Involuntary Parenthood

“You know what my dream is?” Father Pavel was speaking to several dozen middle-aged men and women, all surrounded by children, some of whom were their own, some foster children. We were gathered in a small cafeteria attached to the church to celebrate Easter Week. The surroundings were monastically austere: wooden benches, simple fare on the table – juice and pies made by those in attendance.

“That we will gather together again tomorrow!” a cheerful boy calls out jokingly. Everyone laughs warmly, but Father Pavel smiles patiently and gives the correct answer.

“That you would all grow up, get married, have children and live in Vozdvizhenye!”

“But there’s nowhere to live!” someone calls out. Father Pavel continues to smile humbly.

“Would you like to live in our village?”

“Yes! We would!” come the children’s somewhat reluctant, reserved and discordant cries.

“If they don’t close the school!” the cheerful boy calls out.

“Well, we need to pray that the school is not closed!” Father Pavel adds. “God’s gifts come through prayer. So, let’s thank God. Christ is Risen!”

“Indeed, He is risen!” This time the children respond warmly.

“Christ is risen!”

“Indeed, He is risen!”

Clearly the children – as if playing at choir – like the chanting best of all.

Everyone dives into the pies.

“Before the revolution we had 24 active churches in our district,” Father Pavel explains while chewing on a tasty meat pie.

“And now?” I ask, my mouth full.

“Now there is just one. Under the tsar, some five thousand gathered here. On the major holidays, everyone stood in the street; they couldn’t fit into the church.”

Father Pavel is nostalgically recalling the pre-revolutionary period – if, of course, such a young fellow can be said to “recall” something so long past. In order to return to that happy, fairytale time, this priest, together with a few well-connected politicos “from the district administration,” came up with a rather unusual plan: local families would become foster families for orphans from the district center and from nearby cities such as Kineshma and Ivanovo.

For one thing, it lessened the problem of unemployment. The government pays R4000 per month for each foster child, plus R2500 by way of “salary” to the parent. Not bad money by village standards, especially since there is almost no other work in Vozdvizhenye. The Zavolzhsky district is poor even by the standards of Ivanovo region: 90 percent of the district’s budget is subsidies to families and the unemployed. Long ago, the district’s kolkhoz imploded and industry in nearby cities ground to a halt. Villagers look for work in Ivanovo, Moscow and St. Petersburg. Buses leave Kineshma bus station hourly for Moscow.

The foster plan kicked into motion in Vozdvizhenye when a rumor spread that the local school was about to be closed. According to Russian law, village schools are disbanded when classes have less than 11 students. Several schools in Zavolzhsky and neighboring districts have already been closed, so the threat was real.

The Vozdvizhenye school had long since fallen below the norm. The district administration had already informed teachers that they should prepare to be transferred to other villages, and parents of students were advised that their children would ride buses to schools in neighboring villages.

“For a village, closing a school is an utter tragedy,” said Boris Sanin, first deputy of Zavolzhsky district. “School is a place of work for village residents. And it is a powerful force influencing the atmosphere in the village: recall that the teacher has always been one of the most respected people in any village – the bearer of intellectual significance and culture. If there is no school in Vozdvizhenye, there will be no teachers. And then there will simply not be any opportunity for a parent to bump into the teacher on the street and ask, ‘So, how’s my little devil doing?’”

Correcting the demography of the village by bringing in foster children was the brainchild of Father Pavel. In Vozdvizhenye there are now eight foster families and the school’s rolls now include 66 students, 22 of them foster children. The threat of closure has receded.

According to Sanin, the district administration has developed a plan for construction of a family village on the outskirts of Vozdvizhenye, with ten “estates” for multi-child families. At state expense, of course.

“We would like to repopulate Vozdvizhenye. We planned for there to be ten such families in Vozdvizhenye, with eight or nine foster children in each family,” Sanin said. “And these would all be normal families, not like they show on television, with gays harming the children. But how can you do this, if the people themselves want their children to leave the village in search of better lives?”

Then the financial crisis scotched the district’s best-laid plans, and the state has had to tighten its belt. Sanin proposes that I go to the regional center, Ivanovo, to meet with top bureaucrats there. In Sanin’s words, it would be worth reminding them about this project, because up to this point just one home has been built, for the Karelov family.

I didn’t travel to Ivanovo, but I did meet with the head of the Zavolzhsky district, Anatoly Molodov. And I asked him the question that was on the tip of my tongue:

“Aren’t you afraid that these foster parents will include some less desirables for whom this becomes some sort of business? After all, R6500 is an average salary for a job in the countryside, and there just aren’t rural jobs.”

