When they saw her walking down the street they told their child: ‘Look! Your granny is coming!’ They listened to her footsteps, waiting for the doorbell to ring. But the steps went further up the stairs. After an hour of waiting, his wife started to take everything back to the kitchen. A few minutes later she told him, ‘Come and look, there she is going back, your “mother”’. He saw his former teacher and ‘mother’, going back after visiting a new vospitatel’ who had moved into a flat upstairs. While conveying this story to Kim ten years later, the young man was bitter and perplexed: ‘I was her favourite … I wanted so much to talk, to see her, to make her be proud of me.’ Kim, on the contrary, hosted a young Native man in his one-room flat because he did not have anywhere else to go except to Kim, his ‘father’. According to Kim’s memoirs and letters from former students, many treated their Children’s Home as their home, their childhood friends as brothers, and Kim as father. Kim himself participated vigorously in keeping in close contact with his former students. Indeed, his Children’s Home was his home and his students were his children. Hence chance and personal relations play a very significant role in the life of many children in care and former residents. Within institutions, the grouping of children and teachers is accidental. Whether or not a child will encounter a particularly cruel or caring caregiver is unforeseeable. Institutional cultures, that is, the set of rules and practices, the composition of the staff, the personality of an administrator and the location are peculiar to a given institution and determine the quality of a child’s experiences. Receiving help when they need it upon leaving an institution, as well as finding a job, is also a matter of chance: some receive timely and crucial assistance, while others do not. For those young people who did not get much out of their institutional life, in Magadan there was no organization of post-internat adaptation, or post-prison rehabilitation, which is also pertinent to many of the former inmates. No less problematic is the expected feeling of obligation towards the abstract state for everything it has provided for the child. Since these provisions were paid for using taxpayers’ money, does a child ‘owe’ all citizens? If, as Igor indicated, parents provide for small children, and children take care of their old parents, how would this work in the case of the abstract state? Should they begin working and thus contributing to the state and society, despite jobs not being guaranteed in post-Soviet times? Or should they do what society wants them to do without failing, whether serving in the army, going to war, taking a job in which they are not 233

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interested or being thankful for a room in a dormitory that the embodied state decided to give them instead of a separate flat they are entitled to, otherwise they will be called ungrateful? Do they ‘owe’ concrete carers, including abusive staff? What do they owe to those who provided them with room and board but took away their disabled mother, as in case with Anna?

Two Worlds: Orphans and the Wider Society We shall now move from the account of the signposts of institutional life to exploring how institutional experiences shaped some aspects of children’s identities. One day I was walking on the street when two boys, about ten years old, asked me directions to a particular internat. I explained to them how to get there and asked them why they needed to find it. The more talkative boy nodded at his friend, saying that he was sent there. ‘What about you?’ I asked. The boy hesitated and said, ‘No, I am domashniy, he is internatovskiy’. On several occasions, Misha and Igor used the same language dividing children into internatovskie (children from internats) or detdomovtsy10 (children from children’s homes), and domashnie (children from families) while describing many aspects of their life inside and outside the internat. It soon became clear that for many former residents, the whole of society continues to be divided into these two categories.

Group Identity: Svoi and Chuzhie (‘Of our Own Kind’ and ‘Other’) I picked up this discursive division and asked Misha and Igor to explain more about it. Misha and Igor, while answering my question, also discussed it between themselves: Misha: Family people are different from us. I felt the barrier between us, I am from this system, and he is from that system, it’s like a plus and a minus. I felt that a home person didn’t eat with me, didn’t do this or that with me [and therefore do not have shared culture and history]. But as I get older, this barrier is disappearing, this contact is getting closer. Igor: Not for everyone. I feel awkward in their company. I have learned more about them in prison. There is not much I can tell them that I can tell Misha, or my classmate. So I prefer to keep it to myself. 234

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ER: Why? Misha: They would not understand. With those from the internat it is simpler, you can find a common language with them straight away. I know many former internat kids who live in Magadan now, and even if they are from another company, I recognise them immediately and I talk only to them. I don’t even look at those who are from family [in his voice I hear pain, and disdain]. A family girl, she has such different notions and understandings, it’s not even interesting to talk to her. I feel embarrassed to come up and introduce myself. I feel ashamed. Igor: If a young woman is even a little closer to our world, then to us, she is ‘our’ kind of girl and we drop our guard, forget our insecurities, and we talk to her, no problem. Misha: There are these neblagopoluchniye families. Their children also lead the same kind of life, sexually active and free, live in basements as well as at home, surviving on their own because they didn’t pay any attention to their parents, and just live by themselves. With these children, we can more or less communicate, they are closer to us. Although they are family kids, their experiences are closer to ours, the same dumpsters, basements, and sewers. For Misha and Igor, the question of belonging was straightforward: they were internatovskie, who had never known anything else. It is more complicated for those who remember their families, but again, the majority of my informants said they felt closer to internatovskie. This identity with, and belonging to, ‘our own’ (svoi, or internatovskie) as opposed to ‘them’ (domashnie) is very strong. The ‘brotherhood’ of former residents is a phenomenon noticed by many adults working in the system of child welfare: They grow up together and stick together even after they leave the internat. All they know is ‘we’, they do not know ‘I’. They exist as a group and cannot be without each other. It is like a family, a special form of family. Yes, we too grew up together with somebody, but we have individuality. They are cruel and they are incorrigible. They live as if in a different space [a social pedagogue from an institution]. However, their presumable group cohesiveness is not as strong as it may seem. I asked who these young people rely on when they experience 235

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difficulties. Many of them told me that they rely mostly on themselves and whatever help they can get from others, but not necessarily from former residents. Why is that?: Dasha: I don’t have friends, I am on my own. If I need something, I go to the employment office, or Guardianship Department, although I am not going there anymore … Last time they were so rude. Sergei: I have neither friends nor mates. I do not allow anybody to get close because I don’t trust people. Sometimes I want to talk to someone, share intimate thoughts, but to whom? Who cares? And what for? In my circle it is stealing or robbing. Even if somebody starts talking about the soul, nobody listens. Misha feels more connected with his friends: With our own folks you can dip into his pocket for a cigarette, and he’ll tell you to take more, and vice versa. If I have problems with money or food, I come to him, and even if his wife is a family child, I still come. Sometimes I see she is not too pleased with me. But he would show her where her place is, and help me with what he can. Zhenya and Anna do not want to associate with former residents because of the problems these young people bring with them, such as drinking and stealing from their ‘own’: Zhenya: I have mates but no good friends. Those friends I have are from the internat. We used to meet in the past but not anymore. Some have become tramps. They don’t ask me for help much. I do not let them stay overnight. I have a family now, and when they come, they drink. I do not want this in my home. Anna: I don’t have anybody to ask for help. I try not to associate with our ‘own’ folks too much, because they come and steal from me, from their ‘own’! Whatever their personal feelings are towards each other at the moment, there is a very strong trend among former internat residents of finding partners for cohabitation or marriage among their own, and to come back to residential care institutions to work. I found without exception that in 236

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each institution I studied, there were a few former children’s home and internat residents working as vospitateli, nannies or teachers. Therefore, after growing up in an institutional world, many continued to work and live in this ‘world of detdomovtsy’ for the rest of their lives.

Detdomovtsy and the Outside World: Mutual Perceptions In the communities where internats are located, the relationship between them and the wider community was always problematic. Misha has already reflected on the local community suffering because children from the internat stole. Vitaliy recalls the division of youth into poselkovie (youth of the community) and internatovskie: We did not have anything to do with poselkovie. When there were community dances we were always fist fighting with them. In the ninth grade, our vospitateli told us, ‘Do not socialise with poselkovie, they will influence you in a bad way, to smoke and drink.’ So, the bad influence was also seen as going the other way. Internat children have always been visible in a community. Their relationship with home children ranged from being accepted to being rejected because they were different. The director of an internat for mentally disabled children was very concerned about ‘his’ children playing outside, because there are always conflicts between them and home children. Bullying of his more defenceless children by home children prompted him to limit the contact between them. Tanya remembers being very angry with family children because of the bullying. Some domashnie would call her and her friends derogatively internashki and inkubatorskie (coming from a chicken egg incubator), while they reply with domashki, and ‘incapable of doing anything’. I was curious to discover former residents’ perceptions of family children, who apparently constituted a different universe. The image of a family child constructed by my informants contrasted with internatovtsy in many ways. For former residents, family children and youth were: • • • • • •

not capable of being on their own; lacked skills to do anything (nichego ne umeyut delat’); careless and feckless; relied on mother and father; egoistic; had different interests; 237

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but: • if they could not find jobs, their parents could provide for them until they found one; and • they were more sure of themselves. On the contrary, as orphans, my informants saw themselves as: • more self-reliant (contrary to what society thinks about them); • more humane because they were brought up helping each other, so they understand the pain and problems of a deprived childhood (an opposed of the outside opinion that they are cruel); but: • felt ashamed being raised by the state and by the fact that ‘nobody needs’ them; many manipulate their status, concealing or revealing it to other people; • felt unsure of themselves and uncomfortable in the company of domashnie; • felt hurt that home children have what they do not have: care, love, a solid foundation under their feet, home, parents; • felt that they have nobody to turn to. They perceived family children as happier and more like children, while seeing themselves more like adults, experiencing a harsher reality, especially after the institution. Note that their perception of themselves is often the opposite of what the people from the wider society think of them. Vitaliy remembers how his vospitateli in his internat were saying: ‘To avoid pity, you have to get used to living on your own. Out there, people may treat you as human garbage.’ My informants encountered different attitudes towards themselves as they see it. Pity is what they think the members of the wider society feel towards them, although this pity does not mean that people try to help. Some treat former residents indifferently, while others share the impression that detdomovtsy are different, backward and thieving. Misha evaluates people’s perception of them thus: In our community people did not like us, we stole. The Guardianship Department does not consider us to be humans, they swear at us. Here [in Magadan] it is all right, some even use us as examples. In the army they understood us well and treated us with compassion. But not the police, they don’t like us at all. As soon as they learn that 238

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we are from internat, they say, you all are thieves. Well, it was for a reason. In the internat everything was provided for us. But in this world one has to earn one’s bread, and we did not want to work, could not adapt to the outside world quickly enough, so we stole. One former resident, Dasha, found her mother after being released from the internat. This mother shared with me her impression of Dasha: ‘She is psykhovannaya [a pathologically short-tempered person]. She told me she had been tied to a radiator when she misbehaved. She explodes, yells, and turns red.’ The same perception is shared by Vitaliy, who said ‘many people consider internatovskie to be psikhovannie. I am trying to prove I am not like this, I am normal’. Therefore, being from the internat sometimes turns into a stigma. Sergei, Misha and Vitaliy talk quite openly about having kleimo (stigma): It does not matter what you do, as soon as people learn you are from an internat, they assume the worst. We are always those who people blame when something happens. It is like kleimo. ‘You are all the same’, they say, ‘you only look innocent’. I asked them, ‘If a person had been to prison, can’t he correct himself, become better? They say, no, if you have been to prison once, it is the end of you’. They look at you suspiciously. So I lay low and try not to get into trouble (Misha). Sergei remembers: In the Children’s Home, there was no upbringing as they say there is, only orders. But vospitatel’ must be more attentive to child’s interests. I was really interested in music, so why not allow a child to pursue it? Instead she yelled at me and kicked me out of the room only because I was there without permission, ‘You know you are going to grow into a good-for-nothing, your place is on the scaffold, you will spend your entire life in prison!’ But when something happens, they yell again, ‘See? We told you!’ The hurt [obida] stays with you. However, not all see social orphans through this lens. The GD considers these children should be be no different from other children, despite the fact that social orphans grew up in an environment different from that of home children.

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Social Orphans: Self After analysing the life stories of a very heterogeneous group of informants, I divided them into two subgroups: those who have known their parents and relatives, and those who have not. There is a considerable difference between the two groups. Young people who have known their parents or relatives have answers for many of their questions. Those who grew up being completely cut off not only from their relatives but from all information relating to that part of their lives are visibly more anxious, unsettled and angry, having often searched in vain for answers to numerous questions regarding their family history. All of them without exception tried to find their parents, some successfully and some not. The most vulnerable are children who have never known their parents. To them, many issues relating to family are problematic. They have a complete blank where other people have their family histories, memory and continuity. I saw how even asking this question makes them feel frustrated and hurt. Those who live with a partner, or a spouse and children, consider them to be their family. Anna considers that: In the internat the notion of family is breached. It is difficult for them to start their own families and make it work. I know three girls who married domashnie and neither of them were able to keep living together. Another four of my former internat friends got married to internat boys. One was imprisoned for fighting. The rest are not doing well. They are not even striving for something better. However, even for those who are trying, it is a considerable effort: We grew up on rudeness and even if we got some love and warmth, it was not enough in order for us to give it to our wives now. I cannot give what I didn’t receive at the right time. I myself still need it (Misha). It is easier for former residents to feel where their ‘home’ is (usually the last internat), but not what ‘family’ is. Family is never a resolved issue, often even when children manage to find their parents after leaving care, evoking a range of feelings: anger, resentment, being rejected, hope, love and confusion. Five of my informants asked their mothers why they did not raise them. The mothers replied that when they tried to find them, they were told by the authorities that their children had either been adopted (like the father who found his son in an internat in Chapter 5) or had died. Not a single 240

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child believed these stories. Dasha, after finding her mother, who had been told her daughter died, said that she loves her mother, but does not believe her and does not know how to build a relationship. ‘My mother met me coldly. I was very angry (she cries). Did she raise me? I am very hurt, because she does not tell me the truth and she is not warm towards me.’ Her mother told me how it came as a shock to her when Dasha appeared at her doorstep: ‘I placed her in the Baby Home on the advice of a doctor, but when I came to collect her I was told that she had died. I was hurt. Fifteen years later she shows up, but everything burned down inside of me. I felt so alien to her, although I am trying to find some feelings for her, but I feel it is not real. I have more feelings towards my neighbours’ children.’ When speaking about the ‘self ’ of detdomovtsy, one of the greatest mysteries for me in this study was the fact that knowing that an individual had gone through a series of institutions suggests trends and patterns, but predicts nothing. Similar experiences within an institution produce different results. Many detdomovtsy, both current and former, have come out being able to build their lives according to societal moral values. They received education, worked, started their families and had children in Soviet times, as is recorded in Kim’s memoirs. This is reflected in the letters that he received from his former students and is also evident from the example of some of my informants. Yet, many former residents, in Kim’s time and in 2000, went to prisons and to colonies, committed suicide or were placed in psychiatric hospitals. Among my informants was Tanya. She had not known her parents and has no known relatives, and endured abuse in the Children’s Home and the internat, but nevertheless managed to get a flat, find a job, get married and keep her daughter. By contrast, Misha’s girlfriend, also a former resident, has no flat, job, lost her first child to state care and her second child to a caring godmother. Misha himself, who has gone through the whole chain of institutions, army and prison, nevertheless managed to find a job and is trying to stay away from trouble. He told me how in the third grade he had lost his fear of adults when he stood up to cruel teachers. Later he decided that it was time to break away from his past, rebuild his life, have a goal, a family and live like a normal person. On the contrary, Sergei, having gone from the internat to the children’s prison, and then to adult’s prison, having very limited contact with and knowledge of the outside world, told me how his experiences of growing up in residential care made him sly, and taught him to fear and distrust adults. He was trying to change his life at 40 because of his two children in state care, whom he wants to raise by himself. He had four more years to serve and realized that he did not have many 241

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chances to fulfil his wish. In contrast with Sergei, some former detdomovtsy describe themselves as honest and straightforward. One could argue that these children were raised to be better Soviet citizens than children who grew up at home, since many characteristics fostered by the Soviet moral code and transmitted through heavily ideologized educational settings were uncontested by the familial influence. In his memoirs, Kim made a special point of bringing up children in a spirit of true communism, teaching them how to be honest, uncompromising to injustice and straightforward. He gives examples of how his former charges wrote back to him, saying that in their difficult times with life outside the internat, they tried to adhere to the principles he taught them as children. Although many have had signposts of normality, such as having a family, children, education and a job, others wrote from prisons. Kim felt that even if his former student was writing from a prison, the young person was a moral being who had lost his or her battle with the outside ‘corrupt’ society, or with those who used ‘police pedagogy’ (a disciplinary approach), rather than real pedagogy directed at the slow instilment of moral values and forgiving of minor mistakes. Kim also gave an example of one young man who dreamt of becoming a policeman, but who was refused entry into this profession because he was ‘too honest and straightforward’. Having grown up in a highly structured and rule-bound institutional setting, not having become familiar with the intricate weave of the societal fabric of social networks, implicit rules and understandings and having not acquired the ability to manoeuvre and navigate, the former residents were often lost in the wider society, which lived not only by rules and laws alone, but which was marked by dissimulation (Kharkhordin 1999), cynicism (Yurchak 1997) and informal rules. Even in more stable Soviet times, many former residents died prematurely. According to Kim’s memoirs, some were killed, some committed suicide even though they had a family, children and a job, and some died in accidents. They seem to be increasingly lost in post-Soviet society where, in addition to being more familiar with the institutional world than with wider society, they do not have the social welfare system and extended family to support them. However, there are amazing stories of survival, resilience and adjustment. Kira is in her thirties, a friendly outgoing woman working as a cleaner in a church. She feels that she is alive only because of the care of a particular priest, who was her last hope. Kira does not know her parents or how she got to a children’s home – this void is filled with guesses and fantasies. At her 242

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internat she was raped by two older boys, but she kept this information to herself, fearing their retaliation. She finished eight school years but because she did not have all good grades to be able to attend a community school to study further, she and other children were placed in different vocational schools in Magadan. She wanted to become either a cook or a pre-school teacher, dreading ending up in the school for seamstresses, but this is precisely where she was placed. As with all care-leavers, she was told to come to the GD if she had problems. She asked Nadezhda Papp for a room, and Nadezhda helped her although, she said, the GD were not obliged to do so because Kira was over 18. A couple of former internat classmates came to live with her and she was looking after their child, but she said it was not good there due to drinking and fights. Once she moved to another town for a year and, when she came back, she learnt that the room had burnt down, together with her documents. Her former friends blamed her for the fire. She spent many nights in the police station detention cell, paying a small amount for rent and washing their cars. They helped her to get a new passport and let her go. She was given a room in the (temporary) dormitory for careleavers, but one night – she does not remember what happened there – she went out into the winter wearing nothing but light clothes and slippers. After that she was living on the streets and working in a warehouse sorting onions and stealing them to sell to stores for seven roubles each. Often, all she had for food was chocolate and cigarettes. She and her friend would find men who had money and would be willing to give them accommodation, food and alcohol in exchange for sexual intercourse. They would live with them ‘until they get tired of us’, sometimes for two or three weeks. Occasionally ‘a taxi driver would drive me around the whole night, and in the morning would say, “OK, go”. Go where?! There are many times I attempted suicide’. At some point flats were given to the orphans, but because nobody knew where she was, her flat was reassigned to somebody else. She does not always remember the sequence of events: ‘I lived on the streets for so long, I forget.’ She got mixed up with a group of men who suspected that she stole a large sum of money from them and beat her for a whole day, nearly killing her. ‘I told them, I did not take your money, but do what you want, there is nobody behind me, nobody will stand up for me.’ She finally escaped, but she said, All these stories kept repeating themselves but every time – but harder and harder. Every year it got more terrifying and I knew I had to do something. But there was nothing I could do because I did not have anything. There was nowhere for me to go, nowhere to settle. I did 243

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not have anything, any clothes. The meria did what they could and said, goodbye. Said that I had no business there and that if I did not leave, they would call the police. I asked her whether she could have found help. She replied: ‘From whom? Everyone is in the same situation’. Finally, she was ready to end her life because she did not see any solution to her problems, but by chance she stopped by a church, where a priest turned her life around. He fed her with what little food he had, and ‘this is the first time I ate fish and not dogs’. She said that for a year she ate only stray dogs. She still remembers the first dog she caught, which took the boys she knew six hours to kill. Later the priest helped her with a job and a room. Kira said, ‘He saved me just when I did not see the way out’. This church also helped another girl who remained with her neblagopoluchnaya family and later graduated from a local university with honours. My observations in institutions left me with the firm conviction that even if several children grow up in the same environment at the same time, it is difficult to infer how their experiences will affect them in later life. Different children react in totally different ways to similar circumstances. One never knows what their past experiences may have been. Was a child favoured by a carer, giving the child more attention and being more responsive to his or her needs? Was he or she a demanding child who screamed their way to having their needs met, or was he or she quiet, forgotten and ignored for hours on end? Was he or she a strong-willed and assertive child who was consequently broken more severely than others? Did a carer on night duty take him or her secretly to their bed and, for whatever reason, give him or her a bit of human warmth and attention, or abuse? All this information is lost by the time a child becomes an adult, asking himself: who am I? Why am I this or that way? Is it because of me, or the parents I do not know, or because of my institutional upbringing?

Fantasies of a Moral World I would like to briefly reflect on interviews with three of my informants who struck me as being different in their attitudes toward moral issues. Dasha has a two-room flat in a new apartment building. She became pregnant after a relationship with an older man who demanded a ‘favour’ from her in exchange for some help she needed from him. Her story is a usual one. She rejected her newborn daughter, but then changed her mind. The GD, after checking on her ‘conditions’ and finding them unsuitable, refused to return the child to her: ‘Your baby will get sick here. You can sue 244

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us, but you will not see your baby.’ We were sitting in an unkempt, disorderly and poorly furnished room, speaking about Dasha’s view on family and home life: I want a family where he would work and protect us, bring us food. I would also work and will keep our flat orderly. It is difficult for me to be on my own, but I cannot find a good man. I want cleanliness and good hygiene. I want him to be a decent man, honest and for him not to smell like a bum. I myself am very strict with men, and used to a clean and orderly environment. Sergei is a Dostoyevskian character. He served his many sentences for various offences: theft, robbery, rape and drug dealing. His self-perception and understanding of how people perceive him were very negative. Yet, despite his criminal record, he appeared to be a moral being. His memories of life in institutions were not happy. Now, while serving his sentence, his flat burned down, killing his wife, and his children were placed in children’s homes. To be able to raise his children, he started to change his behaviour and turned from being a hardened criminal to a law-abiding inmate, trying to earn his early release and privileges. He reflected further: Some people fall by accident. But with me it was different. From my very early childhood there was nothing but blackness, it was so far from God. You asked me about whether or not internatovtsy should be helped upon leaving the internat? No! They should be helped when they come to the internat. When they leave, it is far too late. Over there the adults are constantly present and are always right because they are stronger. This is wolf-pack rule. I think adults should admit it when they are not right, but they never do. It was not the same for us children. I did something wrong, and I was told, tell the truth. Well, I thought if I told the truth, I would not be punished, but I was punished. So I did not understand, why should I tell the truth? We must know what the reasons are for doing things, but they don’t explain anything, they only give orders. From the beginning of our childhood everything is demolished, prohibited, destroyed. Nobody gives you any attention, and they do not care what you like, nobody cares. Everything is so ambiguous, so unclear and confusing. Here in prison I am muzhik, I am a follower of those who are stronger, because I was brought up always serving and following adults, because if you don’t, you will be punished as I have been. 245

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Since my childhood, everything has been taken away from me. My freedom, children, flat and propiska. I am completely alone and I have absolutely nothing. The only one thing that was mine, my two boys, they have taken them away from me, too! The system remains the same and I am defenceless against it. If something happens, they blame me, and when I try to defend myself they yell, ‘Shut up you stinking criminal, or else you’ll be quickly put in prison’. Nobody sees a person in me, only a criminal. Nobody even replies to your letters. I have more anger in me than I have goodness. I don’t understand myself. I have cheated so much that I don’t know who I am anymore. I have nobody to turn to, no family. I am alone. I don’t know what to do after I am released. There is nowhere to go. Who will give me a place to live, a job? How am I going to raise my boys, where? I am a cut-off person, I have no future and I am afraid that my children will be the same. I am not afraid of much. Not death or physical violence. Perhaps loneliness, but I am already lonely. I don’t like uncertainty and I don’t like everything that is negative, which is everything that I am. I hate everything that I am, it is all black and negative. I like everything that is light and goodness, which I don’t have. I want to get baptised, but I do not want to do it here in the prison, it is a wrong and dirty place, there are no good people here. I want to do it na vole [upon release], to get this load off my shoulders. In Sergei, who is very aware of his own shortcomings, I see the same discrepancy between the negative reality and the imaginary goodness that for him is the foundation of morality. It is especially evident when he separates and juxtaposes evil (himself, prison) and goodness (getting baptised only upon his release from prison). At 40, he is still confused as to his self and his relationship to others, and is burdened with unresolved issues of the meaning of his experiences. Vitaliy differs from Dasha and Sergei in that he does not seem to have a strong sense of identity. His parents were killed when he was six, and he and his brother grew up in institutions. His first sentence was for theft – he stole because he could not find a job and needed food. Later he was fired from two jobs for abusing alcohol. At 24, he told me that he was serving his 18 year sentence for (Satanic) murder, but did not give any details. However, when I inquired about him six years later in 2008, I was told that he served his sentence for theft and by had been now released, living somewhere in town. 246

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In the prison camp, he deliberately blinded himself and was living in the prison hospital, a common tactic among prisoners to obtain better living. The doctors were afraid that he would not regain his eyesight. Vitaliy told me: I don’t know who I am. I am half-internatovskiy, half-domashniy. But compared to domashniy I can do anything, I am ashamed of nothing, I am very short-tempered. I do not believe in God, I try to, but I don’t think I can. He probably does not exist. He did not give me anything. I want to have a family, but really, I want to live in a quiet calm village and have children. Not a wife, they always leave, but children. I would work and raise them myself, play and feed them and not give them to anybody. And when they grow up they will take care of me. I have lived for twenty-four years and all these years I am tormented. I don’t know what everything is, I am confused. And I keep thinking, when will all this suffering be over? While in prison, he used to befriend pen-pal women, manipulating them into providing him with accommodation, food and care upon his release. One even became his godmother, helping him negotiate with the GD and fight for his rights. I asked Nikolai for his opinion on what he thought were common characteristics of internat children. He went on to describe a few, which I tend to see as being consequences of the environment and the type of upbringing the children received in their Rake’s Progress described in Chapter 6. He observed that these children often hate and distrust adults because they feel defenceless against them and are thus ready to fight and resist. Yet they always crave interaction with adults because they lack it. They need their own space, to be by themselves, to have their own clothes, to eat what they want but not what was given to them. They are creative and experimental with food, doing it their own way. They are highly strung, irritable, edgy, constantly overcrowded, lacking comfort and more cruel than family children, although they love animals because they feel animals need them. He told me that these children tell him things because he listens and relates to them, especially ‘difficult’ teenagers: These are the children who could have been growing up into monsters. One fourteen-year old boy does not feel pain. He has been beaten up so many times that he is not afraid of pain anymore, he is used to it. There are no feelings of pain, compassion, or pity. 247

