The Magnitsky Act, passed recently by the United States Senate, may have been of little interest to Americans, but its impact and aftermath in Russia has been tempestuous.
The act, put very briefly, bars Russians who are implicated in human-rights abuses from entering the United States, and freezes their American bank accounts. Its adoption was accompanied by furious and threatening statements from Russian officials. This week, in a retaliatory move, the Duma, Russia’s lower house, voted almost unanimously for further constraints on non-government organizations that have even the faintest connection to America. Another amendment in the same package introduced a flat ban on the adoption of Russian children by parents in the United States.
This piece of legislation, informally referred to as “anti-Magnitsky bill,” was promptly branded by critics as a “scoundrels’ law” (zakon podletsov remained the most popular hashtag on Russian Twitter earlier this week). It has divided Russian society in a manner unheard of in the past decade. Novaya Gazeta, a non-government newspaper, called for people to sign a petition against the amendment; in just a few days, over a hundred thousand people had signed. The outrage went far beyond the usual suspects—liberals and what can be vaguely described as the community of protesters. Some of the highest-ranking officials, such as the foreign minister and the speaker of the upper house, expressed their disagreement with, or at least doubts about, the ban on adoptions. Even the Russian Orthodox Church is split: Archpriest Dmitry Smirnov, in charge of the Church’s relations with the armed forces, expressed ardent support for the ban, while Bishop Panteleimon, in charge of the church’s charities, suggested that decisions having to do with children had been guided by “political opportunism.”
Some officials appeared to be split even within themselves. On Tuesday, the chairman of the President’s Council for Human Rights said that it was “unethical” to link a response to Magnitsky act to “sick Russian children.” On Thursday, he said that “a full ban on foreign adoption is necessary” and that many of his fellow council members believed that international adoption is a “disgrace for Russia.”
The protests were so powerful that many observers thought President Putin would not support the Duma’s initiative—or at least that he would propose a postponement. He had a good opportunity: his annual presidential press conference was scheduled for Thursday. But those who expected magnanimity were proved to be fully wrong: Putin confirmed his support for the measure, calling it “tough but fair.” [Update: Putin signed the bill on December 28th]
In fact, Putin’s response was hardly surprising. He often says that nobody has the right to teach Russia what’s right and what’s wrong; for him, the Magnitsky Act was an insult. During his press conference, which lasted four and a half hours—Putin holds such events only once a year, but he likes them long and big; more than a thousand journalists were present—he brought up the United States many times, even when the question did not suggest it. In an exasperated tone, he talked about America’s own human-rights problems, the brutality of the American police, even the high number of people who took part in early voting (he suggested that the process had been used to manipulate the results.) He sounded personally hurt. “If we are slapped, we need to respond. Otherwise we will be slapped all the time.”
What was surprising was the atmosphere of the press conference. In the past, such press conferences were Putin’s public-relations galas: they were mostly staged so Putin wouldn’t face unfriendly questions. This time, at least a dozen of the questions were anything but servile. What’s more, there were followups. Questions about the ban on American adoption were asked eight times—amazing, by Russian standards. “It was a rebellion. Asking the same question even two times … is considered to be a crude violation of the protocol and the rules of decency,” wrote Aleksandr Minkin, a veteran Russian reporter.
Orphanages may be seen as an obsolete institution in the Western world. Practices such as adoption or foster families are universally regarded as better for the development and socialization of children who cannot be raised by their own parents. But Russia still has many orphanages, and the number of children kept in such institutions is estimated to be a hundred thousand. Adoptions were unpopular in the U.S.S.R., where the state brutally interfered in people’s private lives and proclaimed that orphans should be raised by the state.
In the freer environment of the post-Communist Russia, the interest in inter-family adoption has grown, but it is still not enough. Foreign adoptions are common, especially of children with serious disabilities, who have little chance of being adopted by Russian families. Children with mental or physical problems confined to government institutions are generally doomed to a bleak existence and, not infrequently, early death.
In the past two decades, Americans have adopted about sixty thousand Russian children, many of them with grave medical problems. This statistic may be humiliating for Russia, and indeed it generates lot of patriotic demagoguery, but the number of unwanted orphans is hardly a matter of pride either. It may explain the defensive reaction that in Russia is not infrequently associated with “patriotism”: if Russians look less kind and generous toward orphans than their counterparts in America do, let’s find fault with Americans and punish them. Proponents of the ban on adoption ascribe ulterior motives to American parents: they adopt Russian kids not because they are humane, but because the American government lavishly compensates them; they want to steal our high-quality “genetic pool”; Americans mistreat or kill their adopted children. The few instances (nineteen over the past two decades) when Russian orphans died as a result of abuse by their American adoptive families invariably generate an outburst of noble fury.
Lawmaker Yekaterina Lakhova, one of the initiators of the adoption ban, was asked by a reporter if she thought Russian orphans would be worse off in America than in Russia. Her answer: “This is not the point. You’re asking a wrong question…. Normally economically developed countries don’t give up their children, not a single of them. I am a Russian patriot.”
“We shouldn’t wait until dozens of Russian children will be murdered,” Archpriest Smirnov said. “Americans have been raised to treat Russians this way by propaganda.” Bishop Panteleimon, in contrast, wouldn’t look outside for the root of the problem: “Over the twenty years of religious freedom we failed to teach our people the values of family, we failed to explain to them that to reject their own children is a sin.”
What makes the outrage against the amendment especially intense is the essentially moral nature of the adoption issue. The same, moral drive was at the heart of the anti-Putin protest of the past year. The protesting crowds resented the government’s falsity—its lies, corruption, unlawfulness, and its disrespect for the people. Volunteer assistance to the weak and the needy, especially sick children, has become fairly widespread among that same constituency that in the course of the past year repeatedly took to the Moscow streets chanting “Russia Without Putin.”
A reporter for Argumenty i Fakty, a high-circulation weekly, was among the first to ask about the ban at the press conference: “I am an adoptive father,” he said, “and regardless of the foreign-policy context, I find the amendments passed by the Duma out-of-limit, excessive and, excuse me, cannibalistic.”
“Do you enjoy being humiliated?” Putin responded. “Are you a sadomasochist?”
Photograph by Andrey Smirnov/AFP/Getty.