“Of course, for some there might be the temptation to use children to earn money. You cannot give money to a family like that – they’ll drink it all up,” Molodov said. He looks very much like Anatoly Chubais – red, straight-combed hair, a long face. “But that can’t happen in Vozdvizhenye. Everything is out in the open, we well know who might be trying to make something of themselves. And we don’t trust children to those who have been in trouble.”

I pretended to believe him.

A few days after I left the region, Anatoly Molodov was arrested on suspicion of taking bribes. According to investigators, he attempted to extort R500,000 from a businessman in order to create an illegal land deed. Along with some co-conspirators, Molodov also allegedly sought to skim another million from other businessmen.

Rural school “optimization” brought the Sashnev family to Vozdvizhenye. Anatoly Anatolevich and Tatyana Yuryevna were working as teachers in a neighboring district. When their school was closed, bureaucrats in Zavolzhsky district invited them to move to Vozdvizhenye. Father Pavel even gave them a home – the “office” of the former kolkhoz.

The conditions for their move were simple: the Sashnevs had to create a family group home and add 10 foster children to the three children of their own. This would have solved the Sashnevs’ work issues: if the 10 foster children were added, and all the children went to school, a position in the Vozdvizhenye school would have been created for Anatoly. But the Sashnevs only fulfilled half of their quota, bringing five foster children into their family.

So now Anatoly works as a militia officer, and Tatyana stays home with the children. We tour their huge, spacious home adorned with an abundance of icons, and suddenly Tatyana Yuryevna starts to complain about Father Pavel.

“He promised us a lot. A banya, that the children would learn horseback riding, and a dock on the Volga. It turns out that we have to do all that ourselves. Instead of a finished banya, they brought us logs: ‘Do the rest yourselves.’ Then they brought boards: ‘Make the dock yourselves.’ And they gave us just one horse.”

The Sashnevs also don’t like that Father Pavel actively involves the children in church life.

“No, I am not against children, say, singing in the chancel choir,” Tatyana says. “But Father Pavel organized a trip to Sergiyev Posad. There, the children had to stand for three hours before the altar. Why is that? That’s really difficult!”

According to Tatyana, Father Pavel even threatened to kick them out of their house if they didn’t accept more children.

“He says, ‘If you don’t fulfill the task which I have given you, then I’ll find another family!’” she says.

The head of the family, officer Anatoly Sashnev, is also not very cheerful. It even seems at times as if he is not very happy to have gotten involved in this child-rearing adventure.

“The state has no time for us. There is no defined program for working with foster families. There is no work in the village, and not a single sports club in the school.

“You’ve come here for nothing,” he finally says. “Your readers won’t understand any of this, what it is to take care of eight children. Even you won’t understand anything. Do you have children?”

“No.”

Sashnev looks at me with big eyes and is silent. Everything is clear: I am a useless parasite, a growth, a child of the modern world. And he is a hero-father, a valued member of society, a bearer of spirituality and the Russian family tradition, someone that we all are indebted to. Actually, that’s probably about right.

“Well, what now…?” Anatoly says.

“God bless all those who enter this house!” is written over the entrance to the bright, modest izba where Father Pavel lives. He has four children. All his own.

I have come to talk with him about the Sashnev family’s criticisms. To my surprise, Father Pavel is glad to talk about it.

“The whole problem is arrogance. They look at everything with their damaged view: this one owes us, this other owes us,” the priest sighs. “It turns out they were not ready to live this life, to answer such a calling. And I tried to warn them that it would be difficult. I wrote out a list of potential temptations that lie in wait for a person on a Christian path. And really there was nothing extremely difficult they needed to do: confess, take communion. But even this was too difficult for them.”

We stroll around his beautiful, recently reconstructed church. The huge, stone eighteenth century building looks somehow unnatural against the background of the small, dying little village.

“It had been my thought that the Sashnevs would have 10 children living with them. But that turned out to be too difficult. ‘No, we cannot take ten. We’ll take six.’ Lord, it was like they were haggling. And, as for the banya, well, yes, we did just provide the logs. So take your vacation and build it! Two years the logs have been lying there. I can’t do everything for them, they have to do it themselves!

“It’s difficult, I don’t blame them. I treat them like sick, irrational children,” the priest sighs. He is clearly pessimistic. “All of our travails have been in vain. We’ve given birth to parasites.”

If you come to Vozdvizhenye for a short visit, you are bowled over by its simple, pastoral beauty. The streets of Vozdvizhenye are not paved, yet the homes are well-built; there are no broken down shacks. But if you stay here a bit longer, you gather very different impressions.

My photographer and I enter the long-suffering school and are confronted by two women. Apparently the fact that we are not from here is obvious from a mile away.

“Oh, take us with you back to Moscow,” they cry. It is a joke, of course. If they had wanted to, they would have left long ago.