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Nikolai, however, is there for them, listening, talking, discussing; by doing so, he feels that ‘I drag these children out of their psychological nonexistence. I consider this to be the highest reward for a pedagogue’. When analysing the self and identity of former internatovtsy, we are presented with a picture of tensions and contradictions that constituted their experiences. Here I would like to draw together a few generalizations.11 The recurring theme in the narratives of former internatovtsy is that of loss and substitution. The loss of the biological family is substituted by the state as a family, but even this surrogate is lost when children become adults, resulting in a double loss. Stealing could be conceptualized not only as seeking adventure, not only as the practicality of getting what one does not have, but possibly as an externalization of one’s loss; a desire of someone who has lost both to make up this loss (which can never be achieved) and to inflict loss on someone else in turn. Many unexplored home experiences are sometimes substituted by these children on their own (Misha and his urge to cook by himself) in an attempt to create a sense of agency. The need for real love and affection on the part of young people is often substituted by the illusion of affection during brief intimate acts, many of which result in pregnancies and the birth of unwanted children, with the subsequent removal of these children. Young people attempt to substitute their loss of the family by giving birth to their own children and thus acquiring a family who they in turn may lose. Even their fantasies of being a part of the family, having a mother, father, siblings and extended family members, being close-knit and providing care and love are the opposite of what they have in reality. Their fantasies cannot be fulfilled and are therefore lost (recall the ‘mother’-teacher who went by the window without visiting her former student). In addition, without the backing of their families, children are defenceless in the face of institutional abuse and before adults who manipulate or simply lose children’s documents (Misha and his file). I heard similar accounts from my other informants. The development of self for former residents took place in an environment different from that of children who grew up at home. For one thing, they have no past: they do not know their family and extended family, with whom they can identify themselves; they have no ties to the physical geography of the land where their ancestors live(d); they have no projections into the past, no family history or traditions, no stories to be told and, unlike some cultures with a strong ancestor cult, they do not incorporate the identities of their ancestors into their own identity. Although in Soviet times, parts of family histories were not always transmitted to the next generation, in post-Soviet times, this barrier has 248

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been removed and indeed many take pride in discovering, and making public, their roots that go beyond 1917, or share their often traumatic family knowledge to come to terms with and live through these experiences. However, this is not even a possibility for former internatovtsy, whose family connections were intentionally or unintentionally lost. Severed connections with the past are only one aspect of family discontinuity. Former residents’ projections into the future are also limited. Without seeing their relatives, they cannot visualize and construct themselves in their own future. The future starts with them – they are the point of reference which will transmit their self to the next generation, and their vision of the future is indeed often that of their children. They would like to pass on and have for themselves a sense of family normality that they did not have, and for someone like Vitaliy, Sergei or Misha, it becomes their life’s goal. Yet, being marked in advance, many of my female informants lost their children, either to the state or to more mature women. The status of a social orphan signals to the authorities the likelihood of inadequate parenting simply because they often cannot produce what the authorities are looking for: stable marriages, suitable ‘conditions’, secure jobs and good flats. Former residents have a shared history and memory with other residents. They mix with them by marrying, associate with people having the same background, work in the institutions and have their children placed in these institutions. Thus, the system is self-perpetuating. I think that children who grew up in children’s homes on the discourse of strong moral values internalize them, but are not always able to act on them outside the institutions, since life outside is different and they were not taught how to ‘read’ it. Not being able to adjust quickly enough to new requirements is what I think sent most of my informants to prison, not because they were inherently bad, as most of them seem to distinguish between right and wrong. Care-leavers are often left without their own accommodations and jobs, which, along with the consequences of isolation and the lack of social support, contribute to the high incidence of their criminal involvement. According to various sources, 25 per cent to 50 per cent of care-leavers are involved in criminal activities (Vazhdaeva 2006). As such, just like my informants, in the crucial moment of leaving the internat they found themselves not only without jobs and income, but also without social networks outside of their similarly disadvantaged former residents, although with the disintegration of the social safety network, reliance on the networks of family and friends is increasing. Equally important is the fact that former residents without connections, resources and money are more 249

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prone to be prosecuted. As Kim said in his memoirs: ‘We know who gets put in prison, the small fish. The big fish will always buy their way out.’ There is a certain sense of contradiction within the narratives of former residents and indeed in the whole system of institutional care. Juxtaposed to the state’s discourse of fixity and certainty of assigned identity, we see a complex and contradictory reality of flexible identity and children’s experiences. There is the complexity of living in a crowded and rule-bound environment and still feeling that ‘we were left to ourselves’, i.e., being controlled and neglected at the same time. Children are not used to working. Being shielded from life’s experiences in an internat and having ‘everything done for them’ without their participation, they then have to choose vocational manual labour professions after leaving the internat. They are forced to live constantly under adult supervision and orders, and have to be obedient, and yet are left to fend for themselves after leaving the internat. These children grow up being at the same time deprived and spoilt.

Societal Changes and Institutions Misha and other former residents of his generation constituted a population of young adults brought up in Soviet institutions but released into a postSoviet society. Young people of his generation must not only make the transition between institutional living and the rules and ways of the outside world, but must also adjust to the discrepancy between Soviet upbringing and the changing outside world. The abandonment of Soviet ideology and its set of moral values that previously maintained such a strong presence in institutional upbringing has made that institutional upbringing increasingly ideologically empty. As Misha put it: ‘In the internat we were taught that all people are brothers. But in modern life people are like animals, each person is getting and guarding his piece of meat, they can kill for it.’ Misha’s and Igor’s moral world, formed by Soviet mores, comes into conflict with changing attitudes towards many issues. For them, silencing and submerging ‘private’ issues constitutes a moral approach to the intimate aspects of life: In our times, nobody talked about sex. But after perestroika started, there was such a depravity [raspushchennost’], all this obscenity on TV. Things are out in the open and they freely talk about things that were considered shameful even to think about. Look at this advertisement for [menstrual] pads! Earlier it was the private and secret domain of women. They talked about it only between themselves. They had a sense of dignity. 250

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Their period of transition was marked with greater difficulty than for those who left institutions in Soviet times, where the social values of institutions and society coincided to a greater degree, and opportunities to receive higher education and employment were also greater. As is evident from the life stories of many of my informants, former residents now often unable to find jobs, become homeless and commit criminal acts. Teenage pregnancies are common and there is the increased danger of their children being institutionalized (because former residents rarely have good ‘conditions’). The absence of a social security network, which would allow the normal functioning of a former resident in contemporary society, is what distinguishes the present reality from Soviet times, when jobs and an income were guaranteed. Education, and specifically higher education, is beyond the reach of most former residents. The inequality of professions and growing competition for enrolment had become important in making life choices, and former residents are increasingly vulnerable here. Although vocational schools are still required to accept social orphans tuition-free, some use various tricks to avoid this responsibility: fee-paying or very bright children may be their first choice over a social orphan. Now, vocational education is less available owing to the lack of workshops and funds. The patronage (shefstvo) by individuals and organizations of children’s homes, providing additional supportive elements to the children and former residents as well as to the children’s homes is no longer practised, being substituted by occasional gifts from businessmen and charity drives. The practice of official mentoring of a former resident by an older member of the workplace has also been abandoned, being substituted by help at the whim of a kind individual. If in Soviet times institutions were funded from federal budgets, now they rely on regional budgets (Dement’eva 2000a). Funding is suffering on all levels. The federal programme ‘Orphaned children’ was funded only 41 per cent (Rybinskiy 1997). The director of an internat complained that out of a needed 600,000 roubles, she received only 100,000 roubles from the local budget; as for the rest, she was told to find it on her own. When she asked where she could find this money, the reply was, ‘You are the director, this is your business’. Directors try to make deals with various private enterprises and literally beg for favours. The institutions appear not to have anticipated this new situation, as they were designed for a different society. To assist former residents in adjusting better to the wider society, the Ministry of Education is considering developing a network of agencies dealing with postinstitutional adaptation. By 2000, there was no such agency in Magadan. 251

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Along with these changes, some aspects of life within the institutions are as they were in Soviet times. Although the contemporary content of education is no longer governed and determined by Soviet ideology, the style of life is predominantly collective and group-led, and boundaries between public and private are still blurred because social orphans do not own anything that surrounds them in their institutional everyday life. Increasingly former residents are orphaned twice. This first happens when the state takes them away from their parents, and secondly when it officially terminates its ‘parental’ responsibility in their early twenties. With lessened social support they stand alone, just at the time when other young people increase their reliance on the family. I would like to conclude that children, after leaving their families, start on a road that is completely unpredictable in its outcome. This explains the many different and contradicting accounts of former residents’ experiences. To me there is no such thing as ‘the experience’ of a former resident, although one can find some similarities. However, it is clear that being in state care does not ensure that everything that happens to children will be done in their ‘best interests’. Yet this is what drives many decisions to deprive parents of parental rights since, among the members of authorities, there seems to be a shared understanding that, as opposed to remaining with a ‘problem’ family, being placed with the state will ensure experiences of good childhood.

Notes 1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

Her grandmother died, leaving her grandfather to care for their four children, one of whom was her mother. One night he was taken by the NKVD and never came back. The children became not just orphans, but ‘children of an enemy of the state’. Despite many difficulties, her mother finished a vocational school in Magadan and became a teacher. Problems with documents (often lost) and accommodation (receiving, looking after and paying for utilities) are among the most prevalent for social orphans, and not only in Magadan; see for example http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2009/058/16.html. These cases are far from unusual elsewhere in the Russian Federation: see http://www.newsru.com/crime/06apr2009/schdirclear31rpurl.html. A corrective prison camp for underage children (aged 14 to 18). An adult corrective prison camp. Hazing, fagging, bullying; abusive, violent and scurrilously humiliating treatment of young conscripts by the older ones, the so-called ‘grandfathers’. 252

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7.

I was told that they are not allowed to use this word in full, because they were not yet fully accepted individuals. 8. Aminazin is a strong sedative. Sul’fazin injections result in fever and severe pain (Fireside 1979). 9. Until 2005, when the law was changed, allowing a parent who officially owns the accommodation to deprive his or her spouse and children the right to live there. 10. Detdomovets is often used as general term to describe children who grew up in residential care before the internat became a separate concept. 11. I am grateful to the Magic Circle interdisciplinary seminar of Scott Polar Research Institute for their help in analysing this material.

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PART III

POST-SOVIET OR SOVIET? SELF-PERPETUATION OF THE SYSTEM

Chapter 8

The Continuing Soviet Legacy: Paradoxes of Change and Continuity

Childhood and Family Today: The Shifting Domains of Public and Private This study was challenging in that it took place simultaneously in two time periods, the present post-Soviet and past Soviet, with a time break in 1991 denoting time ‘before’ and ‘after’. Analysing present day-to-day activities constantly brought me back to the Soviet past via the memories of former residents, references made by state employees, and the analysis of official and historical documents. I had to unfold the intricate combination of practices and views that people remembered as existing ‘before’, and which continued into post-Soviet times, from those they considered to have arisen only in post-Soviet times. Next I shall reflect on some post-Soviet changes and their implication on the area of family and child welfare, followed by an account of continuities and their interpretation. The observed changes were not similar in nature. I will distinguish between two types: rapid and delayed (latent) change. It seems that many of the existing continuities are related to delayed change. In 2000, residential care institutions worked under the conditions of changing boundaries between public and private, state and family, and changing perceptions of childhood in society. In the Soviet era, ‘the state’ (gosudarstvo) embodied not only the government (pravitel’stvo) but also society (obshchestvo). Both of these were shadowed and directed by Party management and ideology. In post-Soviet times, ‘the state’ has developed internal boundaries between the spheres of government (federal or local authorities, or vlasti) and society, civil society, and the emerging ‘private’ sphere and the non-state sector. These new spheres, together with freedom of religion, movement and speech, constituted alternatives to the 257

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state, facilitating independence from state ideology (which itself started to dissipate) and control. Precisely because a non-state realm has come into being, there is now a closer association between the term ‘state’, power (vlast’) and control, with a visible and tangible gap between the authorities and the people. The rapid emergence of the Russian non-state sector and foreign NGOs brought new ideas and thus independence from state philosophies and practices. The working of the NGO sector in providing services has complemented the attempts of the Russian government to address many problems, particularly in the area of social welfare. The possibility for uncensored and objective social science research and an independent press facilitated the voicing of social problems, including those of the family, childhood and institutions.

Gaps in the Social Safety Network The wider processes that simultaneously took place in society have had multifaceted implications for the family. The separation of state and society was accompanied by a partial retreat of the state from involvement in family affairs, reducing both social control and social welfare support. On the one hand, this gave the family more freedom, but on the other hand, it crippled the family’s ability to cope with new forms of hardships. Guaranteed employment, stable income, affordable food and inexpensive childcare all disappeared. Today, an absence of income compels some women to choose Baby Home placements, even if at first only temporarily. The director of the Baby Home in Kamchatka summarized the situation: These women don’t believe in the future. State support in many instances has gone. Crèches are only for children over two years of age. What about women with younger children? If she goes back to work, and if the pensioners, our grandmothers, must work because pensions are not sufficient anymore, where is she to take her child? Many kindergartens became so expensive. Even with the discount, some mothers just cannot afford them. Child monthly allowances have not been paid, and children’s formulas and clothes are very expensive. Many mothers who work for private employers do not get maternity leave and pay, and are not guaranteed their job back if they take leave. The social pedagogue from the Magadan Baby Home pointed to the sharp contrast between previous Soviet blagopoluchie and current destitution: ‘Society used to help the most disadvantaged. Now even people with higher education cannot find a job.’ 258

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The dichotomization of the public and private, with the rising concept of ‘private’, brought about private property, ownership, inheritance and businesses that could be set up, managed and guided by individual interests. The coexistence of state and private enterprises facilitated social and economic stratification, with rapid impoverishment and enrichment of different strata of the population (Murav’eva 2002). Such stratification and differences in income, housing, employment, education for children and relations to the state (being dependent on it or independent of it) reduced the former ‘transparency’ of the life of an individual and family. The state’s authority to regulate many issues related to purely family matters is diminishing; for example, parents cannot be prosecuted and have their children removed for their religious beliefs. The greater autonomy in private life allows some parents to refuse some forms of state assistance that they see as an intrusive intervention. While these transformations take place, the separation of the state and the family has left children, previously supported by both actors, often unsupported by either. The social stratification and reduced transparency makes impoverishment less visible. Families with very young children may become known through either a nurse from a children’s polyclinic or neighbours. But if a child does not attend a kindergarten, or the parents are unemployed or change their place of residence, the children’s polyclinic may not know who resides in their area. By the time a family’s problems come to the attention of the authorities, often by chance, their neblagopoluchie may be too advanced for the authorities to allow them to keep their children, unless they change. As shown in Chapters 3 and 4, this change is precisely what has become hardest for the family to do. The system of child protection seems to be zealous in depriving some parents of parental rights, but children from the ‘invisible’ families may become neglected or unsupervised, falling out of the system of preventive measures, schools, kindergartens or health authorities. Children as young as six are picked up by the police and brought up to the TSVINP where, until recently, juvenile delinquents and unsupervised children were kept together. The Head of the TSVINP complained that young petty criminals are often nursed from this category of young unsupervised children and therefore somebody must work with them: They first steal bread from a store because they are hungry, but then go for something bigger. When they get through their first Court hearing and SIZO,1 they may be lost. They learn so much from their prison experiences. They end up committing a burglary, and this is considered to be a very serious violation. But when a child is sent to the colony for underage criminals, he will never, never become a good person. 259

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Prison camps for underage children now start classes for 15-year-olds who have never been to school. This awareness gives a new impetus to the wishes of child welfare organizations and the authorities to protect and structure children again by ‘normalizing’ parents and ensuring children’s blagopoluchie in state institutions.

State Withdrawal: A Moral Vacuum and Multiple Moralities Although the state has retreated from some spheres of family life, giving families more autonomy, the disappearance of state ideology has resulted in a moral vacuum (Gurko 1995, Pilkington 1996). In Soviet times, the questions of what values to instil and how to instil them were clearly spelled out and solved with the public sphere of education working together with and through the family. Having abandoned communist ideology, while searching for a new identity, the state could not offer a replacement. What appeared in public and professional discourse were either Russian Orthodox Christian values or obscure ‘universal human values’2 (obshchechelovecheskiye tsennosti) that supposedly should guide children’s upbringing. Despite their ambiguity, a reference to these values appeared in the Magadan educational programme for 2001–06. The former state-dictated prescriptive ways and the content of vospitanie lost their cohesiveness and do not necessarily form a unified front against which results are measured. Parents have to make their own decisions on many issues concerning child rearing practices. However, ‘many parents have lost their values, which were guiding their life, and as a result they have nothing to say to their children’ (Breeva 1999: 115). The perception and realities of childhood have undergone many changes. Envisioned and intended as a ‘happy’ time of innocence and learning, living in a specifically created world, with all its child-oriented cinemas, theatres and books, shielded from the problems of the adult world, prohibited from work, while being guided into the ‘radiant future’, it constituted what some researchers described as a ‘ghettoed’ childhood (Qvortrup, cited in Rybinskiy 1998). Children are now seen as individuals who are much more familiar with issues of money, labour and sex, and have greater access to information than previous post-War generations. These transformations of childhood evoke regrets on the part of many adults of a lost innocence that was necessarily connected with a ‘happy’ childhood. The adverse and diversifying effects that societal changes exert on family and childhood make them no longer transparent, controlled, structured and understood phenomena, contributing to the feeling of increasing disorder, where previously order was remembered. 260

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The simultaneous emergence of new phenomena in Russian society (such as the unemployment of parents and the surge in the numbers of street children in public areas) together with the increasing visibility of the old child-related problems that were not voiced in Soviet times (such as domestic violence, child abuse and cruelty towards children) called for the development of new legislative acts, services, concepts and definitions. Child abuse and maltreatment as a concept, an object of inquiry, policy and intervention, only started to emerge in post-Soviet society, and epidemiology of child abuse is still a big unknown. Since 1990, when the Russian Federation signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child of 1989, the Russian government has issued over 100 laws and normative acts regulating the protection of children’s rights in the fields of health, education, labour, social security and family relations. In the introduction to the collection of the most important legal documents, the editors write: Currently numerous old and new legislative norms coexist, dealing with different aspects of children’s well-being. It is a challenge even for lawyers to understand and sort out the abundance of this often contradictory material (Rybinskiy and Ivanova 1999: 3). Moreover, the work of child welfare agencies is now governed not only by federal bodies, but also by local legislative bodies, introducing even more diversity in regulating the operations of regional institutions. In the process of implementation, some acts resulted in concrete tangible outcomes that can be seen, experienced and used immediately, while many others turned out to be less transformative. They entail the delayed changes existing in legislative acts, often giving only an appearance and potential for change, since these articles of legislation lack both clarity of meaning (i.e., the Family Code does not provide a definition for ‘family’) and the mechanisms of implementation (Tsymbal 1999). If the state family policy in Soviet times was that of strict control and the substitution of family socialization with public state socialization, now the state declares the self-sufficiency of the family and the policy of nonintervention in family affairs3 (Achil’dieva 1997). Declaring ‘self-sufficiency’ and ‘non-intervention’ is a long way from understanding exactly how these new concepts should guide practice. The new policy was set out in the Family Code of 1996. Compared with the old Soviet Code of 1969, there are three major developments: (1) the recognition of fatherhood and of the family, both of which are now ‘under the protection of the state’; (2) the 261

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removal of Soviet moral values as the basis for deprivation of parental rights (Article 69); and (3) the granting of new rights to children to represent themselves in court and to have their voices heard in family disputes, starting at the age of ten. There is far less clarity in what all these changes mean to the practitioners and how to interpret them. Asking a child his or her opinion in court is a simple matter – I have seen this done in a dispute between the mother of a child and the child’s guardian. But what is fatherhood and what is ‘state protection of fatherhood and family’? My cases took place in 2000 when, theoretically, the new laws were already in place. In actual fact, we saw that fatherhood was being interpreted in the same Soviet way, that is, unless it was derived from a registered marriage or at least from a man’s name indicated on the child’s birth certificate, paternity was not recognized. Similarly, although Soviet moral values were removed from the Code, we observed how they were still applied and played an important role in judging the parents by the authorities and judges. Many people working in the child welfare network keep working and are not even aware of these changes, laws and regulations, legislature and practices, as if they exist in two different planes. Thus, the new recognition of children as subjects of their own upbringing does not exert any influence on the way the children are brought up in institutions, where they are treated precisely as objects. Tamara’s children’s wish to stay with their mother was disregarded, although both were over ten. The conclusion must be that some of these legislative acts aim at changing attitudes, but clearly they often fail to alter deeply rooted attitudes formed during Soviet times, which continue to govern actual practices.

Continuity of Practices and Attitudes With the backdrop of these often chaotic and diverse changes, there are some areas where continuity from Soviet to post-Soviet times seems to be predominant. In particular, the state hierarchy and the network of organizations and agencies (and within them the Soviet modus operandi) not only did not collapse but, on the contrary, seemed to crystallize and intensify in their operations. There are also strong continuities in practices, attitudes and moral values. If we trace some of the continuities back into Soviet times, this journey will take us not only into post-War periods, but in some cases even further back, right into the heart of Stalinist Russia in the 1930s.

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Practices In Chapters 3–5, I examined the concept of ‘working with neblagopoluchnaya’ families in child welfare, which entails first of all finding cases of inadequate fulfilment of parental responsibilities (cases become known through the collective effort of informing the authorities by officials and private citizens), then explaining to parents what constitutes their inadequacy and giving recommendations on how to correct it, followed by warnings. If the parents fail to comply with the recommendations, proceedings for deprivation of parental rights are initiated. After the deprivation of parental rights, the ties between them and their children are severed. I found striking similarities between these apparently post-Soviet practices and the Soviet concept of ‘working with the family’ to prevent poor parenting outlined in specialist literature. It has a markedly public and disciplinary character. Published and disseminated during the last year of the Soviet Union, Metodicheskie rekommendatsii (1991) described the ways society can help deviating parents: • address the administration of the parents’ workplace, asking for the elimination of factors which facilitate the lack of parental supervision, i.e., relieving a parent from lengthy business trips or night shifts; • talk to parents with the participation of teachers, police, public representatives and people’s deputies; • send materials for discussion about the parents’ behaviour to the working collectives of the parents’ places of work, study or living; • discuss behaviour of parents in the comrades’ court, which has a right to give the parents a comrades’ reprimand, a public rebuke, with the option of publishing this rebuke in newspapers, or a fine of ten roubles; • examine the case at a KPDN meeting, which has a right to give the parents a public reprimand or a fine; • fine parents for their children’s violation of the law, such as petty hooliganism; • give parents an official public warning for the inadmissibility of evasion of parental rights, anti-social behaviour and neglect of their parental duties; • send a parent to an LTP (lechebno-trudovie profilaktorii).4

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The results of these measures were recorded in a special report (akt obsledovaniya) on the family’s living conditions and the conditions of the child’s upbringing, ‘created by the parents who negatively influence the child’. Only after these preventive measures have proven unsuccessful will the authorities start the process of deprivation of parental rights. Note that help to families was, and still is, based on the self-reliance of the parents. The rationale behind it was that once their deficiencies and inadequacies were explained, they have to ‘correct’ themselves through a change in consciousness, otherwise a set of punitive measures could be applied. Kharkhordin argues that this approach of a collective in dealing with a ‘deviating’ individual, which he described as ‘Reveal, Admonish, Excommunicate’, was adopted by the Party Control Commission Courts (CCC) from the work of the ecclesiastical courts of the Russian Orthodox Church. Comparing similarities between the two, Kharkhordin writes: The logic of the New Testament required three consecutive steps: first, denounce the deeds of the sinner and point them out to him or her; second, admonish him/her to return to righteousness: and only when all these measures fail is the third step authorised: excommunication (1999: 53). The Bolsheviks constituted lichnost’ (the self) through oblichenie (revealing deeds), resulting in an important point: a Bolshevik may know himself only through the eyes of the relevant public: ‘Thus, she or he may get an assurance of righteous behaviour, which is indicative of the Higher Conscience, only from the Party’ (ibid.: 342). Therefore, disciplined obedience to the Party is an essential condition of entry into the realm of virtuous living. The CCC dealt with misdeeds of Party members and devised specific measures for their elimination. These measures were supposed to be of an educational rather than a punitive character. Expulsion from the Party by the CCC was the last measure, for use only after all other educative measures had failed. Rather than expulsion, admonition was stressed, ‘patient comradely explanation’ of the mistake committed by a Party member, warning him, issuing a reprimand. Having undergone appropriate rehabilitating exercises, like demonstrating zeal in the practice of socialist construction, members could be restored to their previous status. Kharkhordin maintains that this practice later spilled over to other milieus of Soviet society: factories, offices and schools. Every collective was to be a congregation, based on constant mutual surveillance and the reform 264

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or punishment of transgressors. The transgressing individual was required to posses the highest development of sovest’ (conscience) or soznatel’nost’, the capacity to act in accordance with an internalized understanding of what is right (i.e., revolutionary doctrine). He argues that this practice reached its peak in the times of the Stalinist Purges, but between the 1930s and the Soviet times of ‘mature’ socialism, it underwent a transformation. If, during the Purges, revelation and excommunication were stressed, in ‘mature’ Soviet society, ‘heightened admonition enforced discipline’. If we now analyse the meaning of ‘working with the family’ (that is, ‘deviant’ family) in post-Soviet times, in the light of the pattern of the relationship between society and a ‘deviant’ individual outlined above, it indeed appears that the same Soviet ‘Reveal, Admonish, Excommunicate’ approach has been preserved. First, the family’s ‘inadequacies’ become revealed (they become known via their children or denounced by citizens), then they are admonished (the concept of ‘helping the family’, i.e., explaining what the family had done wrong and what it needs to do to correct it), the parents are expected to correct themselves and, if this does not happen, they are excommunicated (the deprivation of parental rights and ‘symbolic death’ of parents). However, in Soviet times, this disciplinary approach was supplemented with state support – not expert assistance to an individual family as a whole, but a public welfare system with universal employment, free medical care and education, subsidized childcare and mutual assistance funds in trade unions, all of which constituted resources on which parents could draw to correct themselves. Much of the attention to the family centred on the parent’s place of work and helping families in need, although part of this help was institutional placement. Active members of the trade union, usually women, could listen to the laments of a wife; parents of a child received places in kindergartens, discounts for children in pioneer camps or resort areas; trade unions had a fund of mutual assistance for cases of acute financial need. A district policeman connected to the KPDN and the TSVINP was obliged to be acquainted with all ‘problem’ families and ‘problem’ children in his district. Children’s polyclinics, crèches, kindergartens and schools monitored a child’s wellbeing and consequently had familiarity with the family’s circumstances. It was with this support by the state, and being admonished to accept correct behaviour by various kollektivs that a deviating family was expected to rely on self-correction. In post-Soviet society, the state has withdrawn both from moral space and from many parts of the social safety network which previously helped 265

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parents to ‘get it right’. Now it is neither obliged nor able to support the family. Some of the tools for correcting parents’ behaviour, such as comrades’ courts, became obsolete. Enforced treatment of alcoholics was abolished and so were public naming and shaming and the discussion of parental behaviour by the kollektiv at work. The educative and corrective roles previously played by many collectives now rest with fewer agents and structures. Those who are left to work in the preserved parts of the state infrastructure, i.e., teachers and social pedagogues at schools and kindergartens, the KPDN and the Guardianship Department (GD), continue the same disciplinary approach, but with fewer resources. Neither they nor the parents have a sufficient number of social welfare agencies designed to help the parents carry out the recommendations, leaving them to continue to battle with their problems on their own, largely using the same state support that proved to be insufficient in the first place. Jobs may not be found, flats not acquired, alcoholism not addressed and family problems not resolved. As such, along with increased parental responsibility, the state has decreased its own presence in the family. However, this has happened only in certain senses, as it has not stopped the removal of children from families that might become neblagopoluchniye as a result of this withdrawal, and the placing of children in expensive institutions. To sum up, the pattern ‘Reveal, Admonish, Excommunicate’ has been preserved, but in this triad, admonition occurs in an attenuated form compared to Soviet times. Indeed, admonition becomes pointless as neither the state nor the parents have a sufficient number of social welfare agencies designed to help the parents carry out the recommendations and to return to ‘righteousness’ (itself a diffused moral category now). With a reduced emphasis on admonition, one moves much faster from ‘revelation’ directly to ‘excommunication’. This amounts not just to the continuation of Soviet practices, but also those employed in Stalin’s society, albeit in a more symbolic way.

Attitudes and Values Despite the decreasing role of the school in the upbringing of children and the increasing autonomy of the family, the expectations of some state representatives and parents of the role that the school and society should play in children’s upbringing still bear Soviet characteristics. The former mutual interdependence and shared parental responsibility that constituted the ‘virtual kinship’ system, although in fact disintegrating, seems to persist in the minds of individuals. A teacher with over 20 years of experience complained to me that often parents have minimal contact with their 266

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children at home: ‘Children come unprepared. Not many parents read, play, or do homework with them.’ Parents often feel that their responsibility is to feed and clothe their children and the rest should be left to the school. The same problem was outlined in an article on contemporary parenthood by a senior researcher at the Moscow Institute of Sociology: ‘Not all parents recognise their parental responsibility, considering by force of habit that children must be brought up by the school, army, or if worse comes to worst, children’s prison camps’ (Gurko 1997). Despite fundamental social changes, value patterns turn out to be stable and unchanged in some families where parents were bringing up children, transmitting similar values to them that they acquired as children during Soviet times (Slutskiy 1995). The same applies to the public sphere of education. The author of a new textbook designed to train teachers still advocates Soviet-style fusion between family and public upbringing, and fostering previous state-parent relationships (Kulikova 1999). Once again, teachers are viewed as pedagogues, the specialists in the child’s correct upbringing, whose skills and competence are superior to those of parents because, Kulikova she argues, some family values, such as individualism and nationalism, are incorrect and are therefore exerting harmful influences on the child’s development. Note how closely this view corresponds with that of Kharchev’s concerning the inadequacy of family upbringing theorized in 1979 (1979: 35) A pedagogue, she maintains, should become a helper and adviser in family upbringing, be informed on whether or not the child in the family adheres to the regime, if the family teaches the child self-reliance, and if his or her dietary requirements are adequate. The authority of pedagogues, however young and inexperienced, is assumed.

‘Moral Panic’: Current Descendants of Witchcraft Accusations and Show Trials The perception of ‘us’ and ‘them’, which defines the boundaries within the country between us as good and them as bad, also seems to persist. The category of ‘us’ includes family and friends, colleagues and professionals, while the category of ‘them’ contains the same groups that were considered as ‘them’ in Soviet times. In an opinion poll, authorities and politicians were named as heading the list of ‘them’, followed by criminals, marginal groups and deviants (Danilova 2002). In internet discussions regarding social problems one can often encounter calls for drastic measures to be taken against ‘them’, referring to anti-social alcoholics, tramps, the disabled, the 267

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unemployed, and neblagopoluchniye families who should be sterilized.5 The process of social disintegration only replenishes and increases the number of marginal groups from the impoverished population.6 I suggest that elements of this continuity combine with certain aspects of new circumstances to produce the distinctive situation that we see today. Against the background of a significant depletion of societal resources designed to support the family, ‘falling morals’ in the family, economic struggles, a high divorce rate, a high level of alcoholism, the appearance of public discourse on domestic violence and cruelty towards children, the worsening of children’s health and education, high numbers of children who have not been to school, street children and children involved in crime all contribute to the anxiety about the family and, most importantly, childhood (Bezlepkina 1995, Breeva 1999, Dement’eva 2000b, Rimashevskaya et al. 1997, Polyakov 2003). In the field of child welfare, this increases the obligation of the authorities and agencies to protect children from the contaminating influence of families who cannot ensure a ‘happy childhood’. Local authorities and individual agencies that file court suits for deprivation of parental rights are in essence child protection agencies designed to ensure the wellbeing of children, not the family. The requirements of the state for family childcare and what the state agents should do if these requirements are not met are clear. It is far less clear where the family should get help and what kind of help it can receive, especially for poor and less educated families who need the state support the most (Darmodekhin and Elizarov 1994, Sillaste 1995). What is also not clear is what is going on in the family. As one judge said, ‘Nobody is trying to understand what is happening in the family, and why’. As we have seen, the parents’ wish to raise their child should be enough to overcome the obstacles by themselves, or by using state assistance that state agents think is provided elsewhere. Although this ‘assistance’ may be inadequate, inaccessible and ineffective, if the family fails to ‘correct’ itself, the state agents consider it to be the family’s fault. The relationship between the state and the family rests on many specific obligations expected of parents, i.e., self-reliance, self-correction, soznatel’nost’,7 determination and readiness to adhere to ‘correct’ behaviour. Note how much weight is put on self, from the original idea in Marx’s Communist Manifesto that the all-people’s communist state would be based on the conscience of each individual being only necessary to control one’s behaviour, thereby making the oppressive state obsolete. In Kharkhordin’s (1930s) model, righteous behaviour was indicative of a higher conscience. Soviet psycho-theory held the person as 268

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conscious, disciplined, in control of and responsible for his or her behaviour, dominated by reason and able to change his or her environment. State agents expect rational behaviour and self-reliance on the part of parents in solving their problems in post-Soviet times. It follows that if things do not go right, it must be an individual’s fault, and this is precisely what happens when the state agents observe the family failing to adhere to recommendations and mend their ways in order to be able to raise their child. The inability of mothers to overcome their problems is explained as the loss of maternal instinct. Therefore, under pressure to solve a problem of a disadvantaged child and of the family that appears not wanting to or able to help itself, the authorities must operate in an accusatory mode in order to prove the parents’ ultimate inadequacy. The GD has to face a complicated moral dilemma that they often seem to solve through a process of displacement. Within one person there exist the reasons of the state (the state as a multiplicity, which constitutes greater authority than oneself always available for invocation and displacement) and reasons of the person (the same stores they go to, the same life in the city). However, in morally perilous situations, that is, at the moment of decision making when there is (perceived or real) danger to child’s life or health, the realization of the social and personal consequences of their decision may become overwhelming, and not only because of personal accountability, but for the fate of a child if left with this seemingly unfit mother. At this moment many state agents, it would seem, make a certain moral choice that is backed up by this greater authority which displaces their personal accountability with the state’s decision outlined for them; the process which may not be intentional. When a state agent falls back on this greater authority, she denies her own humanity.8 As Mary Douglas maintained, ‘Individuals do not try to make independent choices, especially about big political issues … they come already primed with cultural assumptions and weightings … the big issues reach them in the form of questions whether to reinforce authority or subvert it’ (cited in Crook 1999: 169). Hence ‘excommunication’ must take place, and this is where the categorization of families as neblagopoluchnaya helps the state agents to maintain some clarity. As such, the state agents work under conditions that have a number of distinctive characteristics, that is, the social repertoire available to them contains categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mothers, support to the family is limited and, related to that, various kinds of knowledge about the family and the amount and flow of information is absent. The family 269

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becomes a ‘black box’ and, under such circumstances, one falls back on one’s own prejudices and understanding of what is bad and good, making state agents ready to place blame on those identified as bad, and serving as a precondition to the accusations9 similar to those found in witchcraft trials. Next we shall draw on two parallels intersecting in Maria’s case: those with witchcraft accusations and Stalinist repressive trials of the 1930s. The parallels lie within institutional processes and mechanisms of accusations, not in what they were accused of, as Maria was neither a malevolent witch with intent nor a classical ‘evil’, a positive aggressive force but a maleficent failure. The point of these witchcraft-type accusations is to provide a mechanism of social exclusion and to maintain the boundaries between ‘normal and ‘deviant’. As we saw, a confirmed deviant was excluded from the realm of ‘good’, whether these were categories of a ‘good’ mother, a ‘good’ citizen, or a ‘normal’ society. This exclusion serves a number of functions, which we will now examine. Christian societies are seen as dominated by a monotheistic belief in a single God as a source of religious authority, while Soviet authorities placed Marxist-Leninist ideology in a similar totalitarian position (Kharkhordin 1999). The Soviet belief in the teleological progress into the future to a given destination led to clear discursive outlines of what is right and wrong. The ‘correct’ belief system had to establish boundaries that would delineate and separate ‘good’ from ‘evil’.

Maria as a Picture of ‘Evil’ Mary Douglas highlights a similar case with the Christianization of the African Lele of Kasai, where a young priest who was prosecuting practitioners of the old religion launched a direct attack on the sorcerers, the representatives of pagan beliefs: Those who were suspected of sorcery were beaten and burned until they confessed. The public who were not personally accused, Catholic and pagan alike, rejoiced that Satan was rebuked. God’s rule was justified and health and prosperity were assured (Douglas 1999: 185). Douglas argues further that ‘violence might be reduced if the local bishops insisted that the alleged sorcerer is not solely responsible for undoing his own evil’. To continue parallels between African sorcery and post-Soviet secular witchcraft-type accusations, I would argue that if the family was not held solely responsible for arriving at the point where they are viewed 270

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as unfit to raise their child as a result of their own ‘wrongdoing’, then, such swift deprivation of parental rights as a form of state violence could have been reduced. Just as Christianity was rough on earlier religions (ibid.: 189), so the new religion of communism was rough on the old worldview. Douglas maintained that the explanation of European witch-hunting and of the African case, with the involvement of Catholic missionaries in converting a pagan population, was political, based on rivalry between a dominant worldview and the one it has suppressed. This is all the more clear in Soviet and post-Soviet cases, where ‘witchcraft’ had a materialist rather than a supernatural explanation. Similarly, La Fontaine argues that in accusations of Satanic abuse in modern England, witchcraft provided a picture of ‘evil’, representing the inverse of all that was good and therefore ‘the demonised opponents to the Church’. Many parents who were accused of Satanic abuse of children could be described as societal rejects: Not only were they deprived economically, their behaviour and their treatment of their children deviated from all acceptable practices so greatly that it could be characterised as inhuman. The allegations thus follow the pattern of witchcraft accusations in many societies past and present: the accused are those who violate basic premises about human nature or who are socially marginal in other ways. In particular, and most damning to believers, their children had been seriously damaged by their parenting. Charity and sympathy might be withdrawn, without guilt or fear or reprisal, from those who are designated as evil (1998: 188). The suspicion of practising sorcery in Douglas’s Lele of Kasai fell on the old, the disabled, the mentally defective and the sick. In the post-Soviet case, the population of mothers deprived of parental rights mostly consists of the least resourceful, the poorly educated, the unemployed and those who cannot defend themselves against the accusations. Although mothers like Maria are not connected with accusations of Satanism or witchcraft as such, they are portrayed as totally inadequate – a mother who lacks anything good – and are therefore conceptualized as the inverse of all that was good (La Fontaine 1998); in short, a personification of ‘evil’. It is important here to ask what kind of ‘evil’ is implied when judging ‘unfit’ mothers. It is interpreted similarly to one view of Christian monotheism, that is, for Aquinas, ‘evil is real but negative; it is the real absence of good, rather than a positive principle of agency working 271

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in its own right’ (Douglas 1999: 191, italics added). Therefore, in contrast with Stalinist paranoia, ‘evil’ here is not an agent in its own right; rather, it is the absence of good. The mothers are accused of not being good and being maleficent. Again, I am using the term ‘evil’ as an explanatory analogy rather than a description of an actual situation.

Maria as Dangerous Deviant In her work on witchcraft confessions and accusation, Douglas (1970) analyses the patterns of witchcraft accusations, showing two main patterns of witch belief: where a witch is an outsider and where she is an internal enemy. Here I am particularly interested in the category of internal enemy, which Douglas subdivided into three subcategories, one being the witch as a dangerous deviant.10 I see our unfit mothers as viewed in this specific subcategory of internal witch, and the function of the accusation in this subcategory as controlling deviants in the name of community values. These unfit mothers are accused of not adhering to the moral values of their accusers who, by being good, feel that they do follow community values. Unfit mothers are their opposite: they do not work, they are immoral and they do not look after their children well. Therefore, Maria could be seen as a dangerous deviant who violated the common moral values of society by not being what a good mother should be. Her expulsion (excommunication) and the removal of her children would prevent their contamination, and moving these children into institutions or a ‘good’ family would prevent the perpetuation of this ‘evil’.

Maria and the Withdrawal of Obligations In his analysis of witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart Essex, Alan Macfarlane (1970a) shows that making accusations was also a justification for the denial of obligations of charity or kinship. He gives an example of accusations against elderly women, which justified their neighbours’ refusal to provide them with charitable help. La Fontaine highlights many cases of accusations of Satanic abuse today using the same pattern: ‘Defining people who are failures as parents as satanists is a step which legitimises the withdrawal of both professional compassion and neighbourly tolerance’ (1998: 74). Developing the discussion of Bakhtin, we can add that defining parents as totally unfit for raising their children is a way for the authorities in Magadan to finalize the case and not have to think and deal with it anymore. Many times I heard the tiredness and impatience in the voices of the plaintiffs who would only be happy when the case of deprivation of 272

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parental rights, which had been dragging on for months, would finally be over, so there could be time for other cases. By fulfilling their obligation to protect the child’s health and life, and by making a suitable placement, they would finalize that family altogether, because for them, outside of their relationship to the child, this family did not hold any value. Therefore, the accusations on the part of the state as ways of dealing with ‘evil’ (the witches) serve many functions, such as controlling a dangerous deviant, the denial of obligations and the explanation of misfortune in the community, that is, the falling morals and disintegration of the family, deprived children and the growing number of social orphans. So, with regard to mothers, now it is not a battle against a positive vision of evil, as it was in different periods of Soviet history, where we can find Douglas’s witches as members of a rival faction (such as Men’sheviks) or as an internal enemy with outside liaisons (‘spies’ during Stalinism, i.e., agents of Satan). It is a maleficent inadequacy that was turned into transgression. In child welfare, the state created a category, the neblagopoluchnaya family, perceived by the authorities as individuals, and this is a part of the system. Yet the problem is not seen as systemic, as the nature of accusation and blame here is the accountability of an individual family. In doing so, the state agents continue the long standing Soviet tradition of ascribing ‘negative’ features not to the system, but to individual human causes, thereby enhancing the liability of an individual (Conquest 1967, Fitzpatrick 1993), making people scapegoats for poor organization and administration, or local economic disasters (Mead 1955). In Stalinist show trials, people became indictable by simply doing their jobs (Fitzpatrick 1993). In 2000, many mothers were blamed for the consequences of rapid economic and social changes that were occurring at a higher level, and for which one might otherwise blame the government. Poverty, unemployment, poor housing and the practice of persuading mothers to leave their children in temporary-come-permanent state care were hardly the sole fault of the mothers, but Shlapentokh reflects on the ‘insensitivity’ of Russian liberals to the poverty-stricken masses, where one well known Russian liberal economist ‘called upon the poor to blame themselves for their mishaps’ (1999: 1,168). In accusing mothers of parental inadequacy while systematically overlooking the contribution of external factors, we see a familiar pattern of identifying an ‘enemy’, either external or internal, who can be blamed and punished. When this pattern becomes systemic, it amounts to, if not a ‘moral panic’ in which a group of persons ‘emerges in a society to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests’ (Cohen 1972: 9), then to a heightened social anxiety (Waiton 2008). 273

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By the 1960s, public trials were less concerned with spies, but still focused on the idea of deviance, with no mitigating social circumstances. Juviler (1967) tells a story of a talented surgeon, Z, who was accused of stealing books and personal possessions while working in the Lenin Library in Moscow. He was tried before a large audience. The judge tried to understand the motivation behind the theft of books by a well respected and affluent, but overworked and exhausted young doctor, but could not find an explanation. For ideological reasons, kleptomania11 was considered to be non-existent in the Soviet Union, which made a big difference in this case. One of the psychiatrists participating in this trial believed that Z suffered from fatigue-induced kleptomania, and said that ‘Had this case been heard fifty years ago (before the revolution when kleptomania was recognised), Z would have been freed as a kleptomaniac. Now we do not recognise extreme neurosis’ (ibid.: 506). Z refused to be considered temporarily insane, as that would impede his further career. As a result, he was sentenced to two years in a corrective labour colony. During the trial, a scientist was sitting by the author (Juviler). On a few occasions, this scientist expressed his disgust reagrding the whole procedure and at one point he exclaimed: ‘Sledgehammer psychology! What is that man doing on trial? He was convicted before they brought him here today’ (italics added). If we come back to the trial of Maria, it is easy to see how none of her explanations satisfied the judge, who chose to ignore the role other parties (representatives of the state) played in her affair. Indeed, she was considered ‘guilty’ of poor parenting even before the trial. The trials have other similarities. Both individuals, Z and Maria, had committed ‘misdeeds’. Both were depicted as morally ‘depraved’. In both, the most plausible explanation for their misdeeds did not impress the judges. In the case of Z, ‘although there has as yet been no expert psychiatric testimony at the trial, the judge has already decided from the record of the pre-trial investigation, that “exhaustion alone does not explain his misdeeds”’ (ibid.: 504). In Maria’s case, the persistent attempts of talking her out of taking her child home, and the refusal of the Baby Home administration to return the child, along with the absence of any assistance from society in overcoming the difficulties she had in bringing up her child, did not constitute an explanation for her misdeeds. If kleptomania had been considered to be a legitimate explanation, and if Maria had been helped by (non-existent) social services, neither case would probably have ended up as they did. In the Stalinist show trials and the English witchcraft trials, blame was shifted within the idiom of the principle of evil, since the accused were seen 274

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as active agents of Satan (or ‘the West’, the arch-enemy of the Soviet regime). Their confessions were required because they had to confess to the actual involvement with evil as a positive principle. In the case of ‘unfit’ mothers, the authorities shift the blame, but without the help of the principle of evil and without direct confession of the accused, who are charged with being inadequate. Confession is irrelevant: one doesn’t confess to not being good enough, only to being evil. Yet mothers are asked to agree with deprivation of parental rights, this serving as an indirect confession. In the Stalinist show trials, performed and broadcast before an audience, confessions served a purpose: ‘the usual normative/prescriptive ritualized incantations [were] aimed to discipline the broad public of rank-and-file party members and of the population at large’ (Žižek 1999: 16). Moreover, forcing ‘spies’ to confess meant acknowledging their power and the trial was designed to destroy it. In court cases like Maria’s, there is no audience except for the internal, and these women have no power from the start. The court hearings are not to destroy their power but to confirm they have none. So, why extract the agreeing? Perhaps this act is based on the principle put forward by Dzerzhinski/Vyshinski that: ‘confession of the accused is the basis of the case for the prosecution’ and ‘the confession of the accused is the empress of proof ’ (Radzinskiy 1998: 425, Vaksberg 1991).12 The repressive Stalinist trials and those like Maria’s had an important ritualistic element to them and, as in any ritual, performativity is important. Cassiday describes skewed power balance in the Stalinist show trials where: The injustice of the purges arose from a severe imbalance in access to the dramatic means of representation … Those in the show trials had little or no freedom to use drama in their defence, and as a result, they found themselves the victims of a totalizing script that allowed for no outcome other than guilty as charged (1998: 641). Representation in Maria’s case was non-existent, and all witnesses called came there to support the accusations. The prosecution was well prepared for battle and exercised its symbolic power. This is still drama and although there were no spectators, such trials reach a much wider audience because, in the public discourse, the issue of neblagopoluchnaya family is widely discussed. This includes depiction of the harm that these families inflict on their children and calls to deprive more such families of parental rights.13 Often these trials were pointless, in that the outcome was already predetermined, but participation in the ritual allowed the state agents to 275

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reinstate community values and confirm the guilt of the accused; using individuals as political and social scapegoats to ‘unmask’ their essence as judged upon their action, although the kind of ‘evil’ unmasked was different; to affirm the ‘corporate nature and authority of the organization, to represent themselves as members of that body, to legitimize the regime, and … to create a particular meaning for their roles and persons’ (Getty and Naumov 1999: 24). This allowed the state agents, in parallel with the Party elite in the Stalinist show trials, to ‘maintain a unified rhetorical affirmation of power and solidarity to and for themselves’, since not only the subordinates but also the elite were consumers of their own performance (ibid.: 50). Maria, like Bukharin, who at first refused to confess, tried to turn ‘the ritual of affirmation into a contested ritual’ (ibid.: 308), and deny the state agents’ ‘right to establish the dominant narrative’ (ibid.: 324). Yet, according to Stalin’s formula, criticism was the same as opposition (ibid.: 527) and opposition should be destroyed without pity. Both witches and many victims of repressive trials were executed. ‘Unfit’ mothers are not, but their abandoning, deprivation of parental rights and severance of ties are what could be construed as if not physical death, then ‘symbolic death’, or the ‘excommunication’ part of Kharkhordin’s pattern. However, as we have seen, the unreformed ‘witch’ is left to produce more children, making this approach to solving the problem of social orphans manifestly ineffective.

Self-Perpetuation of the System Earlier chapters have shown what leads to the need to accuse on the part of state agents. They feel that the family is inadequate and does not take the responsibility to improve itself, while the state agents feel they have done everything they could to help the family, and it is the family’s responsibility to do the rest. How the family is going to help itself does not concern these agencies, since it is not their responsibility. On this level, the state agents themselves have limited agency and can function only within a structure developed by the state. They have no choice but to blame the family, because to blame society or other agencies is beyond of what can be acted upon. On the contrary, holding the family accountable is productive, as they could change a child’s situation for the better. Moreover, it is not just the family that is blamed but also children, who are institutionalized. The GD and many teachers, in dealing with problems of former residents, see them as responsible for their misfortunes because the ‘state had provided them with everything’. This is treated as an enabling 276

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rather than a disempowering factor, so for state agents there was no reason why former residents should not thrive. Institutional staff often consider the failure of children to develop normally in institutions, despite all their efforts, as due to the ‘bad genetics’ of their ‘unfit’ family. Therefore, there is a difference between this level and the level of the state, where the recognition of the absence of adequate family support networks could have been fully addressed, but has not. This is where we see the displacement of blame handed down to an individual agency. It appears that the implicit motivation behind numerous cases of deprivation of parental rights was for the state to avoid accountability, while still making a moral and legitimate case for being able to control childhood. Placing all the blame on the failing family makes it possible to treat the ‘unfit’ family as an absolute, to sweep away a mother and not think about what lies behind her problems and her deficiencies, not acknowledging the problems for what they really are. Accusing mothers allows the state to avoid making changes that would profoundly reshape its relationship with the family and reduce the number of cases of separation of children from their families. As I have demonstrated in Chapter 1, Soviet history is rich in loss, separation and discontinuity, affecting a large proportion of the population. Hundreds of thousands of children were brought up in children’s homes in Soviet times, and many of them turned out to be ‘normal’ adults, at least on the surface. No Russian research has so far convincingly demonstrated that the institutions were unsuitable for child upbringing in principle. Since in mainstream state thinking the separation of mother and child was not seen as a problem, and the problem of the ‘unfit’ family can be solved without repairing it by removing the children, it follows that reducing the number of separations is not a goal for the state agents. Safe childhood is.

State Machinery and Innovations Because the process of institutional placements is well in hand, the infrastructure remains largely unchanged and the state claims to have the moral authority to place all the blame on the parents. The system is essentially preserved and struggles with the same problems it has dealt with since the inception of the Soviet state, with only slight variations. Indications that this is the case comes from former residents and an analysis of reports that highlight problems in institutional care. There are persistent cases of physical abuse of children by teachers; the theft of institutional funds by administrators; the misappropriation of child benefits; the neglect of children’s material and emotional needs; indifference towards children 277

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and the loss of their files; and many more examples. These facts were mentioned in published sources (Children After the Famine 1924); in Kim’s memoirs (1950s–1970s); and in documents for internal use between different levels of the bureaucratic edifice in the 1980s and 1990s. This implies that these problems are systemic and will continue in the future as long as the system is preserved.