The two-story school is small and tidy. The first and second grade study together in one room; the teacher assigns a task to one grade, and while they work at that, she checks the progress of the other grade. The fifth-sixth and seventh-eighth grade classes work in the same manner. The rest are all lumped together.

On the wall of the decently outfitted computer office is a list of joking rules in verse:

Better be a good boy

Electricity is not a toy

Don’t fiddle with cords and sockets

We’re still not sure heaven exists.

Father Pavel would not approve.

Albina Rumyantseva is an educator working at the internat* attached to the school. “Of course it’s sad about the children. Take our little Lenochka. She is smart, very nice. Yet no one needs her.  Her grandmother applied for guardianship, but wants nothing to do with Lenochka; she just receives her four thousand [support from the state] and drinks it all up. So I ask her, ‘Lenochka, do you want to go to a sensible family?’ She doesn’t reply.”

Albina unexpectedly admits, “Father Pavel has even pestered me to take some children… But where am I going to put them?”

Her daughter has long since lived in Moscow, working as a hotel manager. Albina brags for a long time about her success. She is proud her daughter got away.

“I do not long for the past… I fear losing the present,” a thin, pop-songy voice floats out of the tape recorder. A couple of nice looking kids – Sergei and Vika – turn slowly in a waltz. This is a little concert for us, the guests. Twelve-year-old Sergei actually has many talents: he dances, sings, plays the accordion and, to top it off, finishes with a recitation of his own poem on Easter.

“Do they miss their real parents?” I ask their foster mother, Galina Krasnov.

“No, they almost don’t remember them. After all, they didn’t see anything good back then,” she answers. “They really love us, and only call us mama and papa.”

As if to confirm Galina Vladimirovna’s words, the kids surround her and give her a big hug.

“Ilyushenka wants to be a driver, and for some reason it has to be a Jeep. ‘Mama, I will bring you bread forever,’ he promises me,” Krasnova laughs. “And Seryozhka wants to be a banker.” In fact, dressed up in his little suit for the concert, Sergei did resemble a miniature banker. “‘Then I’ll bring you money,’ he says.”

Previously, Galina Vladimirovna worked as the school’s deputy director. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the majority of foster parents in Vozdvizhenye are somehow or other connected with education. Of course there is the fact that the danger of the Vozdvizhenye school’s disbanding was understood by the staff there better than anyone.

“I’ve spent my whole life with kids, I’m used to it,” Galina explains. “Even before, I used to bring other people’s kids home after school, so that they could be fed, or have some time to play.”

After Galina Krasnova and her husband Alexander took in five foster children, they were able to retire. Now the family group home is their workplace.

“There were nights, there were days, we were left alone…” the children are performing one more song in our honor. “I suffered, waited, burned with love. But now I have finally given birth again…”

Another foster parent, Lyubov Borisovna Sorokina, a large, friendly woman, has worked her entire life as a cook in the school. It was her tasty pies that we ate in the church. Her husband, Sergei Vadimovich, also works in the school, doing odd jobs. Lyubov, by the way, is now retired. How else could she handle her three children, four foster kids and one grandchild?

By taking in children, foster families are not so much compensating for being out of work, tapping their surplus of energy and labor ability, as they are tapping their surplus of human warmth and the parenting instinct. These people have truly grown accustomed to living for others, and not for themselves. And, in the end, how is one going to live out one’s retirement years in the country? It’s not like they are going to travel around Europe.

“We always wanted to have lots of children,” Lyubov says. “Ours are already grown now, and at our age we’re too old to have more. The children have all gone their separate ways, and the house is quiet. We’re just not used to this. My mother-in-law died, then my grandfather. So we decided to take in strangers.”

The Sorokin family took in one boy and three girls. In general, Lyubov says, there is a “crisis” with girls – everyone wants them.

“Our Vika is half Vietnamese, but that doesn’t bother us a bit,” she shows us a photograph of a beautiful girl with almond eyes – the girl herself is away at camp, doing social work. “Father Pavel told us, ‘There’s a girl in an orphanage, very nice, but not Russian. Will you take her?’ But what’s it to us, if she’s Russian or not?”

Vika’s father, an illegal immigrant, worked at a market in Kineshma, where he met Vika’s mom. Then the Vietnamese mother was deported from Russia for violating migration rules. She was apparently not interested in Vika’s fate, but the father was: he writes from Vietnam, promising Vika he will come and get her. Therefore, Vika has almost no memory of her mother, yet loves her father from afar.

Her foster sister Yulia remembers her mother, but has only bad things to say about her.