Structural Continuity: State Hierarchy The way the authorities deal with these persistent problems follows similar patterns in Soviet and post-Soviet times. Bureaucracy works in a similar manner and many institutions are managed via the same bureaucratic edifice as in Soviet times, minus only the explicit communist ideology. Some of them were simply renamed (i.e., gorispolkom (city council) was renamed meria), retaining many of their previous functions, with the same people occupying the same positions and people still using the old terms in conversations. Dissemination of laws and rules or calls for inspections on a local level are often initiated in Moscow and are sent down via respective bureaucracies: ministry-regional-city-community administrations. For example, the Prokuratura of the Russian Federation and the Ministry of Education send a letter to local prokurors and the regional administration, listing the problems and violations of laws and children’s rights found elsewhere, recommending that they ‘strengthen control over the work of child welfare institutions’. The regional authorities inform city and community administrations, requesting inspections to be conducted and measures to be taken to eliminate possible breaches. If inspections find similar transgressions (and they usually do, according to reports), they will be documented and sanctions taken against individuals identified as responsible for violations (they are sacked, reprimanded, fined, etc.). This report goes up to the immediate higher authorities and to the Ministry, reporting on the measures being taken. The director of the internats who did not receive all the money from the city budget that was due to them told me: If inspections from the higher authorities find out that the children are not fed and clothed properly, I am the one who shall be punished! So instead of working, I am begging for money and favours from different people and enterprises. How do you expect me to do anything else? I am the scapegoat!

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If a government official does not take an initiative, simply pushing papers from ‘above’ to ‘below’ and back, he or she is not in any personal danger of being held responsible for the violations even if he or she is aware of them. The Vice-Chair of the Regional Department of Education stated straightforwardly: ‘We are bureaucrats. We are here to follow and enforce what the laws require.’ This system of almost symbolic activity, with the outward appearance of change but without much real change, continues into the present. The least protected are individuals who work in institutions and the children themselves. In one internat, three directors were removed between 2000 and 2002 by the Department of Education. In 2000, the Chair of the Department of Education, who introduced some changes in the system of institutions, was removed from his position by the Governor. He was the third or fourth Chair in the past 20 years, but the Vice-Chair survived them all. As soon as the newly appointed Chair pointed out something she did not like, the Vice-Chair immediately blamed it on the previous Chair. On the other hand, the Vice-Chair is a powerful gatekeeper. This well-paid position, with high social status and power, is an island of stability and safety within the volatile environment of changes in the society.

Mode of Transmission: Training The preservation and transmission of practices and legal knowledge from one element of the infrastructure to another is sustained by the training of younger employees by seniors, and of the lower authorities by higher authorities (i.e., central to regional). We have already encountered the training of a staff member from a regional community by the Head of the Magadan GD, who recommended that she did not work with a failing guardian family but should return the child to an institution. In her training in Moscow, the Head was reassured that this practice was fine. Also, recall how a senior member of the GD instructed a younger employee on how to make an inspection of the ‘living conditions’ of a neblagopoluchnaya family: ‘Go and see if everything is prepared for the child, and if it’s clean. If not, tell the father he doesn’t deserve to be a father.’ This is at the same time when new laws on the protection of the family and of fatherhood had been in place for four years.

Innovations: Dubious Grounds Innovations may be treated as violations. Some innovations will not be accepted on any level unless endorsed by a higher authority, as not many government officials want to take personal responsibility for implementation, 279

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however beneficial they might be to the children. Depending on the personality of an immediate higher official, a daring ‘innovator’ may either not be ‘found out’ or, on the contrary, may be punished for trespassing on the threshold of what is allowed. Many officials prefer to play it safe, hence some practices changed only after the Head of the GD came from training in Moscow. Before she left, she instructed her staff: ‘If somebody comes with this idea of patronat14 send them away. We don’t know what patronat is, and we don’t want to know.’ After coming from Moscow, she said, ‘I was told what patronat is about, they told us it is a good idea, so now we can talk to those who are interested.’ She brought more instructions: We were given directions that one staff member doesn’t have the right to inspect a family’s conditions, there should be a minimum of two staff. Apparently we are not presently correct. And the parents are becoming too smart: some even file Court suits for moral defamation! They complain that we are unlawfully taking the children away. Maybe sometimes it is so, we are people too, and we make mistakes. There is more freedom for local governments to issue their own laws and regulations, though in most cases they must have financial backing. Priorities in regional development for the last ten years have not necessarily been in child welfare, but elsewhere. Nevertheless, there were a number of innovations, some of which succeeded better than others, though all of them had difficulties. I will reflect here on a number of new alternative approaches to institutional childcare in Magadan and demonstrate their very limited place in the overall network.

Alternative Approaches Research into institutional upbringing conducted by various social and medical scientists in the western part of Russia has highlighted various areas of deficiencies in children’s development, and the lack of life skills (Nechaeva 1994, Andreeva 2000, Kugan et al. 1997, Leshchenko et al. 2000, Dubrovina and Ruzskaya 1990). Consequently, to address these problems, there have been recommendations to improve the institutional system and to build centres for post-institutional adaptation. Some of these recommendations have reached the Magadan Department of Education, which has been reluctant to implement them. The Vice-Chair stated that 280

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many of these recommendations were not applicable to ‘our unique and severe climatic conditions’. However, no local research has been done to develop recommendations that would suit regional conditions. Nevertheless, as I have already mentioned in Chapter 2, during the 1990s in Magadan, there were several developments of an alternative character working alongside Soviet-type child welfare institutions.

Alternative 1: Three Centres The three organizations, the Shelter and the Stroitel and Sotsium family centres, were founded as an alternative to the state approach of solving family problems. The idea of the Shelter was thought up in the mid 1990s by the former director of a kindergarten. According to her daughter, the second director of the Shelter, she foresaw the influx of neglected children on the streets as a result of the negative socio-economic developments in the region, and spent a few years persuading the local administration of the need for such a shelter. After securing its permission, there were issues of where to host it and who would pay the rent, electricity and other expenses. The city agreed to fund it and pay the Shelter’s staff salary. The Shelter occupies a building of a former kindergarten. It is a self-contained residential but temporary children’s home for (only) 30 children, with its own mini-school. At the time of my study it looked after 36 children. Stroitel was founded in the beginning of the 1990s on the initiative of the St Petersburg-based NGO the Institute of Early Intervention and the administration a Magadan school. It is a non-residential centre that occupies a series of rooms on the first floor of an apartment building, and has its own mini-school and a kindergarten. It serves a limited population of families whose children only attend this school. Sotsium was founded in the mid 1990s by a pedagogue. It is located in a community 50 kilometres from Magadan and serves only this community. It develops and implements various programmes of assisting the family, integrating social work (home care for the elderly) and social pedagogy by using the help of teenagers in caring for older adults. As part of their work, the centre also developed a programme for helping children from the local internat for the mentally ill, and helping neblagopoluchnye families to care for their children. The rationale behind these three organizations is the understanding that Soviet-type work with the families is no longer desirable and that a different kind of work is required. They attempt a long term interpersonal engagement with families to assist them in the upbringing of their children, based on a different philosophy that children should not be removed from 281

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problem families to institutions, and that their parents should be deprived of parental rights only when the long term work with the family is not bringing positive results. Their greatest success is that they do reduce the number of children placed in institutions. The Shelter was monitoring 52 families to which the children were returned. In the past four years, Stroitel deprived only one parent of parental rights. Importantly, Sotsium helped a young mother to restore her parental rights and collect her baby from the Baby Home after a lengthy and fruitful involvement in her affairs: counselling, helping her to find a job, and tidy up her house, assisting her in collecting all necessary documents, representing her at the court hearing, and serving as a guarantor that she would look after her child properly. They provided advocacy and help, persuading the judge that returning the child to this mother was safe because, with their help, she was able to adhere to all the state’s requirements, while their long term involvement would assure the child’s wellbeing. However, the scope of work and impact of these organizations is limited; on the map of the city, they are small islands serving a limited population of families. Their work, which has been successful in many ways in providing help to families that actually allowed the family to keep their children, was plagued by problems: (1) a lack of understanding of their work; (2) resistance on the part of established agencies such as the GD, school administration and even some parents; and (3) with the absence of independent funding, they have ended up being dependent on state resources and subject to state control and budgetary constraints. Similarly, new professions such as social workers, social pedagogues and counselling psychologists often experience difficulties and misunderstandings with both parents and administrations of state institutions because their approach to working with the family is different. The first director of the Shelter had to fight for her views on how to treat problem families: When we started to work, we were not understood, we were told not to work with a family, but to send the children to an institution. This year [2000] there was a recommendation issued by higher authorities on the federal level to work with families. Thus we were right! Nobody remembers it now. When there is an order coming from ‘above’, then all of a sudden everybody starts to change their views. A social pedagogue from a boarding school for low-income families reflected on how her work was being treated by her superiors: 282

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Social work is not understood. They think we fuss too much, we are too liberal with children and their families and waste our time. Sometimes I have to defend the children’s interests even from our (school) administration. For example, I was told just to send one of our difficult teenage girls to TSVINP for 30 days and she will ‘come out like silk’. But why, who is going to find out why she was rude with that teacher? What if the teacher told her that this girl was brought here from the garbage can and her mother is a prostitute? Of course the girl does not like this teacher and is short-tempered with her. Similar complaints came from a school psychologist who worked with children and their parents in one kindergarten. Delivering a paper at a local teacher’s conference, she told how the parents did not wish to discuss their own and their children’s problems and affairs, neither trusting nor understanding her role in this relationship. This concern was the same across specialists in social work of the Shelter, the school for low-income families and Stroitel, whose work is to break out of the usual ‘Reveal-AdmonishExcommunicate’ pattern. One social worker met a family of a child residing in the Shelter, who told her not to come to their house anymore: ‘Why are you butting into our lives? We lived like this for years, why did you all of a sudden become interested?’ Young inexperienced social workers, without any special training, are put in the position where they have to resort to trial and error, often dealing with hostile older and more experienced parents. Social pedagogues and social workers have encountered another challenge in their work with families, namely the family’s expectation of state involvement in their wellbeing and the lack of desire to take this responsibility in their own hands: The parents are so used to the state giving them everything that now, when the state no longer provides everything for free, they feel rejected. If we provide them with help, they often don’t appreciate it because they treat this help as something so natural, so expected, because that is how it was before. They demand more than they are willing to give. They wait for the times when everything again will be free and sufficient. The situation has changed, but their habits and lifestyles remain the same. They do not want to help themselves, they just sit there and wait for the state to come and provide what it used to, good jobs where they don’t have to work very hard (from the interview with a paediatrician). 283

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The partial withdrawal of the state resulted in the family feeling abandoned, and especially so in an isolated place like Magadan. Although these centres have been successful in reducing the number of separations, they were in a constant battle with the state structures. The Temporary Shelter was facilitating the development of a new approach to family problems, helping families to care for their children by helping them to solve their numerous problems.15 This approach was met with resistance from the authorities, who still believed that the easiest way of solving these problems was placing children in institutions. Many decisions in the Shelter were aggressively contested by the GD, even involving the local prokuratura in a lengthy legal battle. According to the rules, children cannot stay in the Shelter for more than six months. Inspections initiated by the GD found that some children resided there for a few months longer. The Shelter defended itself, arguing that helping families to solve their problems may take longer than six months and, in order to avoid institutional placement, they opted to keep the child. The GD, however, considered that the Shelter had violated the rules and the children’s best interests by keeping them there. Similar disputes were taking place in regard to other ‘violations’. The GD was trying very hard to subjugate the work of the Shelter to what they were familiar with and what the rules were calling for. So, even though the GD’s workload is somewhat reduced because of the work of these centres, there is a conspicuous power struggle. In the mid 1990s, the city administration recognized the need for a Centre for Family Assistance in the city and decided to set it up. However, according to one government official, the person appointed to this post was preoccupied with addressing his own needs, i.e., collecting material for his dissertation, rather than dedicating himself to the establishment of the Centre. The idea was abandoned. The TSVINP was undergoing restructuring and, according to the new rules, they would not be able to detain non-delinquent children. This would leave vagrant children outside the scope of the child welfare system, with no organization to deal with them. The city-wide meeting of the organizations comprising the system of preventive care, although recognizing the need for such an organization, could not find any funds from the city budget to establish it. ‘We still take these children, moreover, we still have a monthly plan of eighteen non-delinquent children we have to detain,’ said the Head of the TSVINP, ‘but I don’t know for how long. As soon as the new law is issued and we don’t have a right to take them in, I don’t know where they will go.’ 284

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Alternative 2: Foster Families The idea of fostering is not new in Russia. In different forms it appeared as the opeka, or guardianship (childcare by relatives or non-related individuals with monthly remuneration by the state) that still exists today; patronat, or placement of children in families with monthly remuneration and regular monitoring as to the quality of family care (in 1936) (do not confuse this with the patronat of today); and patronazh,16 or home visits by paediatricians from children’s polyclinics to assist families with children (since 1923); priemnaya sem’ia, or foster family (since 1928) (Nechaeva 1994). They differed from each other in various legal details. In post-War years, the most common became guardianship (opeka). In the post-perestroika period, there was a reintroduction of the concept of priemnaya sem’ya. Now this means the placement of up to eight children without parental care into a non-related family, which receives a minimal salary for their work and child support for each child, and has a legal guardianship over the children (Rybinskiy 1995). The first attempts in Magadan and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky were disastrous. According to Marina from the Magadan GD, this innovation had a weak and ambiguous legislative base, where role, expectations, privileges and responsibilities were open to various interpretations by the authorities and the foster parents. The foster parents thought that the state did not provide enough for them to work successfully, while the authorities thought that the family demanded too much attention and material support. The authorities expected regular reports on how the money was spent, while the family considered the authorities to be too controlling. In addition, the children themselves were very unhappy there. One former ‘child’ of these parents was only too happy to return to the internat after sustaining humiliation, abuse and discrimination at the hands of the parents, while the family enjoyed city-wide attention with local publicity and numerous visits from foreign delegations. The family managed to present these visitors, as well as local inspectors, with a successful ‘show-off ’ Potemkin village (personal communication with internat resident Valentin). Despite these initial difficulties, since 1999, there have been 12 foster families in the city caring for 21 children.

Alternative 3: Restructuring of a Residential Care Institution One problem of Soviet-type institutions is their large size, with many children in one bedroom and a communal kitchen where professional cooks prepare meals and where children do not participate in activities usual for family 285

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children. To address these problems, the Department of Education decided to restructure one such large residential care institution into ‘families’, with children of different ages living in their own quarters within the internat. According to the original plan, siblings would be kept together, staff careworkers fulfilling the role of a ‘mother’; each unit, or ‘family’, would have a few smaller bedrooms, a kitchen with equipment, crockery and dishes. Children would cook, shop and wash under the direction of ‘mother’. In other words, this was an attempt to make it as close to family living as possible. The restructuring had been done, but after the initial excitement, it slowly went downhill and was teetering on the brink of being reconstructed back into its previous shape, due to the plans to relocate another internat closer to Magadan, merging them together. There were practical difficulties in work schedules for careworkers, kitchen equipment and dishes were broken, and the internat, although remaining divided into ‘families’, did not fully implement the original idea of providing children with a ‘home’ environment. A few teachers bitterly told me: ‘Who cares? These are nobody’s children. For their own children they would cut anyone’s throat. But here it is children for the system, not the system for children.’ I have heard this sentiment a number of times, specifically from those people who, after making their own analysis of certain requirements from the authorities and changes endorsed or refused by them, concluded that many of these decisions were made based on what is better for the authorities and institutions, rather than for the children.

NGO Initiatives It is in the domain of NGOs and individual initiatives that we see the separation between the state and society, with the society being more responsive to new ideas and flexible to their implementation, albeit with difficulties. Although independent from state control, local NGOs depend heavily on foreign funds, and were not taken very seriously by government agencies. The foreign NGO Mercy Corps came to Magadan in 2000 to provide some training for public organizations and state agents on how to deal with ‘unfit’ families, but their focus was primarily on the development of foster care programmes. The Assistance to Russian Orphans (ARO) programme and the partnership of USAID and International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) that started working in Russia in 1999 placed a much stronger emphasis on the family preservation philosophy backed up by some $2 million in US funds. However, its strategy is to ‘promote long-term child welfare reform in Russia through support to model initiatives developed 286

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by Russian NGOs’ (Juste 2002). The state structures will be affected only indirectly. Magadan was included in its funding plan only for the year 2003. Foreign NGOs have their share of problems: often their work is met with suspicion regarding the real agenda behind their intentions; there is also a strong paranoia related to their possible espionage activities, as well as a feeling of wounded national pride, particularly in the long established field of education and the child welfare systems. Many Russians felt annoyed when foreigners move in and try to ‘teach us how to work with children’ without even bothering to learn about the work of their child welfare organizations, the strict regulations and how the system works. ‘They do not understand that we cannot just do what they ask us. We have our laws that regulate these issues differently, and we have to adhere to this’, said one GD staff member regarding suggestions by Mercy Corps to move children from an internat to foster families. Some Mercy Corps initiatives elicited angry and indignant remarks from those who work in the system. As one special education teacher told me: ‘Nobody asked them to come. Our system of correctional pedagogy has been developing since the 1920s, and we know better how to look after our children!’ Important here is not only nationalism, but also threatened professionalism in the country that exalted professionalism, despising amateurs. Others, on the contrary, see cooperation with foreign NGOs as an additional resource and further legitimization of their activities, at least when they happen to coincide with those of the NGOs. The older generation is less concerned with how to make money, but rather how to do what they feel is right, and this understanding is often based on moral values that are predominantly Soviet. For the authorities and judges, among the declining order of stability and values, ‘saving’ children and protecting them from the contaminating influence of their ‘unfit’ parents is what gives them a sense of purpose and pride. They appear to be in control, much like the fantasy of the simulated stability of the state that they might have believed in before. However, some parts of the system work for the sake of self-preservation, because working in these institutions gives them income, allows them to realize themselves professionally and saves them from the humiliation of being unemployed. Therefore, either for moral or for practical reasons, or perhaps even without realizing it, their work contributes to protecting the state as much as protecting children. Thus, the hierarchical administrative edifice, with its mentality, goals and rationale, remains largely unchanged. Although there have been some innovations which played a very important role in introducing new ideas and delivering alternative services, they ran parallel to the well developed 287

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system of child welfare institutions and institutional placements, and have had a limited effect on its functioning, with each experiencing various drawbacks that slowed down or even prevented their implementation. In choosing how to deal with new developments, some people had to prepare themselves for lengthy battles with the authorities, while others seemed to feel more comfortable doing what they know best, especially when their experimentation met with a disciplinary approach on the part of the state, and when their efforts were not appreciated, supported or financially backed. Introducing anything new, whether new professions or new ways of looking after children, proves to be a slow process. This is the combined effect of limited or even absent funding; practical difficulties in establishing infrastructure (where an organization is to be housed, who is paying rent and electric bills); obscure legislation; and undeveloped mechanisms of implementation, resulting in people simply not knowing how to achieve these goals. Finally, if the authorities know how to deal with the institutions, having done so for a number of years, they often do not know how to deal with new developments. With this ambiguity, people often fall back on what they feel familiar with, proven and safe.

Notes 1. 2.

3.

4. 5.

Sledstvenniy isolyator or pre-trial detention centre. These values mean different things for different people. For some, these are peace, ethical behaviour, truth, love and non-violence (Malyarova and Kislitsa 1999). Others see these values as based on Christian values and argue that Russia, being a multireligious country, should accept patriotism, family and civic duty as values (Parakhin 2003). Others speak about ‘universal human values’ but, when asked what exactly they mean, admit that they do not know, or list honesty, kindness, compassion and dignity (Novokhatsky 2003). The Education Law of the Russian Federation also mentions ‘universal human values’ as one of the priorities on which the state policy regarding education is based (Chapter 1, Art. 2, Education Law of the RF with amendments 1996-2002, http://www.educom.ru/ru/documents/ education.php). Which in her view was determined not by the liberalization of views, but because the state can no longer afford to offer elaborate assistance to the family with childcare. LTPs were places of isolation and re-education of alcohol and drug abusers by using forced treatment of alcoholism and forced work. See, for example, http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2008/43/26.html, http://www.gazeta.spb.ru/266521-1/, http://www.rusk.ru/monitoring_smi/2009/ 04/09/zawita_prav_zhenwin_i_detej_ot_sem_i/ 288

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6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

The Minister of Labour and Development, Pochinok, made public the number of people in Russia who live below the ‘poverty line’, however this is defined: 34 million (out of the total population of 145 million of the Russian Federation) (Polyakov 2003). A capacity to act in accordance with an internalized understanding of what is right. Thanks to Barbara Bodenhorn for helping me to develop this point. I am grateful to Marilyn Strathern for her insight. Another explanation could be derived from the psychology of blame. The state agents, by identifying themselves with goodness, see themselves as comprising a ‘good’ society that punishes mothers for being bad mothers, even charging often impoverished, unemployed women money for child support. The need to blame and accuse may come from the projection of the feeling of badness by the state agents onto mothers as a part of their internal defence mechanism against their own feeling of suppressed guilt, frustration and self-persuasion that this is the only way to solve the problem, thus reassuring themselves that at least they are good mothers. I am grateful to Piers Vitebsky and the Parkside Counselling and Psychotherapy Group (Cambridge) for their insight. The other two were the witch as a member of a rival faction, and as an internal enemy with outside liaisons. As well as other ‘maladies’ of capitalist society, i.e., prostitution or nationalism. I am reminded that the Roman Law tradition of Europe laid a heavy emphasis on confession before punishment (as did the Catholic Church), making it practically impossible to punish someone for a serious offence until they had confessed. This was the great difference from the English Common Law tradition, which allowed the individual to maintain their innocence and yet still go on to punish them (Alan Macfarlane, personal communication). See for example http://childrens.fatal.ru/res/famstat.htm, http://www.vmdaily.ru /article/php?aid=56256 and http://www.usynovite.ru/massmedia/726833Ry2z. html. See also Sheleg 2005 and Tseluiko 2003. Fostering by institutional staff. Curiously, in doing so, they often arrived at the same result as the state officials. One woman had her child in the Shelter because she was unemployed and without income. In trying to help her, the Shelter found her a dishwasher job in a cafe. But when the Shelter’s staff discussed whether or not the child could now be released back to his mother, they decided against it because now that she had a job, she would not be able to look after the child because she would be busy in the evenings. Moreover, I saw a letter from their former student writing from the prison, where he asks why they don’t reply to his letters. It seems that here the same ‘excommunication’ attitude is at work. Before the Revolution, a transfer of a child from an institution to a non-related family for monthly remuneration and with regular monitoring of this child by the local council.

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Chapter 9

The Post-Soviet Case in a Wider Context

In this part I would like to place the post-Soviet case in a wider context. The question to ask is whether these practices and attitudes, which were developed within a particular socio-political framework, are peculiar to (post-) Soviet society and are therefore different from those found in liberal democracies of Western Europe and the USA. Child welfare practices necessarily involve critiques of anthropology of parenting, a multifaceted area embodying kinship, family policy and politics, concepts of childhood, gender relations, issues of normativity and class, among other factors. An analysis of the literature on parenting in many European countries and the USA reveals a picture that in many ways is startlingly similar to the one I present in this book. Historically, there are remarkable similarities between the views on and attitude towards ‘unfit’ families in (post-) Soviet Russia and those of the state and voluntary societies in Victorian England toward destitute, ‘drunken and immoral’ parents as exerting evil influence. The two major organizations, the state’s Poor Law and voluntary societies’ childcare agencies, ‘continued to be characterised by the removal and rescue of children, by an emphasis on permanent care away from the influence of the parents and by attitudes which inhibited parental involvement by making them feel ashamed of their inability to cope’ (Holman 1988: 25). In 1945, despite its stress on the value of the family, the Clyde and Curtis Report, prompted by the emerging data on poor treatment of children in foster families and complaints from children in residential care institutions about being brought up under repressive conditions, did not really argue for the value of families of deprived children. Many of these trends continued into the first three decades of the twentieth century until the philosophy of family preservation and prevention was developed and put into practice. Only the Children’s Act of 1948 marked the end of the influence of the Poor 291

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Law over children. However, in the 1950s, John Bowlby wrote that ‘nothing is more characteristic of both the public and voluntary attitude towards the problem than a willingness to spend large sums of money looking after children away from their homes, combined with a haggling stinginess in giving aid to the home itself ’ (1953: 100). As we shall see, this is a trend characteristic of state/family relationships of modern states in the twentyfirst century as well. There are also other similarities.

Pronatalism In examining family politics, I draw on two publications by historians who studied family politics (Ginsborg 2000) and reproductive policies (Hoffman 2000) across a number of European countries, including the Soviet Union. Both examine the Stalinist period, but that does not make them irrelevant: the strands developed during a particular time rarely have a clean break with the advances of new eras; they continue, changed or unchanged, leaving traces of previous cultures in current thinking. Hence, in the Soviet post-War years, stretching well into the 1980s as far as government policy is concerned, there have been ‘concerted efforts to encourage child-bearing in the face of what was described as “the demographic crisis’” in the Russian Federation, where ‘newspaper articles presented the Russian public with stark statistics of low population replacement in the west of the Soviet Union and outlined the economic threat posed by an ageing population’ (Kelly 2007: 152). In 2007, the Russian government introduced measures to counteract the rapid depopulation of the Russian Federation, calling for increased reproduction and supported by the governmental scheme of ‘maternal capital’.1 Once again, having children is considered a matter of social significance to benefit the country, rather than a private individual decision. Ginsborg makes parallels between the family politics of Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, maintaining that there were common features in all regimes: (1) families were exalted and placed in a special relationship to the state, i.e., a healthy family was organically linked to a healthy state; (2) the regimes invented categories of exclusion, thus producing two broad types of families – the approved and the suspect (inferior). In the Soviet Union, the primary model was urban and nuclear.2 Portraying themselves as saviours of the family, all regimes sought to regiment the relationship between the individual and the state, which often took place at the expense of the family; (3) the regimes tended to exacerbate generational conflict, as youth became 292

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the dynamic element encouraged to seek adventure through service to the state; (4) the regimes pushed in on families, extending its panoptic gaze beyond the threshold of the family home; (5) the regimes cancelled those areas of free association and self-organization that constituted civil society, attempting to fill the associational spaces of society with organizations directly created by the state or with those approved by it; (6) pronatal goals were pursued; (7) the regimes used three major types of instruments: economic incentives, a striving to improve conditions for maternity, and punishing practices that impeded procreation. There was, however, one important development that set the Soviet Union apart from these examples: from the time of the 1917 Revolution, women were to enter the public sphere in full time employment along with assuming a full time role as wives and mothers in their households. This issue had emerged and will emerge again in our discussion. Likewise, Hoffman considered Stalin’s pronatalism to be a part of the pan-European trend toward state and expert management of reproduction, where ‘given the demands for industrial labour and mass warfare, the Soviet government and governments throughout Europe tried to increase their populations. In liberal democracies and dictatorships (whether socialist or fascist) alike, individual reproductive rights were subordinated to national demographic concern’ (2000: 10). He maintained that Soviet pronatalism most closely resembled the policies of Catholic countries in Western Europe, which promoted reproduction among all segments of the population, in contrast to the negative eugenics of Germany, the UK and Scandinavian countries (ibid.: 5) and the USA (Hartouni, cited in Connolly 2000: 285). However, the Soviet mobilization of women into the workforce and positive population measures common to Catholic countries demonstrate ‘that ideology and culture led governments to pursue population management in markedly different ways’ (ibid.: 16). The post-War Western European policies that marked themselves as different from previous policies stressed the following elements in family politics: not just the preservation of the family but the rights of the individual, and not only the need for state intervention but also for the autonomy of civil society. This is where the break between Soviet and postSoviet periods demarcates the relative strength of some elements (although present in some of the newest policy documents): the philosophy of family preservation is not fully practised, as we have seen in many examples in this book; the rights of the individual are most starkly translated into the rights of the child over the right of the parent (from the vantage point of the 293

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state agencies ensuring child welfare); state intervention is intensified in cases where family problems become visible because of the need to ‘save’ the child; and civil society has not yet been made a partner equal to the state in child welfare. Yet, in other areas, some Western democracies are shown to lag behind the Soviet Union policies that were in place as early as 1918 and 1926: compared with laws granting women equal rights with men, making it not only acceptable but desirable to work outside the home, in France in 1942 the husband was the moral and material head of the family, being deposed from this role only in 1970, yet remaining the manager of the couple’s community life until 1985. In Italy, parity between spouses was established in 1975 (Ginsborg 2000: 438). To summarize, in Soviet society all groups and categories of people were encouraged to reproduce, women were expected to join the workforce3 and childcare responsibilities for all children were construed as being shared between a semi-public nuclear, an extended family and state institutions. The latter point has been described as being characteristic of Northern European countries as well: ‘[W]ith the development of modern states, the raising of children has been more and more professionalized and subject to state responsibility and authority’ (Gullov 2008: 129).

Women’s Employment and Child Socialization There are significant differences in social and welfare policies in different European countries, as illustrated in the fine collection of works on the topic (James and James 2008, Ginsborg 2000). Thus, in Spain, in the public sphere there is no collective feeling of responsibility for children because they are ‘other people’s’ children (Casas 2008: 63), while in the UK, on the contrary, ‘under the direction of the state all adults and professionals working with children become responsible for safeguarding them’ (James and James 2008: 8), a case characteristic of Soviet society. If in America in the 1920s and 1930s (Rose 1998) and in contemporary Denmark, daycare institutions have taken over the task of socializing children, especially where professionals doubt the socializing skills of the parents (Gullov 2008: 135), in Norway, where the expansion of institutional daycare has been slow, a recurrent theme in debates is the question of the best place for young children: the family and home or institutional daycare with professional adults (Nielsen 2008: 41)? In Ireland, the responsibility of the state to safeguard the welfare of children was consolidated only from 1990s onwards (Devine 2008: 89). 294

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Yet, despite important country-specific peculiarities, there are similar tendencies. One of them was the increasing participation of women in the workforce with ensuing expansion of (pre-school) childcare facilities. In the Soviet Union, this process started generally in the 1920s, while in many European countries and the USA, this was not the case until the 1960s onwards4. In the UK in the 1940s, the Home Office had a clear idea of what constitutes a family: a breadwinning father, a stay-at-home mother and the children (Cunningham 2006: 233); likewise, in the USA prior to 1964, working mothers were considered to be ‘bad’ mothers – school boards fired women who became visibly pregnant or got married (Ladd-Taylor and Umansky 1998: 16). In Denmark, the increasing number of women being employed outside the home was accompanied by the law on child welfare of 1964 that turned state-subsidized childcare into a universal provision regardless of parents’ income. Since then, day-care has become so much a part of the normal trajectory of the child that being at home is interpreted as ‘potentially damaging’ (Gullov 2008: 133). Likewise, Honig documents that since 1992 in Germany ‘every child aged between 3 and 6 has had the right to a kindergarten place … Today virtually every child attends a kindergarten, at the very least one year before entering school, and there are as many specialist staff employed in daycare institutions for children as in primary school’ (2008: 204). Hence, just like in Russia, along with a firmly entrenched understanding of ‘good childhood’ as being familialized, institutional pre-school childcare makes it an agent of defamilialization (Huinink, cited in Honig 2008: 205). The extension and qualification of institutional care and education of children of pre-school age allows parents to be in gainful employment. The attribution of childhood to the family becomes looser (ibid.: 206), with parental authority being challenged by the general institutionalization of childhood, which requires sharing the responsibility of children’s upbringing with professionals (and bureaucrats) (Gullov 2008: 140), since daycare institutions have taken over the task which was previously the responsibility of the family of bringing up children and teaching them how to manage on their own, in accordance with collectively defined behavioural norms (according to Gullov, who writes about childcare in Denmark (ibid.: 134)). As Honig asserts, ‘care outside families is not an isolated phenomenon … children move between family, daycare and child culture’ in the ‘classic structure of childhood distributed between family, relatives and institutional care’ (in Germany) (Tietze and Rossbach, cited in Honig 2008: 209–10). This is where dual socialization (Dencik 1989, cited in Honig 2008: 210) is taking place, a 295

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concept that attaches a key importance to the duality of family and public education for the experience of growing up in postmodern societies. Drawing on Bourdieu, Gullov demonstrates that children are embedded in fields of social relations, in which agents in different positions try to consolidate and extend their status and influence; thus, ‘dominant conceptions of childhood reflect the distribution of power and dominance between the positions in the field’ (2008: 9). An increasing involvement of the state in the matters of childcare and education could not but affect the modern family, (post-) Soviet or European. As Jenks maintains: ‘The modern family has become the locus for the confluence of politics and individual psychology, but beyond this it has emerged as both the primary unit for, and also the site of, governmentality [Donzelot 1980, Rose 1989], that is, it both absorbs and, in turn, distributes social control’ (1996: 14). The difference is that if in Western democracies ‘the modern family has become the basic unit of social cohesion in advancing capitalism’ (ibid.: 15), in the Soviet Union the family was colonized by the state to support the regime and, by simply participating in everyday life (Navaro-Yashin 2002), the family was advancing socialism. In both systems, though, ‘the modern family enabled the modern state to invest in ‘futures’. According to Jenks, ‘[T]he ideology of care both lubricated and legitimized the investment of economic and cultural capital in the ‘promise’ of childhood. Childhood is transformed into a form of human capital which, through modernity, has been dedicated to futures’ (1996: 15).

Concepts of the Child and Childhood Belonging In (post-) Soviet society, a child is seen as a being-in-becoming, a sort of work-in-progress. The view on childhood is very much a developmental one: children are in need of adults and the quality of parenting is necessarily reflected in the character of the child. The ‘natural’ place for children is considered to be in the natal family with his or her mother and in an extended family that provided primary care and love. As individuals, children are embedded in the family as a dependent family member and are paternalized by two actors, the parents and the state. Childhood, elevated to acquire a status of a priority group, was conceptualized as inherently being in need of both, for a lack of either would distort the normal development of the child. A good childhood, then, is familialized and, at the same time, is necessarily institutionalized. With the absence of voluntary, 296

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religious and non-governmental agencies, it was institutionalized by and into the state structures. Through this institutionalization, it was moved out of the family setting into the public sphere, where a direct connection between the state and the child had been established. This meant that children were not seen as autonomous beings; whether placed within families or within state institutions, they, as in the UK, were in a constant relationship based on the authority of adults and the protection and ‘safeguarding’ of children’s futures as citizens and the next generation of labour (James and James 2008: 7). No doubt many of these descriptions sound familiar as belonging to a ‘traditional’ European and American view of the child. The view of childhood innocence and as a time to be happy and carefree or the view of a child as evil have roots in European social thought by at least the nineteenth century. Seeing children as a country’s future is a view shared by the UK, Russia, and Denmark. In an introduction to a series of national reports on childhood as a social phenomenon, Qvortrup concludes that ‘more than one report mentions that one of the most important aspects of modern childhood is the character of its being embedded in the family’ (1990: 19). Indeed, familialization is a process, he argues, which is taken for granted and leads to family childhood being seen as normal, natural and non-ideological: it is the placing of the children in the position of being dependent family members. Through massive school attendance, a process of individuation was taking place, or ‘the trend that the single individual is integrated in more and stronger non-familial activities and organisations and institutions as representatives for none but themselves’ (Holter and Ve 1978: 76, cited in Qvortrup 1990: 24). Childhood is seen as a minority group, excluded to its own advantage from full participation in the life of society because of its need for protection, so they are marginalized on paternalistic grounds. These notions have been challenged by a new paradigm in the conceptualization of childhood that sees children as social agents (James et al. 1998, Turmel 2008, Rosen 2007). Here the dominant view on children in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia not only shared many of its characteristics with its European counterparts, but in some way preceded the newest developments. If an individual child is seen as a dependant, Soviet children were constantly organized into peer groups and various collectives, and as a group, they were seen as social agents. Many reforms that took place soon after the Revolution of 1917 ‘brought fundamental changes in terms of prominence of children’s issues and in prevailing understanding of what children’s place in political culture and society should be’ (Kelly 2007: 62). 297

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About the same time as the family was seen as an outdated unit due to wither away, children were given an exceptional status and started to be treated as separate from their parents. In 1922, a new political organization of Young Pioneers was created, a branch of the Communist Union of Youth (Komsomol); in family law, regulations curtailing ‘parental power’ were introduced that imposed upon parents the duty to provide for their children. As a result, Kelly maintains, in 1925, parents were legally obliged to bring up their children properly, but were only entitled to bring them up at all if they did so adequately. ‘The state protects children from every form of oppression, and provides them with a normal upbringing. Parents and guardians are reserved certain rights, with whose help they carry out the duties laid upon them’ (ibid.: 63). The 1926 Marriage and Family Code stated: ‘Parental rights are to be enacted entirely in the interests of children, and if they are not so enacted, the courts may deprive parents of parental rights’ (ibid.). The Moscow Proletkul’t group put together a ‘Declaration of Children’s Rights’, guaranteeing to children the right to leave their parents if they so wish. As far as a concept of children’s agency, ‘giving voice to children’ was an idea that prompted the setting up of the system of ‘selfgovernment’ in children’s institutions of all kinds, from nursery schools upwards, that were supposed to organize discussion bodies (‘soviets’) specifically for pupils (an idea that is practised in earnest in contemporary Norway) and to have pupil representation on their management committees. Through these, children were meant to be involved in management and decision making, as well as discussing topical politics of the day. Some of these institutions continued into late Soviet and post-Soviet time; for example, school self-governing was set up as early as the 1930s and is still practised in many schools, although its content did not leave the framework of what was permitted by adult society regulating life in public organizations. Thus, although the idea of children’s agency had been explicitly proposed, its execution had been limited. In post-Soviet times, childhood moved not away from but closer to its European counterpart. Women are no longer obliged to work and, although this is not what is reflected in attitude towards mothers like Maria, there is still a greater possibility to bring up children with less involvement of the state. Although shaped by the foundation laid out in Soviet society, the previously missing element, the market, had filled the space left by the shrinking state provisions. Although regulated by state laws, the content of education in daycare is not permeated exclusively by official state ideology instead, yielding to multiple ideologies that colonized the social space. 298

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A Double-Edged Sword of Support and Control A common thread in the examination of the relationship between the modern state and the family has been the double-edged issue of state support and control. Indeed, the above discussion points to the system of support developed by many states either to the family (childcare provisions away from home) or through the family (child benefits). But what of control? Here I would like to draw upon the point made by Qvortrup: ‘It is characteristic of all laws that, first of all, parents are delegated (by the state as “parents patriae”) to represent children’ (1990: 35). As in the post-Soviet case, Qvortrup states that state intervention ‘normally happens in exceptional circumstances’ (ibid.). I would like to pause here and see what other sources would tell us about these ‘exceptional’ circumstances in other modern states. The supporting arm of the state has reached the area of child protection in many countries, where many agencies provide services for failing parents. In the USA, homeless mothers with their children are considered candidates for housing assistance, public entitlements, parenting skills training, job training and daycare services (Barrow and Laborde 2008), as well as counselling, Medicaid and various programmes that help to address specific individual problems, such as anger management classes, domestic violence counselling and drug treatment (Lee 2008). There are agencies that are supposed to help parents gain access to these services. Parents are entitled to lawyers and there are family courts (ibid.). In the UK, besides welfare provisions for single mothers such as council housing and child benefits that allow a mother to survive with her child, a host of services attends to family problems, i.e., in the county of Essex, the Child Assessment and Care Management Service develops care plans that attempt to rehabilitate the child within the family, post-adoption services and the Children and Family Court Advisory Support Service. If we compare even this limited list of available help to what was available to Maria, Natalia and Tamara, it is clear that they have been left alone with their problems, and shortly after faced the state’s punishing arm. However, family assistance is not without its problems in Western democracies. In fact, reading the details of the engagement of failing parents with social services is at times like rereading the pages of my book all over again; at the end, the parents and social services seem to be locked in a battle that ends in a similar way to that of Maria and people like her, except that most children, after a temporary stay in residential care, will be placed in foster and adoptive families, while in Magadan many went directly to long term residential care institutions. 299

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Tina Lee examined child welfare in New York City. She maintains that families of colour and the poor were over-represented in the system, and that children were placed in foster care for reasons of neglect, that is, inadequate food, clothing, shelter, supervision or parental problems. Despite the ‘family preservation’ philosophy and the number of services designed to support the failing family, she cites a number of studies that show that more money is spent on foster care than on services that aim to reunify and ‘reform’ families, as in case of Magadan, where more money is spent on supporting institutions than on aiding families in need.5 In New York, there was a significant discrepancy between what the social services considered to be priorities in families ‘mending’ themselves, and that of the parents. The latter were concerned with material problems such as housing and money, while the former insisted on the parents ‘working on themselves’, creating individual changes in behaviour. Lee refers to ‘performing compliance’ on the part of the parents who are expected to behave in a particular way. Therefore, they are required to complete various programmes, show ‘commitment to children’ and a willingness to do whatever it takes to regain custody, agree with the caseworker’s assessment of family problems, showing that they have taken responsibility for their children, and adopt attitudes that signal change. Performance seems to be a crucial factor in both the Magadan and New York cases. Importantly, not only do specific requirements coming from different social services conflict with each other, but parental reasons for not being able to comply with them are not taken seriously. Lee gives an example of a working father whose rights were terminated for his ‘non-compliance’ to engage in therapy, which he could not carry out because neither he nor his caseworkers could not find a place that would give him appointments outside of working hours. In addition to showing compliance and completing all services, parents must show that they have the ability to feed, clothe and house their children before they could be reunited with them, Lee observes, and if parents are unable to secure their own apartment or prove they have resources to support the children, foster care agencies will often refuse to return their children even if they are no other barriers. Barrow and Laborde, writing about homeless mothers separated from their children, outlined formal reunification requirements as parenting classes, treatment compliance, maintaining visitations, securing income and housing and, again, ‘working on oneself ’ (2008: 9). A mother’s parental rights may be terminated if she fails to find family housing, and the authors describe various difficulties in securing such housing. As in Lee’s paper, a Catch-22 is described 300

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for a mother caught between the requirements from different agencies that preclude her from being reunited with her children; she could not have access to a family shelter because her children were not with her and, without a suitable family accommodation, the child welfare agency would not return the children. It seems that the state’s grip on failing parents in the USA is even firmer than in post-Soviet Russia. Barrow and Laborde describe the inability of some women to cope with establishing adequate care arrangements, maintaining contact with their children, completing treatment programmes and obtaining housing, being caught between the conflicting demands of shelter case managers, treatment staff, child welfare workers, foster care staff and family court judges. Some of these agents were unresponsive to mothers who were not forceful advocates for their children and sometimes showed resistance to those who were. Furthermore, I read: ‘blamed for poor choices in the past, they were now in situations in which none of the choices available to them were good ones for both themselves and their families’ (ibid.: 12). This is telling insofar as cultural constructions of personhood are concerned: a typical discourse of ‘choices’ in the USA separates the self from ‘bad decisions’ one might make, while in the Russian environment, the discourse of ‘choice’ is absent; as such, poor choices mean a bad person. Once again, the authors make a point at conflicting agendas and policies of larger institutional systems that contribute to preventing mothers from being reunited with their children, but also state that, without attempts at social inclusion and allocation of resources to support it, including affordable housing and neighbourhood services that the family needs, a better coordination on the institutional level can go only so far and, in any case, an allocation of resources may be difficult in times when even those better-off have economic difficulties. Yet, ‘[T]he expansion of housing and economic difficulties beyond the most impoverished social groups may make it less easy to reflexively blame such problems on poor decisions and individual inadequacies and focus attention further ‘upstream’ on the institutional practices and larger social policies where restricted options originate’ (p.13). As in the case of Maria, blaming an individual for institutional problems is a way in which social services choose to ‘save’ the child from such families; as in Maria’s case, more support is called for. It appears that in each country there exist certain groups from which mothers, even if complying with the authorities’ requirements, will have a much harder time claiming their children. Whether in Russia or in the USA, the engagement with social services is reminiscent of a battle. Barbara Bodenhorn (1988) described encounters between Inupiat families in stress and social services. As is in Europe and 301

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Russia, the Division of Youth Services (a representative of the state government) is described as having a dual role of ‘facilitator’ and ‘enforcement’ agency, the role that made many villagers reluctant to become involved with the state on a voluntary basis (as foster carers), as ‘every suggestion is a potential threat’. Bodenhorn gives an example of the use of the Receiving Home (a temporary residential placement for children), a helping institution which could be turned against families that used it when they needed someone else to look after their children temporarily. Parents have occasionally found that their use of the Receiving Home was presented in court as evidence of neglect. As such, the fear that, when the family comes to the attention of the state, ‘you are in for it’ was not entirely unfounded. One of her informants, working for Alaska Legal Services, ‘stated that several of her clients’ initial contacts with the state were through the Receiving Home; they had no idea when they took their children over, that they started a series of events over which they would have little control’ (1988: 280). Commenting on social workers being young, among other things, suspicious and rigid, a situation shown to be familiar in the UK, Bodenhorn notes that: ‘[T]he unbalanced power relationship between the social worker and client creates a situation in which it is very difficult for the people in power not to decide they know what is best, although it is often not the intent of the person, who genuinely “wants to help”’ (ibid.). This breaking up of blood family ties is set against the starkly different attitude towards adoption and fostering among the Inupiat, who treat these arrangements as a positive choice, an expansion of family ties and a way of sharing children. These arrangements do not carry any moral judgement and are juxtaposed with the view of middle class society in the USA (shared by the non-Inupiaq social workers and attorneys) that the mother-child bond is almost sacred and a mother who freely gives up her child is somehow ‘not right’, which ensues the break of the blood tie. This comparison illustrates not only the alternative view on the value of biological ties and adoption, but throws into relief the similarity between the US and Russian views on the importance of ‘blood ties’ and the judgemental attitude towards those who deviate from that model. Likewise, the view that the involvement of the state, in the form that the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ paternalism in child welfare may have, in the eyes of one of her informants, ‘encouraged people to hand over responsibility to “the government”’ (ibid.: 274). The increased legal presence on the North Slope accompanied a rise in the number of people sent out to jail; children from these families were more likely to end up in care. 302

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‘Paternalism’, whether by the (American) state towards Native American Indian populations, the Soviet general welfare state or British welfarism towards disadvantaged groups, seems to be equally implicated in developing dependency on the state, which inevitably puts the affected populations in contact with the state’s roles as a helper and punisher. The question is how in each country the deviants are construed, brought back to a moral society or expelled from it. The use of ‘enemies within’ by individual politicians to their own political advantage is much more prominent in the USA (LaddTaylor and Umansky 1998) and the UK (Waiton 2008) than in Russia, but the creation and re-creation of such enemies is a continuous process common to these countries. As such, in the UK, ‘Margaret Thatcher’s “use” of crime was part of political confrontation – her aim being to defeat the militant “enemy within” and enforce law and order as she understood it’ (ibid.: 49). ‘Crime’ here was used metaphorically to invoke the decline of social stability and decent values (Phipps, cited in Waiton 2008: 49). John Major instead promoted ‘a crusade against crime’, where ‘a new enemy was discovered and the focus was placed upon a different section of the working class, “the underclass”, among others’ (ibid.: 54). According to Waiton, in the mid 1980s, a few articles discussing this ‘underclass’ sympathized with this impoverished group and framed the discussion in economic terms, yet a decade later this debate turned into a moral concern about single parents and criminality. The discussion about this dependent class, writes Waiton, allowed for a return of the fight against welfarism, but the enemy was no longer the organized working class, but the ‘feckless poor’ and their children (ibid.: 57). He goes on to refer to the discussion of the underclass in America, where people within moral relationships show up as subjects of praise and blame: ‘The state’s efforts to punish members of the underclass who commit crimes is one of the last traces of a commitment to a shared community with them’ (Simon, cited in Waiton 2008: 57). Simon observed that by promoting an absolute moral outlook, this debate had a universal aspect, the promotion of a common standard to which all should aspire. But in the UK, the growing problem of crime and ‘yobs’ was rather marked by despair than a belief in the possibility of reconnecting with this ‘underclass’, which engulfed some 30 per cent of the British population. This debate was marked by polarizing opinions, although even the refusal to agree with the moral condemnation of the poor was still laced with the acceptance that this new ‘class’ was a growing problem for society. However, the real difference was between the moral conservatives and many liberals and left wingers in the acceptance or rejection of traditional morality – not in the acceptance of the growing 303

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problem of a ‘disordered class’ (ibid.: 58), which came to be understood not as a group of people who are suffering from the effects of unemployment or low incomes, but those who simply behave in irresponsible and criminal ways (Cullen, cited in Waiton 2008: 59). The connecting point between these UK and the US examples, with their importance of ‘working on oneself ’, and the post-Soviet examples in this book has a not so subtle moral undertone. In contrast to the post-Soviet case, in the second half of the twentieth century, in the UK and the USA, there was ‘a move a away from the idea that some children will be better off if taken out of parental custody and placed in the care of the state or of some approved voluntary organizations, and in the case of the UK, sent off to a new life in Canada or Australia. In nearly all circumstances, it came to be thought that it was in the best interests of the child to stay with its birth family’ (Cunningham 2006: 233). Indeed, attempts are being made to rehabilitate the child within the family (Appell 1998, Holman 1988). Yet, even here the state and the family are locked in a relationship that bear similarities with post-Soviet cases. An extended article in the British paper The Daily Telegraph (Jardine 2004) lists the trials and tribulations that families undergo once they come into contact with social services: 1. The conviction of parents that they have been wronged is hard to reconcile with the social workers’ certainty that the procedures that they follow are as near perfect as any human agency can be. 2. Often, concern for a child’s welfare can turn into a battle between parents and social workers. Whether innocent, guilty or just struggling, parents are often afraid when social services become involved with their lives. 3. ‘The hostility some social workers display is quite surprising’, said the Shadow Attorney General, ‘They are like warriors going into battle. Many of the social workers I encounter are young and illsuited to deal with intricacies of life’. 4. Those parents fighting to get their children back often say that their impassioned fights count against them. 5. Parents claim that supportive character witnesses and positive reports are ignored, while any sign of troubles (a mention of postnatal depression, a child’s illness or marital strife) is emphasized. 6. Even when parents accept that they may need to change their ways, the need for speed is against them: ‘It’s the children who are 304

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important’, says one manager within the adoption system, ‘and if these people can’t get their lives together in a short enough time …’ 7. Accusations of persistent negativity often relate to reports on contact sessions with children. Some parents have to display their parenting skills in impersonal and gloomy family assessment centres. Only a quarter of the parents pass this assessment (another 50 per cent of children are placed for adoption or foster care and the remaining 25 per cent go under the care of relatives). 8. Finally, and importantly, ‘Best results for us’, said an employee of such a centre of psychological expertise, ‘is best for the child, not necessarily for the family’. The paper finds that the ‘best interests of the child’, the phrase taken from the Children Act of 1989, may be the root of the problem. Although the Act stressed the importance of keeping families together, the interests of the children often come to be seen as separate from the family. The Children Act of 1989 came about in a society where the concept of childhood had shifted paradigms. A more ‘traditional’, pre-1980s view represented a child as a universal, biological given phenomenon, a child-asbecoming, a not-yet-social being, a product of decontextualied ideas of development and socialization with its one-way effect of (adult) society in individual children (Prout 2005: 1). Critiques of this view on childhood engendered ‘new childhood studies’, in which ‘childhood was examined as a social construction and children were studied not as passive objects of socialization but as social actors in their own right’ (ibid.; see also James, Jenks and Prout 1998, Turmel 2008), emphasizing children’s agency. Two concepts of childhood – as familialized but excluded from full citizenship for their own protection (Qvortrup 1990: 12) and children as active social actors shaping as well as being shaped by circumstances (James and Prout 1997) constitute parallel trends towards increased autonomy but also increased regulation (James, Jenks and Prout 1998). Hence, in the UK, along with the view on children as active social agents, childhood is presented as a time of risk, in which children are defined as being in need of protection in order to fulfil their potential as adults (James and James 2008). Here we find a familiar discourse of the government’s ‘double-edge sword of care and control’ as well as ‘risk’ and ‘protection’ used by the government to ensure a tighter regulation of childhood. Jackson and Scott argue that ‘risk anxiety helps construct childhood and maintain its boundaries, while the specific risks from which children must be protected 305

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serve to define the characteristics of childhood and the “nature of children themselves”’ (1999: 87). These boundaries had been set by the construction of childhood, as Aries would have it, as a special state in need of protection and vigilance. It has been suggested that risk anxieties specific to childhood are not social disorder located in particular classes and communities, and therefore containable but a part of a general sense that the social world itself becomes less stable and predictable, a fear that usually surfaces during times of rapid social change (Jackson and Scott 1999: 88). The authors draw on the studies of Beck, who associated the process of individualization within modernity, which entails the individual monitoring of risk, with detraditionalization that had produced a less predictable world, and which risk assessment attempts to render more manageable (ibid.: 89). However, the new paradigm constructs children as more active, knowledgeable and socially participative, making them more difficult to manage, less biddable and thus more troublesome and troubling (Prout 2005: 7). Cunningham (1991: 7) suggested that ‘between the late seventeenth and mid-twentieth centuries there occurred a major and irreversible change in the representations of childhood, to the point where all children throughout the world were thought to be entitled to certain common elements and rights of childhood’ (cited in Prout 2005: 10), the rights that are embodied in the 1989 UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). These rights, if we are to judge from what the social services are looking for in their attempt to ‘save’ children from unfit families, tell us that the ideal of an innocent, carefree, vulnerable and in need of protection is still with us, a concept of the child on which, it seems, much of the contemporary work of social services practices is implicitly based. Whether in the UK, the USA or Russia, here the concept of an innocent child is also intimately linked to constructions of motherhood.