“When they had just brought Yulia to us, she would wake up in the middle of the night and ask, ‘Did momma go far away? Won’t she find us?’ She feared that her mother would come,” Lyubov recalls. “And so I asked her, ‘Won’t your mother cry without you around?’ ‘No, she won’t. She’s a big shot now, and big shots don’t cry.’”

At the Sorokins’ home, Yulia was surprised by the curtains on the windows and the linens on the beds – they didn’t have such things at her orphanage, and the whole family slept together on one divan. Still, the Sorokins live modestly. They have a small house – one room for the girls and two for the boys. It is pleasant, cosy, but tight. Yet there is no shame in being close, isn’t that what they say? Perhaps the state will one day give the Sorokins a bigger place; they certainly dream of that.

Meanwhile, Yulia comes out and delivers a poem with great expression. Her foster father Sergei wrote it:

My region, my village

Fields, forest and Volga

Beneath the mountains

A school, where children learn,

A church, where the bells are rung –

My village has all it needs!

Outside Vozdvizhenye, in the village of Dolmatovsky, there lives another foster family, the Karelovs. This is an “exemplary” group home that the district is rather proud of. Over the last 15 years, eleven foster children have passed through here. The Karelovs and their brood live in their hamlet, next to a beautiful forest, a pond with carp, and a new two-story home courtesy of the governor.

The head of the family, Nikolai Borisovich Karelov, has a very interesting biography. Prior to perestroika, he was a prominent Komsomol official in the regional capital. He rose to the position of second secretary of the regional Komsomol, worked as the chairman of the labor union and the deputy director of a huge clothing concern that encompassed seven enterprises and six thousand workers. In 1992, the clothing industry, which Ivanovo region was famous for, came to a halt. Karelov decided to take up farming and moved from the “capital” of Ivanovo to Zavolzhsky district.

“Back then, farming was booming. Everyone thought that private farmers would replace kolkhozes,” Karelov recalls. “There were more than a hundred private farmers in the district. Just two have survived.”

Karelov is not one of those two.

“We raised cows, bulls, started planting potatoes. Then we found that we couldn’t haul them away profitably – it was too far to Ivanovo and they wouldn’t pay enough for them.”

Raising potatoes did not turn out so well, yet raising children did, thanks to Nikolai Borisovich’s training as a “specialist in communist education.”

“The kids arrive from orphanages angry, wolf-like. But the proximity to nature, to animals, works wonders. You saw yourself how tenderly they stroke the calfs!” Karelov says with delight. “Of course children need to be raised in the country. In the city you can barely keep an eye on them!”

The Karelovs became foster parents quite by accident. Once, while dressed as Father Frost, Nikolai went to the neighboring village to congratulate kids for New Year’s – a fruit of his labor union training. By the side of the road he encountered two girls – seven and eight years old – carrying a bucket of well water, delirious from hunger. They were the orphaned daughters of a young drunkard woman from his village, Maria.

This Maria was constantly seen around the village in a drunken state. She even once asked Karelov for a loan, offering her children as collateral.

“What the hell are you doing, Masha?” I said, trying to embarrass her, Karelov recalls. “She was actually quite a beauty. But she had lost her job; the sewing line had closed down. She couldn’t cope and went to the dogs.”

The former seamstress stole money from her retired mother’s pocketbook, replacing the bills with paper. The blind old woman didn’t notice the difference and gave the “bills” to her grandchildren to buy bread. They took the bits of paper to the store, not knowing any better…

Maria soon died and Karelov took the girls in. Things grew from there.
A year later, the district administration asked him to take in another boy, 10-year-old Artur. His biography was even more awful. His mother killed her drinking buddy and tossed the body into a well. Neither of Artur’s older sisters would take him in.

Today the Karelov family has 11 foster children. The oldest, Artur, has long since grown. The Karelovs are exceedingly proud of him, because he got into the Moscow Aviation Institute without bribes or connections. He earns money from his hobby: painting and selling nice landscapes. His paintings – which mainly depict his native region – adorn all the walls of the Karelov’s large house.

“I’m not complaining, but there is a bit of injustice in the fact that the support payments for foster children stop when they are 18. Look, Artur has just arrived on a visit, and soon he will be heading back to Moscow – and how can I not give him a couple thousand rubles?” Karelov says. He is a big, strong muzhik, a true farmer, salt of the earth.

He is well matched by his spouse, Tatyana Ivanovna.

“Is the house yours or the church’s?” I ask.

“Is there really any difference?” She replies, suddenly clasping her hands to her chest. “Oy, your shoes are wet! How can you go around like that? Well, don’t worry, we’ll dry them out.”

I just want to cry, to fall into her arms and be adopted by her.  RL

* Internat: a word usually used for a school for children with special needs, i.e. orphans, kids with behavior or developmental issues.