Motherhood Ideals If concepts of childhood are varied and contestable, so are views on motherhood, and particularly models of ‘good’ motherhood, which serve as a benchmark for identifying all sorts of deviations. Nancy ScheperHughes maintains that maternal love is a product of a very specific historical concept: ‘mother love is … far from universal or innate and represents instead an ideological, symbolic representation grounded in the basic material conditions that define women’s reproductive lives’ (1992: 306

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401). By removing mother love from the realm of the natural, it becomes possible to examine how the ideal of good motherhood is culturally produced (Connolly 2000: 280). The ‘myth of motherhood’ finds its grounding in cross-cultural historical research (Badinter 1981, Ransel 1988). Scheper-Hughes found that the invention of mother love corresponded with the rise of the modern bourgeois family and the demographic transition: the precipitous decline in infant mortality and female fertility (1992: 401). The concept of the ‘best interests of the child’ as it is practised by social services is also folded into the conceptual framework of ‘good motherhood’, crystallizing the idea of what it means to be a ‘bad’ mother. It seems that social services, whether in the UK, the USA or Russia, see childhood as embedded in the family, but the best interests of the children as separate from those of the parents, with the socially constructed good motherhood embodying mostly middle class values (Ragone and Winddance Twine 2000, Ladd-Taylor and Umansky 1998). If so, thinking with the dichotomy of good and evil while ignoring ambivalences and complexities of lived motherhood, structural and symbolic violence in which many women find themselves mothering along the ‘fault lines’ (Ragone and Winddance Twine 2000) will inevitably lead to the work of measuring, identifying, categorizing and distinguishing between those who are good enough and those who are not. For many mothers, ‘the dominant standards of good mothering can become another source of injury for women whose circumstances render such standards impossible to achieve’ (Appell 1998: 263). Writing about such mothers in the USA, Annette Appell argues that bad mothers are the mothers that get caught, owing to their greater visibility to governmental agencies: They are mothers of the roughly half million children in foster care in the United States. Courts have removed these children from their homes because their mothers have failed to meet someone’s standards of proper mothering. A small minority of bad mothers have physically harmed or intentionally abandoned their children. The rest are guilty of less serious offenses: they use illegal drugs, consume too much alcohol, are abused by husbands or boyfriends, allow their children to be abused … or leave their children with family or friends without making a ‘proper’ care plan. In the eyes of the world, when it is looking, all of these mothers are the same. They are reviled and dehumanised, and their children must be saved from them. Yet bad mothers are mostly like other mothers. They love their children. They 307

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care about how their children are growing up æ Their children too are like other kids. They need stability and love, but too rarely find both, or either, as state wards (ibid.: 356). Although, as Appell suggests, many middle class American women can be said to have similar problems as ‘bad’ mothers, the government rarely sees inside their homes. Looking at different constructions of ‘bad’ mothers throughout various periods of American history, Ladd-Taylor and Umansky maintain that: ‘[F]undamentally, the “bad” mother serves as a scapegoat, a repository for social and physical ills that resist easy explanation or solution. Scapegoating, as a process, does not engage principles of equity or even-handedness; it seeks pockets of vulnerability.’ Scapegoating makes it possible to hold individuals solely responsible for their actions, omitting the wider social milieu, argues Connolly; if we begin to view this problem from a larger social, cultural, and historical perspective, the issue appears more complex, more diffuse and more costly to repair (2000: 281). In a ‘restricted and often punitive (American) welfare system’ (Modell 2002: 19, Appell 1998: 376), foster care and adoption become alternatives to offering services to dysfunctional families, and this is the issue that runs through the literature on motherhood, which falls outside the model of a ‘good mother’: more resources are channelled to support socially approved moral agents, whether it be adoptive, foster parents or institutions (in Russia), than to ‘fixing’ parents whose influence is considered to be detrimental to their children’s wellbeing. Pinning blame onto individuals precludes the development of social measures that would support and protect families (Connolly 2000: 281). An opposite view is presented by a number of scholars who have pointed out that ‘liberal scientists often refuse to recognize parental neglect because it could be seen as “blaming victims”. Instead, the inadequate parents are portrayed as social or political victims, which they often are. But this does not preclude their being victimizers of their own children’ (Scheper-Hughes and Sargent 1998: 23, Korbin 1998). Bourgois and Goldstein produce an account of such parents who harm their young children through substance abuse, or who use harsh punishment to discipline their children; at the end, however, the authors still seem to point at those conditions that produce these behaviours, i.e., maternal chronic hunger and deprivation, the lack of real alternatives for their children (in Brazil) (Goldstein 1998: 412) or ‘a public sector that relegates the responsibility for nurturing and supporting children virtually and exclusively to individuals, and specifically to women 308

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… [T]he larger society that structures social marginalization must share the burden of responsibility of reproduction and child rearing’ (among Puerto Rican immigrants in New York) (Bourgois 1998: 349). This dilemma is indeed at the heart of the (applied) work of social services, being a generative point for the further life trajectories of both parents and their children. Deciding who is a ‘bad enough’ mother seems to produce outcomes that are subject to severe critiques: the decision to keep a child in the biological family and avoid pinning blame on victims/ individuals may in some cases lead to child abuse and fatalities. Removing and ‘saving’ children from parents who may be themselves victims of structural violence or over-zealous social workers does not always benefit children as intended, for ‘while waiting for their “bad” mothers to become “good”, children are at risk of growing up without love, care, and a sense of belonging that a parent, even a ‘bad’ one, can provide’ (Appell 1998: 377). However, in the 1990s, political mother-blaming only intensified, and single mothers and welfare mothers took centre stage. Conservatives now blame single mothers for crime and growing divisions in American society (Ladd-Taylor and Umansky 1998: 17). Yet, what does it mean for the post-Soviet (Russian) case? Quite unexpectedly, I see that both the Soviet and post-Soviet state practised a rather laissez-faire approach to the family: as an institution, it is not so much an object of micro-management as an object of admonition and control. This was made possible by morality diffused over the social welfare network and a reliance on a person’s conscientious attitude towards moral values, rather than a concentration of expertise at particular sites; the existence of the ‘virtual kinship’ relations, which made it possible to move the child out and cut the family off if public admonition had failed, also contributed. The issue was not ‘What is going on in the family?’ but rather, ‘This is how the family should be’, which precluded this institution becoming a focus of independent applied research and academic scrutiny by social scientists and policy makers, and the development of individualized services. A host of consequences ensued, including a lack of knowledge about the family, an underdeveloped field of child protection (child abuse6 and maltreatment), and an absence of dedicated family and juvenile courts. In post-Soviet time, public services, which previously helped parents to ‘correct themselves’, are disintegrating, which results in reduced assistance to the family and intolerance to known cases of child neglect. This makes a good preventative system, but at the expense of the family, for ‘family preservation’ philosophy is still in its infancy while the institutional arms of the state are ready to 309

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accept these children. The child must either live in good conditions at home, which his or her parents must somehow ensure, or he or she must live in good conditions in state care or a substitute family. That said, concepts of kinship, childhood and motherhood, where a child is seen as an innocent vulnerable child, a kinship based on procreation (biogenetic ties), exert an overriding moral force (Carsten 2000: 2, Modell 2002), and mainstream models of a culturally-specific ‘good mother’7 run as common themes in both Russian and what Marilyn Strathern called ‘Euro-American’ societies. Along with these, social and structural inequalities in modern states have long been identified as significant variables, facilitating the view on mothers from certain groups as ‘bad’ mothers. Family assistance seems to be of crucial importance here. ScheperHughes and Sargent, drawing on John O’Neill’s observation on the emergence of the idea of a duty-free society, which demands a withdrawal of collective, public, and community support for the wellbeing of society’s vulnerable populations, especially mothers and children, stated: ‘We conclude by noting with alarm the recent proliferation of child-hostile public policies in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, policies that are rapidly unravelling the welfare state at the close of this century’ (1998: 28). The responsibility for child welfare is firmly placed on an individual, most often a ‘naturalized’ mother, making scapegoating a common mechanism. As I have shown, these witchcraft-type accusations serve important social functions. What I put on the table is a slightly different matter. Addressing conference papers describing poor parenting in the USA, Charlotte Faircloth asked: Is poor parenting a class issue? We hear about ‘welfare moms’, and ‘disengaged dads’ who don’t parent appropriately. We should ask how feasible it is to engage in the recommended 6 months of exclusive breastfeeding, democratic disciplining or educational play when living in poverty and the ‘quasi-public’ settings … We should also ask why policy focus is on micro-managing family life, and not on the big questions: day care, schooling, jobs. And finally, why is it that we never hear about the rich parents who spend little time with their kids, by using nannies, boarding schools and summer camps? They can afford privacy, but how ‘engaged’ are they? This indeed might look like a class issue, but as I have already discussed, the idea of deviancy (including deviant parenthood) so often viewed through 310

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the lens of race, gender, poverty and class in the ‘West’, was not seen as being rooted in the same socio-economic categorizations, but in morality in the Soviet Union. How then do we account for the similarities? The question is still on the table.

Notes 1. 2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

http://www.profile.ru/items/?item=25106. The subsidiary was a Soviet rural model based on the new collectivized family of the kolkhoz. Not working without a sufficient reason for doing so was a criminal offence punishable by imprisonment for six months. For young mothers there was an option of taking unpaid maternity leave up to three and seven years (after a paid period of one year), but this option was not without problems: living on one income was prohibitive and strong work ethics compelled women to return to work, although the maternity leave period was included in the period required for receiving a pension. Norway: late 1960s (Nielsen 2008), Denmark: 1960s–1970s (Qvortrup and Christoffersen 1991: 28); in Sweden in 1963, 38 per cent of mothers were employed, compared to 82 per cent in 1983 (Ginsborg 2000: 443). I was told by different directors in 2000 that a child in residential care costs the state between 5,000 and 9,000 Roubles a month, while monthly child benefit paid to mothers was 700 Roubles. Until summer 2009, convicted paedophiles were given only up to three years’ imprisonment with a possibility of parole, and upon release could work in professions involved with children. In the USA, working mothers were considered to be bad and, prior to 1964, school boards fired women who became visibly pregnant or got married (Ladd-Taylor and Umansky 1998: 16). On the contrary, a working mother was a female ideal in the Soviet Union; firing a pregnant woman was unlawful.

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In this book I try to find an answer to the question of why are there so many children without parental care in post-Soviet Russia. I suggest that focusing on actual or imagined breakdowns in the family via welfare mechanisms is a way of understanding childhood, family, individuals and their relationships to the state, as well as what constitutes normality and deviance and who gets to classify families and individuals as such. A timeline is important here. The infrastructure and practices of the child welfare system had been set up in Soviet times and were based on Soviet ideology, attitudes and values in childcare. In post-Soviet society we witness a rapid transformation in the economic policy, but not in the domain of family values and personhood: the pace of change in is different. The neblagopoluchnaya family is the interface between the two domains: they are poor (in a new post-Soviet way) and they are ‘bad’ (normative value); this category is a moral judgement as well as an economic description. In the new environment, normative values become out of sync with economic realities: expectations of motherhood are similar to Soviet times, but the economics do not allow women to fulfil these expectations. The persistence of many Soviet elements in the post-Soviet environment creates tension between these two modalities. Moreover, continuities in family policy and institutional care go together with the rhetoric of discontinuity, as in a market economy or politics, where models of discontinuity are explicit, giving off the impression of total change. Similarly, in his The Old Regime, the French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that the Revolution of 1789 was not so much a new start as a development of trends already present in eighteenth-century French society (1988). As Yuri Lotman maintained, ‘culture as a complex whole is comprised of strata that develop with different speed so that at each crosscut section one would find a simultaneous presence of different stages of its development. Explosions in one stratum may combine with gradual development in another, which does not preclude an interaction between the two’ (1992: 25–26).

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I present a view of Soviet and post-Soviet kinship at the moment where it appears to fail and the state intervenes. I propose a new way of understanding kinship through institutions, with the state in a coparenting role reflecting the state’s role in the family. The development of this type of kinship in Soviet times had far-reaching consequences. Since 1917 there have been many changes in the relationship between the state and the family, from original intentions to dispose of the family altogether to the recognition of the importance of the family in the period of ‘mature’ socialism and the recognition of family autonomy in post-Soviet times. However, this ideology of the strong family related to the strong state. Instead of talking about state intervention, then, we should talk about the state’s construction of the family and the result of this construction, where every step regarding family issues, be it police registration (propiska), work, housing policy, family problems and issues, has been mediated through state and public institutions. My data shows that even in so-called ‘normal’ families, gender roles stipulated that the main caregiver of a child was his mother. What emerges from my ethnographic data is that despite the new legislation, within the family the father is still often marginalized and that, without the mother, the family disintegrates. The essentialized gender differences see a woman as having an immutable nature that necessarily incorporates an innate maternal instinct, the basis of mother love and care. However, in Soviet time the family was viewed as being incapable of providing proper childcare to raise an approved individual, so childcare was shared between the family and numerous public (invariably state) institutions where children were looked after by professionally trained, non-related adults. Child-related problems were resolved in a similar manner to the way that family problems were resolved in the public sphere. The family became a semi-public institution, used to relying on the state provisions for its livelihood, especially among the less individually resourceful families. The partial fusion of the state and the family led to what we now see as the undermining of personal responsibility. I see these multiple ties binding the family and children to the state as a variation of ‘social ties’, a basis for the social model of relatedness. The family breakdown makes visible two interlinking issues, that of (1) modes of relatedness and (2) power asymmetry between the state and the family.

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Modes of Relatedness In the course of this book we saw the interplay between three modalities of relatedness: social, biological and virtual. They in turn are based on two views of the child as inherently good and as inherently evil. In the ‘social’ model, I refer to a mode of relatedness between biologically non-related individuals, such as marriage or adoption. These ties also stretch to embrace social ties through public childcare institutions. The importance of these ties were stressed when primary caregivers – mothers and grandmothers – were employed outside the home, but also when the birth family was not measuring up to the state’s expectations of proper childcare. ‘Biological ties’ were invoked in different circumstances and by different agents, but tell the same story: blood is an essentialized substance where morality resides. It is the basis of love and attachment, but it may also contain the ‘bad seed’. This is where the conflict between reformism and essentialism ultimately resides, as it reflects an unresolved Soviet contradiction between the principle that humans are perfectible and, on the contrary, that the circumstances of their birth might give them an (class) essence that is very difficult or impossible to change – a Soviet form of the more widespread dichotomy between blood kinship versus social kinship, or genetic versus environmental determinism. Today, the collective consciousness is deeply imbued with the superiority of blood kinship, hence the negative attitude towards adoption and prejudice against children residing in institutions. This is where the proposed ‘social kinship through institutions and ideology’ – country as a family – comes in, cutting across this dichotomy. It goes beyond simple social kinship as in adoption and marriage, but also beyond symbolic or metaphorical senses. It is intensely practical, being enacted by child welfare personnel and having direct institutional consequences. The state supposedly takes over the roles of a good parent, setting up relations of obligation in which a child must ‘repay’ the state for this provision. This care by the state is matched by the child’s sense of obligation, reciprocity and loyalty. But this sense is diffused over a potentially infinite range of multiple and transient adult carers. Complex human relations and attachments do form, but these are subject to chance and may or may not be long term. These people stand for the more abstract entity of the state as a family, to which the child is ultimately indebted. Two contradictory and extreme concepts of the nature of the child see the child as either inherently good or inherently evil. Under the influence 315

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of the former ideal, and deploying the ‘social’ model of relatedness, children are increasingly taken away from ‘problem’ families and placed in institutions to protect them from those families (the environmental view on nature of the person). However, when these same children do not live up to state agents’ idea of a positive outcome, a parallel concept of ‘bad genes’ is used, blaming the child or its parents for the failure. The essentialist discourse on ‘bad genes’ comes into direct conflict with the idea that a child can improve with good ‘upbringing’. In separating children and their parents into ‘good’ and ‘bad’, the state also separated the world of childhood into good and bad childhood. The world of good childhood had sentimental ideas of innocence and purity, while bad childhood encompasses children from Soviet children’s homes for the disabled, from children’s prison camps and institutions, which for some children turned out to not to be the positive and reforming experience that the state intended it to be. ‘Bad’ childhood has a trail of ‘the badness’ of their parents following them, facilitating the construction of the identity of those who are placed into this category. When the state intervenes and breaks the ties between the ‘unfit’ parent and a child, this connection is transformed from being a kinship tie into a stigma. Here we see the reworking of the ‘bad’ origin: with one stroke it is broken, but with another it is being simultaneously reconstructed. The deployment of the ‘bad seed’ biological model is a fallback defensive position – when things go wrong, it enables staff to claim that it is not their failure, but the individual’s.1 There is also a curious sense that in the state/family drama, the individual child does not exist or, rather, the child exists as a blank space that produces certain requirements. Linked to the concept of the child as inherently good, the child as a tabula rasa serves as an object that the (Soviet) state was free to sculpt in its own image, producing a certain kind of adult, a ‘new type of man, the Soviet man’. This immediately evokes the Christian idea of man being made in the image and likeness of God, and because God is good, man has the potential to share and develop in God’s goodness. The tool for sculpting this adult will be a ‘good’ family, but if the family cannot provide the required conditions, then it will be the state as a parent that would do the job. Set in motion in Soviet times, this idea comes into conflict with the newly acquired ‘voice’ in the new Family Code; children, from being objects of upbringing by others, are becoming subjects of their own upbringing (Sem’ya 1997, Goneev et al. 2002). Childhood, no longer contained and reproduced as a familiar category, is more difficult to control, and this creates feelings of anxiety for those involved in childhood issues. 316

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In this rearrangement of kinship, the state favours children but leaves them without their families, without a context. They treat children as an absolute concept, not a relational concept: how could one be a child without parents? Within the domain of family, social orphans are a deviant definition, but it is a faked deviance. It is a fictive non-kinship – virtual kinship is another half of this non-kinship, as children are de-kinned to make them susceptible to re-kinning (Howell 2006), and this is the point at which the state comes in. Institutions are set up in a way that requires a constant supply of artificial orphans, and children are re-kinned to the abstract state. The category of social orphans is itself a problem, because it presupposes what we might call a counter-intuitive notion of the family; the term ‘social orphan’ is a euphemism.

Power Asymmetry The moment when the state comes in is also the beginning of increasingly skewed power relations. The ‘respectable’ families who find themselves in difficulties use institutions as an extended arm of the benevolent state to help them out by providing temporary care – the ‘ideal’ type of state-parent cooperation, but one in which parents make sure they retrieve their child promptly. On the other hand, mothers who lack vital resources are unable to retrieve their children and are treated by the state as deviants: feckless, immoral, irredeemable, their facts and arguments ignored in court. Such mothers are required to demonstrate their adequacy in accordance to impossible criteria, from proving unrealistic levels of income to ‘performing’ maternal love under inscrutable rules of observation. For these mothers, the power balance has tipped irrevocably, and the state shifts from being co-parent to sole parent. In the power battle between the post-Soviet state and the family, a ‘problem’ family has little agency; resistance is not always possible and many family’s tactics are rendered futile. These are mothers who do not know how to defend themselves. ‘Western’ social sciences examine social exclusion, deviance and the reproduction of marginality linking these to class, race, unemployment and poverty. However, Soviet ideas were rooted not in these criteria but mostly in moral virtue with an economic undertone (which at the same time is social virtue, though paradoxically tangled with genetic inheritance). In the transition to post-Soviet times, Soviet moral attitudes, as well as many practices in the child welfare system, have persisted, but the emergence of unemployment and poverty, hitherto almost unknown, made their 317

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application much harsher. To live without money and employment, which makes it difficult to follow the ideas of proper parenthood, is conceptualized as a personal inadequacy, and the desire of the state agents to draw the children of the dispossessed back to a state structure, which will provide them with material support and education, is itself a powerful motivation to send children to institutions. The parallels between Stalinist repressive trials, workforce confessions and many other areas of Soviet life are well documented in a pattern which Kharkhordin summarized as ‘Reveal, Admonish, Excommunicate’. However, my focus on the supposed personal inadequacy reveals new parallels. One is with English and African witchcraft accusations. Accusations of personal inadequacy, which mothers cannot defend themselves against, portray them as social deviants, providing a scapegoat to sidestep wider social problems, and allow the state to withdraw support from the incurable family by concentrating resources entirely on the ‘innocent’ child whom it has separated from that family. The logical outcome is what I call the ‘symbolic death’ of parent and child to each other. In this seemingly post-Soviet case, we see the inter-related nodes of fetishization of the state, witchcraft-type accusations and scapegoating, which constitute a repertoire of patterns of inclusion and exclusion, of responsibility, causality and blame. When fetishization is not subscribed to, witchcraft-type accusations serve as a mechanism of scapegoating and social exclusion. However, these mechanisms operate on a wider scale, and this is where my second parallel comes in – that with Western democracies in Europe and the USA, provided that the Macfarlane’s bipartite precondition, or phenomena necessary for the formation of accusations in specific instances, has been met. They are ‘firstly, the presence of some tension or anxiety or unexplained phenomenon; secondly, the directing of this energy into certain channels’ (Macfarlane 1970b, cited in Mitchell 2004: 15). Current anxieties about the state of childhood seem to be common to modern states. Moreover, in Russia and ‘Euro-America’, child welfare practices are based on the similar concept of an innocent vulnerable child in need of protection, despite the new concepts of children as active social agents that had been established in Euro-American social sciences in the 1980s, and two decades later in post-Soviet social thought. In both systems, though, the two concepts coexist, creating tension at the point of application. Likewise, similar concepts of motherhood that presuppose experiencing particular feelings towards children (maternal instinct, mother love) and the expectation for parental performance make it possible 318

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to categorize motherhood into ‘good’ or ‘bad’; the ‘bad’, through the mechanism of scapegoating will surely be as likely to be cut off from their children in the USA as they are in Russia. It is only recently that in Western societies, new policies allowed separated children and parents to seek and find each other, with birth parents having ‘hidden and stigmatised identity’ (Modell 2002: 19). The difference is that in Russia, due to the still active Phantom ‘virtual kinship’ relations, they will grow up in residential care, often repeating the fate of their parents – so the promise of a reform is not fulfilled, in the classical Foucauldian sense where prisons never reform the convicts – while in countries with liberal democracies, such as USA and UK children will be redistributed mostly among foster and adoptive families, although short spells in residential care are also possible. However, in both systems, because family policies are underpinned by the same idea of the primacy of blood kinship, mothers are considered to be the main caregivers and are thus the major (although not the only) actors to be demonized. What emerges, then, is that we are dealing with the consequences of bureaucratic functioning in the tick-box audit culture in the urban industrial setting of modern welfare states, which may only seem to be radically different because they are set up in different political systems.2 In the actual fact, we are talking about governmental processes in modern states that are preoccupied with future-oriented progress and reformism – whether they reform (‘civilize’) Australian Aboriginal, American Indian, Canadian Indian or Soviet Northern Native people, from whom they need to draw children into the system of residential care to start creating a ‘new’ generation of proper citizens, or whether they reform ‘problem’ families to make them more like the expected ‘normal’ citizens. It is about a group being defined in the language of inadequacy and the necessity of measures having to be applied to bring it up to a particular level. The examination of specific cases is about how practices from one context get defined as bad practices, who gets to define standards and what some of these standards might be. Therefore, in some areas, the differences in two systems, the (post-) Soviet welfare state and that of Western Europe and America, are not that sharp. Underlying reformist practices in both systems is the idea that ‘like reproduces like’ (Strathern 2005c) that plays itself out differently in different systems. If in ‘Euro-America’ the stress is on parents being taught parenting skills, in Russia, parenting skills are thought to exist naturally as an indication of the presence of maternal instinct. Marilyn Strathern describes the case of Australian missioners who, guided by the idea that parents who 319

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do not know how to parent pass on a lack of knowledge to the next generation (Strathern 2005b), set out to break the cycle of reproduction (of ignorance) but ‘used it to different effect – not to bring parents and children closer but to set them asunder. If they could get the children away from their uncivilized parents, then the children would make better progress’ (2005c: 185). Strathern gave examples of two children who learnt from their parents not what might have been expected: ‘Peevay learnt the resistance, not the hatred … Carolyn learnt the refusal not the neglect … What was important in both cases was the fact of the relationship’ (ibid.: 186). In other words, she concludes, ‘like does not reproduce like’ and one cannot predict what the child will learn from parent-child relationship. What came through as important was ‘the power of relationship between mother and son’, that although ‘for a while a person’s skills might be taught by others, the relationship is learnt only through those who are party to it’. She sees the relationship as a resource, and ‘problems arise when such resources become targeted for improvement’ (ibid.: 186). She maintains that this is ‘a particular Euro-American, neo-liberal way of reckoning resources … when we start describing performances amenable to indicators/or moralities of selfmanagement/or rights as the repository and measure of right-doing. These are all parts of a package that these days has global currency’. But, she continues, ‘we should be wary of the doctrine and like reproduces like. What people take from their circumstances simply is not as morally predictable’ (ibid.: 187). What I can add here is that the case does not seem to be particular to only Euro-American societies but Russia as well, unless Russia could be viewed as a part of European tradition. Coming back to the specifically post-Soviet context, as in many binary systems, law and disorder (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006), pure and impure sacred (Taussig 1992), and the state and the neblagopoluchnaya family are mutually constitutive. The state, being reproduced in the encounters at the margins of statecraft, resides in the relationships: since the moral state exists only in the relationship with the marginal, the neblagopoluchnaya families are necessarily implicated. Often mothers do not put up as much resistance as Maria and, through their resignation (Navaro-Yashin 2002), uphold the state as much as the state agents do. Moreover, the state agents’ own resignation in the face of the enormity of the problems experienced by the families and their helplessness to alleviate these problems perpetuates the state no less than their belief in their own righteousness. As the Comaroffs point out, the ideal of Anderson’s imagined community and of cultural homogeneity founded on fiction is often violently sustained (2006: 32); 320

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Maria, by resisting the totalizing view of the state agents on her essence and action, turned the court into a standoff between the state agents’ Phantomvision cosmology and the alternatives. But these alternatives are now not supported by the state infrastructure, while the mechanism of scapegoating is deeply entrenched, allowing the state to proceed with minimal changes. It is in this standoff that we see how the Soviet state comes into being. The seemingly fragmented state that exists as a multiplicity (in historical as well as morphological terms) becomes unity at the moment of its encounter with the conflicting community, the moral state and the immoral neblagopoluchnaya mothers. Shared stories and categories, writes DeLanda, that emerge as part of conflict between two communities play an important role in the assemblage, ‘rigidifying the identities of the conflicting parties, the narratives being part of a process of group boundary construction … Stories of conflict (and the categories of insiders and outsiders associated with them) serve to code and consolidate the effects of territorialization on interpersonal networks’ (2006: 58–59, original emphasis). However, the state also exists as a different object to different people. The state agents we encountered in this book were mostly women – childcare is gendered space. The task of performing the state is also about performance of gender, of competitive motherhood and womanhood. The moment when the state agents repeat their identity as a good mother and a proper woman who is within the state, a part of the expansive state structure, is when they are being the state. The state agents prosecuting Maria create a governable space (Ong 2005: 274), an island of stability, order, rationality and security where the Soviet state exists amidst a post-Soviet volatile and chaotic society in flux. This serves a dual purpose. They stabilize their own lives, re-creating and taking refuge in the familiar without having to adjust drastically to the new environment; in doing so, they re-create and stabilize the state. The performing of the state is situated at a very particular moment, that of Maria’s violation of the sacred duty of motherhood. For Maria, this state is real and overpowering. As a result of doing this research, I believe that this is the time to establish a state social services network specifically designed to help families in caring for their children. To develop the new paradigm, it would be necessary to replace a number of failing elements in the social welfare system with other forms of social security. There is a need to abandon the disciplinarian approach to family problems; to recognise the family’s selfworth and establish a family preservation philosophy; to introduce a policy 321

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of non-discrimination against certain categories of families; to establish social services; and to re-distribute funds that currently support large institutions, in order to support the family. The expectation that the family can do it all on its own, especially when the basic social safety network has developed large gaps, is unrealistic without long-term involvement of social services in assisting families to care for their children by helping parents to overcome their difficulties. There are already signs of change. At the second international conference on “Children and Institutional Care” in Stockholm, the representative from the Russian Federation, Shakhova, pointed at the areas of new development for the last four years, emphasising adoption and guardianship as major forms of child placements, and the further development of foster families, i.e. priemnaya sem’ia and patronat. She also pointed to the increase in the number of social welfare services intended to forestall the institutionalization of children and social orphanhood. Shakhova named the prevention of social orphanhood as the main priority in the development of the field of social work. As strategies she named the elimination of the reasons that lead to social orphanhood (‘protivodeistvie prichinam sotsial’nogo sirotstva’), although she did not specify what it means, as well as the development of post-institutional rehabilitation of former residents. She also cautiously said that the state hopes to work towards supporting the family, including the substitute family3 (Conferentsia 2003). Although my study demonstrates that the state system is slow to change, I would like to conclude on a more optimistic note, for it seems that there is hope that eventually a family preservation philosophy may be developed and implemented. I anticipate that this may not rectify the problem of the separation of children from their mothers who fail to live up to the ideals of a ‘good’ mother with the emphasis on exclusive mothering characteristic of contemporary urban states. Residential care institutions will still play an important role in the child welfare infrastructure in Russia in the near future, but I expect that supporting the variously conceptualized family will send fewer children to residential care.

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Notes 1.

2.

Having said that, I should bring in the latest news from the new fields in biology called epigenetics and epigenomics. Epigenetics – the study of heritable changes in gene function that occur without a change in the DNA sequence – is essentially another form of Lamarckism (Jean-Baptiste P.A. Lamarck [1744–1829] was a French botanist, zoologist and biological philosopher) who postulated that acquired characteristics may be subject to inheritance. In the Soviet Union, Lamarkism had been implicitly disregarded through discrediting the works of Timofei Lysenko (1898–1976), a prominent Soviet biologist and agronomist, who proposed the idea of ‘vernalisation’, a technique that allowed winter crops to be obtained from summer planting by soaking and chilling the germinated seed (see Sheehan 1993, Graham 1993). Lamarckism has seen a comeback and is now armed with contemporary scientific proof for it has been found that environmental experiences create epigenetic tags, the chemical changes that can alter gene expression, which can then be inherited not through DNA but through epigenome. For example, in their research into epigenetic programming by maternal behaviour in rats, Weaver et al. offered ‘the first evidence that maternal behaviour produces stable alterations of DNA methylation and chromatin structure, providing a mechanism for the longterm effects of maternal care on gene expression in the offspring. These studies offer an opportunity to clearly define the nature of gene-environment interactions during development and how such effects result in the sustained ‘environmental programming’ of gene expression and function over the lifespan’ (2004: 852). Epigenetic inheritance was found in humans as well (i.e., Pembrey et al. 2006), but I refrain from discussing these implications fully because the link between epigenomics and human behavior requires further research. For more general information on epigenetics see http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/plus /sfg/resources/res_epigenetics.dtl, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts /3413_genes.html, http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/epigenetics/, http:// www.roadmapepigenomics.org/ Interestingly, but in the 1920s Aleksandra Kollontai did not make a sharp distinction between capitalism and socialism regarding the ways in which the necessity to work for wages outside the family unit negatively affected family life. She maintained that in both systems more and more women had to engage in wage labour because the wages of one breadwinner was insufficient; the family ceased to be a productive unit and only consumed services and products produced by the collective labour of working men and women in the factories. However, if ‘capitalism put a crushing burden on a woman’s shoulders’, making her ‘a wageworker without reducing her cares as a housekeeper or mother’, in socialism, the society will take upon itself not only home chore responsibilities but also childcare and socialization, while freeing women to work outside the family (Kollontai 1920).

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3.

Translated from “gosudarstvo v kachestve perspektivy budet podderzhivat’ sem’yu, v tom chisle zameshchayushchuyu, i razvitie instituta sem’i v tselom”. As I was unable to obtain the actual report, I had to rely on the report from the conference, published on the ARO web site. This was very vague in its phrasing, difficult to understand even in Russian and difficult to translate accurately into English.

324

EPILOGUE

It has been ten years since I conducted my main fieldwork. Much has changed since then. The Guardianship Department has been completely overhauled; it moved to a new location and employs nine people, all new. I was told that the way they work with neblagopoluchniye parents is very different now. From the old GD, Ekaterina retired shortly after my fieldwork and moved to the materik, or western part of Russia, to join her family. Larisa still works for the meria, but in another department. Because of her lengthy experience, she is still being consulted on the matters related to her previous responsibilities. Being a forceful advocate of the rights of children not to live in what she feels is a ‘bad’ family, she obliges. Marina, the Head of the GD, was fired from her post, accused of crude violation of children’s rights and alcoholism. Whether she was indeed violating children’s rights, or whether it was just an excuse to fire her for the administration’s own political reasons, I do not know. Neither do I know if she really had been drinking or if that was just gossip. However, what is important is that her dismissal was tied to the same issue of ‘amoral’ behaviour (alcoholism in this case), which constitutes the basis of so many cases of deprivation of parental rights. She passed away in 2009. Misha and his sister managed to stay out of jail. Ekaterina tries to help them occasionally but, she says, Lyuba in particular is a bit too carefree and does not appreciate her help fully. Vitaliy was released from jail and was seen somewhere in town. Nobody knew where to find him. Sergei was also released and deprived of parental rights for his two children. There were many new developments in Maria’s life as well. In 2008 I visited her in a house where she lived with her new boyfriend just a block away from the one where she and Petr used to live. The old Dal’stroi-era house was in a squalid condition, dirty, with peeling wallpaper. It was quite evident that alcohol had become part of her life. She shared the events of the past few years with me. Maria and Petr went on to have two more children, whom they managed to raise at home for a few years. However, Petr then died of alcohol poisoning at the age of 29. Whether it was a case

325

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of excessive alcohol consumption, or he was one of three dozen that year who died of counterfeit poison vodka that was sold as a legitimate product, I do not know, but that spelt the end of Maria’s family. Over the traditional 40-day grieving period she started drinking and her children were taken away from her and placed in children’s homes (she suspects her neighbours informed the GD). Volodya, her eldest son, was also taken away from his Grandmother, who started drinking under the influence of her cohabitant/husband (Maria said). All the children are in institutions now, except for Klava whom Maria sent away to live with Petr’s mother somewhere on the materik, and of course Vasiliy who was adopted abroad. The Grandmother is allowed to, and does, visit her grandchildren in children’s homes, but Maria is prohibited from doing so, because she is deprived of parental rights for all of them. Maria showed me her family photographs with the children, herself and Petr, and Petr’s parents. She quite evidently misses them all and has vague plans to collect her children somehow. She bought new wallpaper and wants to save some money to fix up her house so the GD will allow the children to return. However, by working as a night dishwasher in a local restaurant and making 500 roubles a shift, she barely has enough to cover her food expenses. I think that somewhere deep inside she knows that the children will never be allowed to be reunited with her. Thus she is waiting until they are old enough to do that on their own.

326

Appendix 1

List of Documents Supplied to the Court by the Guardianship Department and the Baby Home in Maria’s Case The judge had read the set of documents collected by the Guardianship Department in support of their request. These included: • An official document (postanovleniye), which states that Maria has asked for the placement. • The report on the living conditions from the Guardianship Department. Among other things a girl is mentioned, ‘Klava, 1.5 years old, looks very small, thin, doesn’t walk, doesn’t utter any words, the child is clearly lagging behind in her development and probably doesn’t receive sufficient nutrition and care’. Maria said that she will tidy up her house. When asked what she is going to feed her child with, she replied that her income is what her partner, who does not have a permanent job, brings in. • Another report on living conditions from the Baby Home, where it is mentioned that Maria ‘categorically denied the possibility to produce a written refusal of her child’ [implying that she was asked by the Baby Home specialist to refuse her son when the child was only two months old, counteracting the Guardianship Department’s insistence that it is acceptable to help the mother by placing her child to an institution for up to 6 months, and that it is viewed as a ‘normal’ thing to do]. • Document F-1: the father is registered as indicated by the mother. • The Guardianship Department considers the living conditions and the quality of mother’s care or rather the absence of mother’s care inadequate, and on the basis of this conclusion they request the 327

Appendix 1

•

•

•

•

•

protection of children from the influence of such a mother by removing her parental rights. A certificate from the Baby Home: the boy is raised in the Baby Home and is provided for by the state. During the length of his stay in the Baby Home, his mother has never come and visited him, has never asked about his development, health, even by telephone. A letter from the partner of 17 years of the grandmother (the guardian of Volodya), who practically brought up Maria. She gave birth to her first son without a husband, so the partner had to provide for Volodya, whom they raised since he was a baby, because his mother Maria did not want to care for him and did not want to work. Then Maria got together with Petr, and the boy continued to live with his grandmother and grandfather (her partner). The relationship between Volodya and his mother did not work out, she was becoming a drunk and Volodya did not want to go away from his grandparents. Then there was her son Vasiliy, who is in the Baby Home now. This partner (the grandfather) is requesting that Volodya be left with them. A letter to the city administration from another neighbour, who indicates that Volodya lives with his grandmother. His mother Maria collected her son by force and refuses to return him. When she (the neighbour) would come to Maria’s home, she would see them drunk, the house was dirty and a mess, and the boy was crying and wanted to go to his grandmother, but he was not allowed to. Two letters from different neighbours confirming that Volodya lives with his grandparents. His mother collected him by force, with a scandal. Whenever his mother comes, there are always scandals. Another document in regards to the living conditions, written by the Baby Home head teacher and a senior upbringer (starshiy vospitatel’). The mother was locked up together with her children at home. The mother said that the birth certificate is with the grandmother, but she [the grandmother] was not home when the seniour upbringer made a home visit. The grandmother came to the Baby Home 30 minutes later and said that her daughter obtained the documents using dishonest methods in order to receive child benefits, because she needs money. She does not work anywhere, she leads an immoral lifestyle, drinks and does not care about her children and their health. The children are exposed to foul language at home. A message was sent to the mother with the request to come 328

Appendix 1

and see the authorities in relation to her son. A few days later, the father came. He was warned that if the parents would continue to have an irresponsible attitude towards life and would not follow the rules of the Baby Home, then the administration of the Baby Home would remove the parental rights of the mother. The father promised to come again and bring the mother to the Baby Home to resolve the issue (this document contradicts the earlier statement by the same person that the parents never came to the Baby Home). • A certificate signed by the Mayor of Magadan (Guardianship Department) in relation to the guardianship of Volodya by his grandmother. • Living conditions of the grandmother: three-room flat; clean, warm, cosy. Volodya has his own room, bed, table and toys. • Conclusion of the Guardianship Department: a request to remove Maria’s parental rights with regards to both Volodya and Vasiliy.

329

Appendix 2

Reminiscences of Two ‘Bad’ Childhoods The childhood experiences of Tamara, who was deprived of parental rights, and another informant, Mikhail, a 22-year-old man, share many similarities, despite the age difference. They were both placed in residential care institutions at a very young age, went through the Rake’s Progress and ended up in the Children’s Home for disabled children after being diagnosed with oligofrenia, a mental illness. From there they were frequently sent to the psychiatric hospital. The following are excerpts from my interviews with Tamara and Mikhail.

Tamara ER: Tamara: ER: Tamara:

ER: Tamara:

ER: Tamara:

When you lived in boarding schools, did you receive any letters? No. Even if somebody had written to us, we would not have got letters anyway. Why? Eh (sceptically), practically nobody saw any letters there. This is especially true in the Disabled Children’s Home. Staff were not allowed to pass any letters to us. When you were sent to the psychiatric hospital, what happened there? We were living there and walking outside in the area adjacent to the Hospital (po dvoru gulyali). There was nothing to do. We were given injections if we behaved badly. Why did they give you injections? So we would not run away from there (chtoby nogi ne taskali, ne sbegali ottudova). They gave us aminazin and 331

Appendix 2

sul’fazin to make us sleep more. So they mocked us as much as they pleased. ER: They gave you these injections only when you behaved badly? Tamara: Yes. ER: It wasn’t a part of your treatment? Tamara: No. ER: Was there any treatment in the institutions? Tamara: No, no treatment. In the Disabled Children’s Home they also gave us these injections for bad behaviour. ER: Did they give you injections in the Children’s Home, too? Tamara (chuckles): They gave us not only injections … We were shaved bald, we were tied to beds. Many of my friends who were there will confirm that. ER: What was going on there? Tamara: When we got there [the Children’s Home for the Disabled], we were 13–14 years old. At first we were shocked. Look at us, and look at the children who were residing there! Paralysed and (nenormal’niye) mentally ill. We were kept separately. Later on we got used to it. We didn’t study, but we worked a lot. We sewed. But because we were normal and felt we didn’t belong there, we started to escape from there. They were catching us and punishing us. ER: How were you punished? Tamara: Our heads were shaved and we were given injections. They put us in a cold water bathtub. Tied us up. They would also remove mattresses from our beds and tie us up to the metal springs. They were trying to discourage us from escaping. Well, we would live there for two–three months, and then go again … for a walk [escaping]. Who wants to stay behind bars? ER: Did you try to explain to anybody that it was not correct for you to be in the Disabled CH? Tamara: Yes, we tried. ER: To whom? Tamara: We started to threaten the director that we were going to write to Moscow. Only then did they start to move [do something]. I could have ended up differently. But I managed to leave this place and they even hired me to work there afterwards. I worked there for 8 years. 332

Appendix 2

ER: Tamara:

ER: Tamara: ER: Tamara:

Did your complaints make any difference at that time? No. Where would our complaints go? Nowhere. This is later, when I was working there, a Committee came and selected those children who do not have to be there and placed them in boarding schools. When I was residing there, there was no selection. There was only one way out, this was to be sent to the group of the severe mentally damaged, and from this group, the only way out was to the morgue. From those children who were with me at that time, Borya hung himself, and Tanya was so affected by the medical treatment that she ended up mentally ill (Tanyu tabletkami sdvinuli). Many of us ended up badly, they were medicated so much that they just didn’t make it. They came there normal, and became not normal. Four of us out of eight got out. Two died, two became mentally ill. How was it in other children’s homes? Horrible. I will never forget how they beat me. It was plainly horrid. Who was beating you? Nannies. If you don’t sleep and your eyes are open, you get hit. If you make sounds by hitting your spoon on the plate, they will smack your lips. I remember all this very well. I was told that now it is not like this. Vera said it is alright there. I just don’t know why she is running away from there if it’s all right there. I told her, please don’t run away. She started to run away from the Shelter. I told her, let’s sort out our business, this Court and everything. No, she started to run away. Even the Shelter’s director said, she is always running away, they have to look for her. Now she is running away from the internat. I told the Shelter’s director, and so what, you will send her to the internat and I know she will run away from there and will freeze to death somewhere on the way home. Even if you will send her farther away, she will run away from there, too. She is coming home! She is not running FROM home, she is running HOME. But I cannot help her do her homework and not be truant, because I myself don’t know much. Because when they felt themselves free to give me all these injections, then I was ‘a (clinical) fool’ (dura), but 333

Appendix 2

when they let me out to freedom [na svobodu vypustili, it sounds as if she was freed from a prison or a labour camp], then I am not treated as being handicapped, all of a sudden I became smart, not a [clinical] fool. This is what happened, isn’t it? They didn’t allow me to get my education (uchit’sya ne dali) because I wasn’t eligible [as she was in the Children’s Home for the disabled, she was therefore viewed as uneducable], but in life they expect me to function as everybody else.

Mikhail Mikhail was told he was abandoned by his mother. When she changed her mind and came to collect him, the authorities told her that he was adopted. Meanwhile, Mikhail was transferred from a children’s home to an internat for mentally ill children in Provideniya, Chukotka (where Irina had also spent a few years): ER: Was life in Provideniya different from other institutions? Mikhail: There was a difference. In the internat for mentally ill in Magadan, I was loved like in the Children’s Home, but in Provideniya … of course … it was not too good there (plokhovato). I don’t know how old I was, but carers … this one carer, she had really long nails … When we started to speak about it, he speaks more slowly, as if it is painful for him and he does not really want to remember it. Later on, when he speaks about abuse, there is a real pain in his face and his eyes: Mikhail: So I was lying in bed, and she says, ‘everybody get up’! She said it loudly, and I got scared and peed in my bed. So I cannot get up, I was ashamed of myself, and anyway I thought she was going to tear me apart. She came and jerked my blanket off, grabbed me with her nails and took me with my sheet to the bathroom. So I had to laundry my underpants. It wasn’t good there. Cruel. We were made to kneel as punishment, had to hold our potties, Gennadii Borisovich was hitting us.

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His experiences in the Children’s Home for the Disabled are similar to Tamara’s: Mikhail: When I came here for the first time, to Magadan, that is, I escaped from the internat. I got lost. I couldn’t find my way back to the Children’s Home for Disabled Children. I asked and then somebody told me, and I found it, it was cold. ER: Why did you escape? Mikhail (his voice becomes quieter): Because I didn’t want to live there. ER: Why? Mikhail: I don’t know … It was really bad there. Because they tied us up, and they gave us injections, Aminazin. If you don’t swallow the pills they give you, they will give you injections. They gave me pills by the handful, and I don’t know what these pills were. Maybe this is why it is so hard for me to study, maybe there are some side effects to the pills I had to take. I took so many of them! I came to Magadan in 1987, I think, so they were binding me to a bed, giving me injections, that is why I escaped. ER: When do they tie you up? Mikhail: When you start yelling and become upset and hysterical, when something hurts. They drag you to a psychiatrist. He will prescribe pills and they will tie you up. ER: Have they tied you up? Mikhail: Yes, they have. In the Boarding House for Disabled (psychokhroniki) they torture these poor handicap people so badly, it is horrible. Once there was this little girl, she was small, and could think straight (ne soobrazshayet). She was screaming for something … ah, she wanted to eat. It was in the evening, we had already eaten our dinner. She was still hungry, but no bread was allowed. There was this nanny, she was so angry, I can’t even tell you what a cruel woman she was. She took this little girl and threw her on the snow outside. Naturally, the girl started to yell and was hysterical, she hardly had any clothes on. Mikhail’s diagnosis of mental illness was a tool for controlling some of his inquiries that were inconvenient for the administration:

335

Appendix 2

Mikhail: I worked for the Children’s Home for a while. We were asking the Governor why we had such small salaries, 500– 600 roubles? Irina Aleksandrovna called me in and asked, why do I care? Why am I asking around? I said, why not? I am working in a hospital, and I want to know. She said that if I will be asking further, not to forget that they have psychiatrists there that can send me to the psychiatric hospital. I of course was especially vulnerable because I have this diagnosis, they can do whatever they want with me. They can make a real mental out of me and send me to the Mental Hospital or whatever they want. So, I did not ask any more questions, and tried to sit as low as I can. Both Tamara and Mikhail were separated from their siblings and both lost contact with their families. Tamara has no contact with her family whatsoever, and Mikhail managed to find his mother and members of his extended family, but feels he does not belong there: ER: Mikhail:

Do you still have your grandparents? Yes, I do, I also have three aunts, my two cousins, nieces and nephews. I have a lot of relatives, but we have cold relationships. Towards me. Because when I came to my aunt Natasha, and I heard aunt Tanya telling her not to tell me where she lives. So I understand I shall not come and see her. Why did she say it, I don’t understand? Now she believes in God, and she started to treat me much, much better, I didn’t even recognise her … I have plenty of relatives, but they don’t need me. Because I didn’t grow up in their surroundings. If I would have been growing up with them, there might have been some tenderness, attachment. I am a nobody to them. I also feel like a stranger with them, I come to visit them, to drink tea or something, and I feel ashamed. They are like strangers to me. I still cannot get used to them.

Tamara and Mikhail are both very angry with their parents, blaming their mothers for their misfortunes. Both have had only four years of education, although they wish they had more. Mikhail felt an inclination to study all along, feeling embarrassed by his educational inadequacy. Tamara felt she needed more education because she was not able to help her growing 336

Appendix 2

children with their schooling. She said: ‘When there was time to teach us, we were considered mentally ill, and now when there is time to demand from us to function as everybody else, we all of a sudden became normal’: Mikhail: Of course I realise that I am stained for life with this whole business of oligofrenia. ER: But you were saying that it doesn’t get in your way, that you were able to find a job without any problems … Mikhail: Yes, it’s true … But, if I hadn’t had this stain on me, I would have studied further. You see, earlier I had a goal, when I was in school 12 I wanted to become a manager or a doctor. Then they dulled my goals, gradually, and then it went down to zero, and now I am farming land, and that’s all. I like to manage, I was used to it since I was small, I had power, and I was bossing smaller children around. And here … they dulled me up, no power, nothing.

337

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370

Glossary

Bomzhi, bichi

Tramps

Detdomovtsy

Former or current children’s home residents

Internat(s)

Residential boarding home(s)/school(s)

Internatovskie

Former or current internat residents

Meria

Mayor’s Office, City Administration

Neblagopoluchnaya sem’ia

A ‘problem’ family

Neblagopoluchniye parents

‘Problem’ parents

Propiska

Residence permit

Vospitannik

A child being brought up and educated in a children’s home or internat

Vospitatel’

An upbringer, a careworker in a residential home

371

Index

Abrams, Philip, 18 Abuse alcohol and drug, 79, 107, 129, 132,136, 137, 142, 143, 288n4 child, 12, 20, 96, 155, 178, 207, 213, 216–19, 241, 244, 248, 261, 277, 285, 307–09, 334 Satanic, in England, 271, 272 spouse, 307 Accountability, 13, 162, 230, 269, 273, 277 Accusations 19, 88, 137, 304, 310, 318 functions of, 267–76 witchcraft, 38, 272 witchcraft-type, 38, 267, 270, 271, 318 Admonition, 161, 166, 264–66, 309 Adoption, 5, 40, 43n33, 52–54, 66, 68, 71, 76, 77, 92, 96, 102n3, 134n9, 153, 199, 302, 304, 305, 308, 315, 322 ambivalence, 197 post-adoption, services, 299 secrecy of, 76, 150 Affection, 193, 194, 196, 248 Agency, 7, 23, 24, 133, 152, 184, 271, 276, 277, 304, 317 child welfare, 300 children’s , 207, 229, 230, 248, 298, 305 concept of, 26–31 and voice, 33–34 Aggression, 161, 202 Alt, Edith, 164 Alternative approaches, 280–88 Ambiguous, 245 attitude, 52

issues, 141, 231 legislative base, 285 relationship, 22 status, 6, 71, 81, 215 Anger, 190, 202, 219, 220, 231, 240, 246 Anti-societal lifestyle, 142 Anxieties, 11, 12, 167, 305, 318 Appell, Annette, 304, 307–09 Artefacts, 146 Attitudes, 6, 12, 19, 22, 56, 141, 145, 147, 178, 238, 244, 291, 300, 313, 317 continuity of, 262–67 Audit culture, 182 Autonomy children’s, 305 of civil society, 293 of the family, 13, 57, 159, 164, 260, 266, 314 lack of, 158 and privacy, 14, 259 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 131, 272 on dialogue, 34, 133 on heteroglossia, 129, on official monologism, 132 on power and language, 26, 33 on unfinalizability, 133 Barrow, Susan, 299, 300 Barthes, Roland, 130 Beatings, 201, 202, 217, 218, 220, 221, 223, 333 Belonging ambiguous state of, 71 childhood, 15, 160, 163, 296, 309 feeling of, 166, 179, 231 373

Index

group, 32, 208, 235 middle-class, to, 141 and property, 178, 223 social, 16 Benefits, 7, 20, 35, 52, 55, 141, 154, 226 child, 61, 82, 108, 112, 117, 133n2, 155, 277, 299, 328 guardianship, 107, 124 northern, 60 Binary accounts, 144 categories of the family, 78 division, 143, 145, 148, 156 opposition, 145, 320 structure, 145 Biopower, 26, 27, 29 Blame, 4, 19, 146, 162, 169, 239, 246, 270, 276, 301, 303, 308 and accountability, 273 attribution of, 196, 197 displacement of, 277 psychology of, 289n9 and witchcraft, 274, 318 Bodenhorn, Barbara, 172n1, 189n8, 301 Borneman, John, 157, 164, 165, 167 Boundaries, 80, 185, 199, 204 blurred, 166 and childhood, 305 fluid, 2 moral, 143, 169, 267 between ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’, 38, 148, 161, 270 between public and private, 13, 15, 252, 257 between self and outside space, 188 between state and family, 160, 167 between state and society, 17 and stealing, 225 and territorialisation, 21 Bourdieu, Pierre and agency, 24 on dispositions, 23, 42n25 on fields, 32, 129, 295 on habitus, 23, 24, 26 and language, 131

on power, 31 and symbolic power, 130 Bowlby, John, 208, 292 Breeva, Elena, 160, 260, 268 Bronfenbrenner, Urie, 157 Bureaucracy, 16, 38–40, 43, 154, 213, 278 Bureaucratic edifice, 10, 17, 278 games, 204 indifference, 39, 40 offices, 154 organization, 69 practices, 20 rationality, 26 system, 38, 39, 319 Carsten, Janet, 157, 166, 309 Centre for Temporary Isolation of Juvenile Delinquents (TSVINP), 10, 64, 66, 72, 100, 170, 224, 229, 259, 265, 283, 284 Charitable foundling homes, 48 help, 272 Child concepts of, 48–50, 296–98, 305–06, 316 kidnapping of, 151 maltreatment, 65, 96, 220, 261, 309 neglect, 1, 12, 20, 54, 55, 65, 68, 70, 75, 77, 89, 95, 96, 98, 101, 108, 130, 136, 138, 152, 178, 250, 259, 277, 281, 299, 302, 309, 320 and parental duties, 129, 263 wellbeing, 27, 57, 71–73, 88, 135, 138, 182, 183, 265, 268, 282, 308 Childcare, 13, 15, 41, 55, 63, 65, 74, 80–82, 87, 97, 127, 128, 157, 161, 168, 181, 258, 265, 268, 285, 288n3, 295, 296, 298, 313–15, 321, 323n2 agencies, 291 facilities, 54, 294 infrastructure, 53

374

Index

institutions, 48, 50, 158, 215, 280 organizations, 70, responsibilities, 294 Childhood, 88 bad, 316, 331 belonging, 160, 163, 296–98 changing perceptions of, 257, 260 conceptions of, 296, 305, 309 deprived, 4, 50, 238 experiences of, 170 good, 295 happy, 56, 161, 268 idealization of, 50 marginalized, 297 place of, 167 positioning of, 157 and sexuality, 230 Children abandoned, 1, 5, 47, 49, 71, 73, 113, 149, 163, 307, 334 as being-in-becoming, 296 best interests of, 25, 27, 28, 73, 76, 92, 127, 135, 155, 165, 173n11, 252, 284, 304, 305, 307 delinquent, 1, 52, 54, 72, 259 illegitimate, 48, 52 left without parental care, 1 non-delinquent, 284 parents’, 27, 73 rights, 261, 278, 298, 325 as social agents, 297, 305, 318 state, 27, 73, 211, 231 street, 1, 49, 52, 53, 57, 261, 268, 281 unsupervised, 1, 52, 54, 170, 259 vagrant, 1, 72, 284 welfare network, 12, 18–20, 27, 41, 53, 63, 64, 68, 72, 80, 171, 262 Class, 17, 23, 34–37, 130, 139–42, 145, 172n4, 302, 303, 306, 307, 310, 315, 317 Collective authority, 14 child’s, 188 as a congregation, 264 consciousness, 26, 315

family as, 51 farmers, 141 good, 43n27 indignation, 130 living, 223, 252 moral agent, 22 over individual, 23 parent, 231 pedagogy, 223 play, 199 property, 167 responsibility, 157, 294 upbrining, 172 working, 263 Committee for Juveniles (KPDN), 10, 64, 66, 72, 161, 162, 167, 263, 265, 266 Conditions living, 25, 27, 75, 70, 79, 70, 91, 92, 98, 99, 100, 106, 108, 111, 115, 156, 159, 251 as in stipulations, 30, 135 value-oriented, 88, 135, 138, 264 Confidentiality, 12 Confinement, 185–87, 191 Conflicts between children and carers, 219, 231 between children in institutions, 194, 201, 202, 207, 230 between detdomovtsy and home children, 237 family, 15, 62, 63, 72, 77, 79 Construction of bad mother, 308 of boundaries, 21, 160, 321 of childhood, 305 of family, 47, 157, 314 gender, 51 of identity, 316 of meaning, 33 of motherhood, 306 of personhood, 301 of reality, 131 revolutionary, 49 of socialist society, 15, 53, 163, 264 375

Index

society as a family, 164 of unfit parents, 6 Continuity, 262, 313 of attitudes, 266 and change, 7, 41 cultural, 26 historical, 43n27 personal, 240 of practices, 263 structural, 278 Control administrative, 10 of anomalies, 29 over child welfare institutions, 278 over childcare, 167 over the children, 129, 157, 183, 187, 190, 193, 201, 205, 207, 217, 229, 250, 277 of deviants, 272 over families, 13, 15, 55 in institutions, 182, 223 by peer, 207 by police, 224 reduced social, 258 regulatory, 28 of signifiers, 144 of time, 184 Correcting oneself, 147, 300, 304 outcomes, 182 parents’ behaviour, 266 Corrective disciplinary punishments, 148 facilities, 170, 171, 208, 218, 221, 224, 252n4, 274 roles, 266 Court and audiences, 255 and child removal, 307 collective as, 72, 160–161, 263, 266 composition of, 103–104, 105 ecclesiastical, 264 and a free lawyer, 91 internal, 156 juvenile, 309

new rights of children to represent themselves in, 262 stand-off in, 321 suit, 73, 76, 89 and written records, 75 Court hearings and accusations, 137 and degrees of resistance, 151 and guardianship department, 68 and inaccuracies, 136 and language, 33, 101, 103, 105, 129–33, 153 and stipulations for returning the child, 135 Custody, 40, 152, 153, 300, 304 transfer, 132 De Landa, Manuel, 20–21, 42n24, 321 Dement’eva, Irina, 251, 268 Department of Education, 10, 11, 64, 66, 72, 101, 102n3, 198, 199, 204, 279, 280, 286 Deprivation of parental rights, 31, 56, 57, 66, 71, 73, 76, 77, 89, 97, 99–101, 103, 104, 121, 127, 134n9, 142, 148, 153, 156, 165, 252, 259, 262, 263–65, 268, 271, 275–77 Deviance, 20, 37, 135, 142–44, 147, 274, 313, 317 Disability, 101, 152 Discipline, 41, 159, 161, 182, 185, 190, 193, 194, 201, 203, 207, 220, 221, 223, 264, 265, 269, 275, 308 Discontinuity family, 47, 49, 148, 249 historical, 277 rhetoric of, 313 Disempowerment, 129,133, 277 Division of space, 185, 187, 188, 190 Douglas, Mary, 38, 269–73 Dunham, Vera, 139, 140, 172n4 Durkheim, Emile, 143 Employment, 84, 199, 214, 251, 258, 295, 318 full-time, 293 376

Index

mandatory, 37 place of, 178 and requirements, 88, 100, 114, 128, 136, 137, 139, 158, 168 universal, 265 women’s, 294 Enemy, 20, 146, 156, 273 attitude towards, 147 external, 166, 275 internal, 272, 289n10, 303 of the state, 252n1 Environmental determinism, 25, 26, 122, 128, 315, 316 Epigenetics and epigenomics, 323n1 Essence, 80, 276, 321 ascribed, 24 attributed, 138 class, 315 failure of, 138–139 maternal, 139 moral, 197 social, 131 Essentialism, 315 Essentialist discourse on ‘bad’ genes, 316 Essentialized blood as substance, 315 distinction between classes, 36 gender differences, 314 Everyday chores, 203, 204, 226, 228 Fairclough, Norman, 130, 131 Family assistance to, 12, 48, 52, 55, 82, 84, 93, 100, 101, 103, 118, 121, 133n2, 138, 158, 160, 163, 173n11, 259, 265, 268, 274, 284, 288n2, 299, 309 authority, 53 blagopoluchnaya, 78, 80, 89, 148 extended, 1, 15, 41, 56, 60, 63, 78, 81, 82, 84, 127, 128, 152, 164, 166, 168, 171, 242, 248, 294, 296, 317, 336 good, 7, 78, 79, 107, 118, 136, 194, 232, 272, 316

maloimushchaya (low income), 61 mnogodetnaya (with three or more children), 61 nuclear, 2, 4, 60, 63, 67, 82, 84, 158, 164, 292, 294 policy, 16, 21, 41, 47, 261, 291, 313 privacy, 158 unfit, 6, 26, 27, 28, 34, 42n13, 49, 55, 72, 74, 76, 77, 89, 97, 147, 149, 168, 171, 197, 231, 269, 271, 272, 275–77, 286, 291, 306, 316 vneshne-blagopoluchnaya, 79 Fantasies, 242, 244, 248 Father F-1, 89, 113, 327 invisible, 96 marginalization of, 52, 128, 157, 314 party as, 164 symbolic, 165 Fatherhood recognition of, 261, 262, 279 Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 19, 141, 273 Foster care, 1, 5, 42n7, 286, 305, 307, 308, 319, 322 families, 48, 285, 287, 291, 299–301 parents, 53 Fostering, 85n3, 302 Foucault, Michael, 26–30, 43n28, 147, 148 Gaps, 20, 61, 63, 65, 148, 182, 258, 322 Geiger, Kent, 50, 157 Giddens, Anthony and agency, 30, 31 and Theory of Structuration, 27, 29 Goffman, Erving, 177 Goldman, Wendy, 53, 54 Guardian, 66, 88, 125, 127, 128, 136, 150, 151, 262, 279, 298, 328 state, 73, 106 Guardianship, 66, 67, 77, 85n3, 105, 106, 134n9, 152, 285, 322 benefits, 107, 121, 133n2 council, 68 377

Index

Gupta, Akhil, 17, 20 Habermas, Jurgen, 16 Halfin, Igal, 19, 141, 142, 145, 146 Harwin, Judith, 50, 55, 158, 159, 161 Hatred, 202, 219, 320 against women, 220 towards enemies of Motherland, 146 Housing, 141, 159, 259 assistance, 299 authorities, 93 difficulties with, 108 institutions as, 74 new code, 79, 85n4 poor, 97, 273 Howe, Leo, 35 Howell, Signe, 317 Humphrey, Caroline, 13, 95, 148 Identity, 33, 246, 248, 260, 316, 321 of an assemblage, 21 assigned, 166, 250 and category, 316 class, 35 group, 211, 234 hybrid, 39 the institution of, 131 and moral boundaries, 143 personal, 42 social, 17 stigmatized, 319 symbolic, 18 Ideology, 50, 52, 167, 278, 293, 296, 298 disappearance of, 260 dominant, 144 independence from , 258 official, 22, 145 and phantom state, 171 social, 21, 24 and social kinship, 15, 24, 26, 41, 156, 164, 171, 315 Soviet, 19, 250, 252, 257, 270, 313 of the strong family, 314 Imitative Habit of being, 190

Immoral family, 37 life style, 79, 98, 107, 129, 142, 143, 328 mothers, 108, 138, 272, 317, 321 parents, 291 Inadequate fulfilment of parental duties, 41, 97, 263 Individuality non-recognition of, 193 See also Psychological nonexistence Infrastructures, 26, 32, 60, 66, 277, 279, 288 changing, 7 child care, 53, 65 child welfare, 8, 63, 168, 171, 313, 322 and social kinship, 167 state, 29, 266, 321 Innovations, 277, 279, 280, 287 Intelligentsia, 141, 142, 172n4, 172n5 Interaction of children with adults, 25, 135, 194, 195, 209n4, 247 dialogic, 133 forced, 188 gene-environment, 323n1 state/family, 30, 154 of strata within culture, 313 See also Lotman, Yuri. Interplay between ideas of failure, 139 between kinship models, 24, 26, 315 Intervention, 14, 16, 28, 160, 259, 261, 293, 299, 314 Isolation geographic, 63 from the outside world, 201, 203, 207, 249 and space, 185, 187, 189, 190, 195 TSVINP, 10, 64, 66, 100, 170 unit, 71 Issoupova, Olga, 54, 157, 164 Izhdivenchestvo, 226

378

Index

James, Allison, 294, 297, 305 Jenks, Chris, 296, 305 Keane, Webb, 142 Kharchev, Anatoli, 50, 51, 157, 158, 161, 267 Kharkhordin, Oleg, 14, 17, 19, 21, 23, 31, 159, 166, 242, 264, 268, 270, 278, 318 Kinship models biological, 76, 82, 139, 171, 197, 248, 302, 315 and co-caring, 63 social, 315 social, through institutions and ideology, 15, 24, 26, 63, 156, 164–69, 171, 173n12, 208, 266, 309, 314, 315, 317, 319 See also Modes of relatedness Kollontai, Aleksandra, 21, 51, 323n2 Korbin, Jill, 308 Kotkin, Stephen, 17–19 Kukhterin, Sergei, 82, 157 Kul’turnost’, 140, 141, 172n4 La Fontaine, Jean, 38, 271, 272 Ladd-Taylor, Molly, 295, 303, 307–09, 311n7 Language, 14, 16, 17, 21, 103, 165, 166, 234, 319, 328 acquisition, 183, 195 common, 235 and common sense, 130 and heteroglossia, 33 and power, 26, 33 as a resource, 153 and voice, 105, 129 Lapidus, Gail, 51, 54 Ledeneva, Alena, 15, 39 Lee, Tina, 299, 300 Lenin, Vladimir, 17, 142, 172n3, 172n7 Lewis, Oscar, 35 Limitations, 32, 153, 190 Lotman, Yuri, 145, 166, 313

Macfarlane, Alan, 38, 272, 289n12, 318 Madison, Bernice, 24, 25, 48, 50, 53, 55, 157 Mainstream models of ‘good’ mother, 310 models of Soviet state and society, 19 school, 92 society, 34, 35, 37 tendency, 12 thinking regarding proper parenting, 208 thinking regarding separation of mother and child, 277 values, 131 Makarenko, Anton, 56 Marginal groups, 34, 36, 38, 177, 267, 268, 271, 320 Marginalisation, 308 Marginality, 34, 36, 37, 317 Marriage, 236, 249, 315 changing views on, 51–55 official, 104, 137, 139, 262 unregistered (civil or common law), 109, 137 Masculinity, 82 Maternal behaviour in rats, 323 capital, 292 deprivation, 208 duty, 54, 138 feelings, 112 health, 61 instinct, 138, 139, 269, 314, 318, 319 love, 136, 306, 317 mirroring, 195 quality, 138 Maternity Home, 63, 64, 66, 71, 74, 75, 91, 103, 110–12, 114, 129, 197, 214 Modell, Judith, 308, 309, 319 Modern state, 26, 38, 292, 294, 296, 298, 299, 310, 318, 319 Modes of relatedness, 16, 76, 165, 314–16

379

Index

Moral judgement, 105, 135, 143, 302, 313 qualities, 137 vacuum, 260 Moskovskiy, Kim, 142, 170, 179, 205, 211, 212, 226, 232 Motherhood, 52, 54, 308, 309, 313, 318, 319 anti-, 138, 139 competitive, 321 good, 307 ideals, 306 protection of, 56, 157 role of, 21 sacred duty of, 321 value of, 51 Mothering, 307 exclusive, 208, 322 good, 130 multiple, 208 test, 139 Mothers, 30 bad, 4, 5, 6, 12, 19, 68, 269, 289n9, 295, 307, 309, 310 good, 130, 270, 272, 289n9, 306–08, 310, 321 immutable biological nature of, 314 impoverished, 40 prejudice against, 22 single, 43n31, 52, 55, 82, 299, 309 unfit, 97, 149, 269, 271, 272, 275, 276 working, 20, 53, 55, 295, 311n7 Multiple moralities, 260 Mutual perceptions, 237 Navaro-Yashin, Yael, 17, 18, 20, 296, 320 Neblagopoluchnaya family, 4, 19, 22, 34, 36–38, 71, 79–81, 99, 107, 131, 132, 136, 152, 154, 197, 215, 244, 273, 275, 279, 313, 320 See also Problem family 252, 317 NGOs, 63, 258, 281, 286, 287 Norms, 13, 23, 28, 37, 41, 135, 145, 161, 183, 184, 261, 295

Obligations, 38, 40, 168, 183, 229, 230, 232, 268, 272, 273 Obshchestvennitsy, 140 Opeka, 1, 66, 285 Parallels, 61, 270, 318 between Calvinism and Leninism, 172n7 between family policies, 292 in family policy contradictions, 16 residential care and correctional facilities, 223 Parental rights, 128 and child’s interests, 298 delegated, 165 restoring, 101 and state violence, 271 and ‘symbolic death’, 41, 149, 169, 265, 276 termination of, 1, 3, 7, 19, 38, 54, 99, 300 See also Deprivation of parental rights Parenting skills, 79, 299, 305, 319 Paternalism socialist, 164 USA, 302 Patronat, 1, 280, 285, 322 Patronazhnaya sestra, 66 Performance, 320, 321 administrative, 39 consumers of, 276 of love, 136–38 parental, 300, 318 school, 207 Perlman, Janice, 35 Phantom state, 171 Pilkington, Hilary, 36, 42n19, 138, 260 Pine, Frances, 13, 157 Play child, 184, 186, 188, 191, 192–96, 199, 203 Possessions material, 140, 172n4 personal, 178, 194, 225, 274

380

Index

Poverty, 32, 34–37, 40, 43n29, 54, 61, 79, 169, 205, 273, 289n6, 310, 317 Power, 7, 8, 11, 17, 18, 19, 23, 26–33, 35, 39, 47, 63, 80, 84, 87, 148, 151, 154, 164, 167, 201, 258, 275–76, 279, 284, 296, 297, 302, 320 asymmetry, 33, 105, 129, 132, 314, 317 Pre-trial detention centre (SIZO), 218, 222, 223, 224, 226, 259 Prison, 50, 112, 134n9, 148, 149, 152, 160, 185, 188, 234, 239–42, 245–47, 249, 250, 259, 260, 289n15, 319, 334 children’s, 169, 170, 267, 316 Prisoners, 59, 61, 147, 177, 198, 211, 214, 215, 221, 222–25, 233 Prison-type facility, 72 Pronatalism, 52, 292, 293 Prout, Alan, 305, 306 Psychiatric hospitals, 208, 224, 241, 274, 331 Psychological aspects of family life, 79 clinics, 146 consequences, 37 disintegration, 4 expertise, centre for, 305 non-existence, 193, 248 PMPC Committee, 11, 101, 205 support, 82 well-being, 138 Public and private boundaries, 15, 159, 252 hybrids, 14, 157, 178 shifting domains of, 13, 39, 257 Public assistance, 49 conduct, 140 and family upbringing, 23, 158, 162, 267 image of childhood, 50 institutions, 48, 65, 314 responsibility for children, 294, 308 upbringing, 56 welfare system, 265, 310

Qvortrup, Jens, 260, 297, 299, 305, 311n4 Ragone, Helena, 307 Rake’s progress, 215, 247, 331 Reformism, 315, 319 Regime, 14, 16, 139, 140, 142, 172n4, 292, 293, 296, 313 Regimen, 41, 181, 182, 185, 190, 194, 201, 207, 223, 267 Requirements and common sense, 130 for family ‘home’ conditions, 27 institutional, 182, 183, 196, 205, 223, 229, 249 normative, 97 regimental, 41 social services, 300 state’s, 30, 83, 84, 87, 88, 99, 135, 268, 282 Residential care institutions, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 41, 41n2, 52, 55, 66, 67, 71, 171, 173n11, 178, 212–16, 223, 226, 227, 230, 232, 233, 236, 241, 244, 249, 250–52, 260, 266, 272, 277–79, 287, 291, 294, 299, 322 alternatives to, 281 Baby Homes, 2, 10, 11, 12, 22, 24, 42n26, 62, 64, 66, 67, 70, 71, 73–77, 81–84, 85n7, 88, 89, 91, 92, 94–96, 99, 103, 105–10, 112–15, 117–20, 125, 127–29, 132, 133n1, 134n4, 134n7, 137, 142, 149, 151, 152, 177–83, 185, 186, 188–91, 194, 196–99, 201, 202, 204, 209n2, 214, 229, 241, 258, 274, 282, 327–29 Children’s Homes, 2, 3, 24, 50, 53, 54, 67, 70, 71, 81, 142, 169, 170, 177, 183, 205, 211, 213, 218, 223, 234, 245, 249, 251, 277, 316, 326, 333 costs, 180, 311n5 functions of, 73 Internats, 2, 10, 11, 24, 64, 66, 70, 73, 77, 82, 92, 101, 149, 152, 163, 178, 194, 198, 205, 214, 217, 248–53 381

Index

Resilience, 22, 229, 242 Resistance, 15, 22, 26, 29–31, 50, 131, 144, 151, 159, 202, 230, 282, 284, 301, 317, 320 Resources, 26, 30, 31, 32, 35, 39, 59, 62, 63, 69, 78, 84, 96, 128, 138, 142, 148, 193, 249, 265, 266, 268, 282, 300, 301, 308, 317, 318, 320 Responsibility, 4, 5, 12, 13, 151, 231, 251, 276, 308, 310, 318 collective, 157, 294 criminal, 224 delegated, 221 dispersed, 230 of state employees, 167 parental, 54, 55, 57, 127, 132, 164, 266, 283, 300, 302 personal, 139, 213, 279, 314 shared, 162, 168, 295 state’s, 228, 231, 252, 294 Rimashevskaya, Natalia, 129, 135, 160, 268 Risk, 29, 30, 62, 65, 79, 213, 224, 305, 306, 309 Rodoman, Boris, 166, 167 Rutter, Michael, 208 Rybinskiy, Evgeniy, 2, 3, 52, 57, 135, 136, 160, 251, 260, 261, 285 Scapegoats, 38, 220, 273, 276, 278, 308, 310, 318, 319, 321 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 306, 308, 310 Schneider, David, 165 Scott, James, 31, 172n3 Self-perpetuation, 32, 276 Semi-public institutions, 55 nature of the family, 168, 294, 314 and public/private boundaries, 15 Sharma, Aradhana, See Gupta, Akhil Shlapentokh, Vladimir, 15, 141, 273 Show trials, 261, 273–76 Similarities, 274, 292 in child welfare practices, 7, 8, 41, 291, 304, 310 and institutional life, 213, 252, 331

in post-Soviet and Soviet practices, 263 between residential care, prisons and army, 222 in Russian Church and Soviet civil practices, 264 and social stratification, 223 and Soviet ‘middle class’, 141 See also Parallels Social orphanhood 1, 3, 6, 7, 322 Social orphans, 6, 7, 10, 12, 15, 18, 27, 38, 71, 155, 177, 179, 213, 218, 231, 232, 239, 240, 251, 252, 273, 276, 317 definition, 1 number of, 2, 5 Social pedagogue, 66, 67, 75, 92, 99, 100, 150, 152, 170, 180, 188, 213, 231, 235, 258, 266, 282, 283 Social services, 18, 168, 274, 299, 300, 301, 304, 306–08, 321, 322 Social stratification, 35, 37, 141, 159, 221–23, 259 Socialism, 47, 52, 140, 158, 265, 296, 314, 323n2 Soznatel’nost’, 25, 265, 268 Special school for juvenile delinquents, 218, 224 Ssorin-Chaikov, Nikolai, 26, 33 Stack, Carol, 35, 36 Stalinism, 17, 140, 146, 273 State as an abstract, 231–33, 317 as a co-parent, 164, 165, 168, 171, 317 as composite actor, 153 cult of, 167 as real, 321 reified, 16–18 as a relational category, 18, 320, 321 ‘state is them’, 16 ‘state is us’, 16, 17 as super-parent, 157, 164 support and control, 298 Stealing, 170, 178, 224–26, 236, 243, 248, 274 382

Index

Stigma (kleimo), 36, 239, 316, 319 Stimulation, 190, 192, 195, 196 Strathern, Marilyn, 20, 136, 173n12, 189n9, 310, 319, 320 Sufficiency material, 78, 136-38, 172n8 of ‘home’ conditions, 128 self-, 261 Taussig, Michael, 18, 320 Training, 24, 39, 66, 67, 85n2, 204, 205, 214, 226, 279, 280, 283, 286, 299 Transparency, 130, 159, 205, 259 Trotsky, Leon, 24, 51 Uklonenie ot vospitaniya, 97, See also Inadequate fulfilment of parental duties Umansky, Lauri, See Ladd-Taylor, Molly Unemployment, 5, 7, 20, 35-37, 79, 97, 100, 116, 236, 261, 273, 303, 317 Uspenskiy, Boris, 145 Values community, 272, 276 middle-class, 35, 139, 142, 307 moral, 4, 27, 57, 143, 156, 172n6, 241, 242, 249, 250, 262, 272, 287, 309

Protestant, 139, 141, 172n7 universal human, 260, 288n2 Verdery, Katherine, 15, 158, 164, 169, 270 Violence, 35, 161, 218, 246 children’s, 202 domestic, 160, 261, 268, 299 by institutional staff, 220 peer, 201, 202, 207, 217, 221 state, 271 structural, 309 symbolic, 23, 307 Visibility, 4, 148, 154, 155, 182, 261, 307 Vitebsky, Piers, 102n2, 289n9 Vospitanie, 22, 23, 56, 100, 185, 217, 260 Waiton, Stuart, 273, 303 Warner, Michael, 15, 16 Weber, Max, 26, 30, 32, 38–40 Winddance Twine, France, See Ragone, Helena Winnicott, Donald, 195 Withdrawal of food, 218 of obligations, 272, 310 state, 31, 61, 63, 260, 266, 284 Working with the family the concept of, 41, 56, 66, 100, 263, 265, 282

383