Twenty years ago, the economic and social void that followed the end of the Soviet Union and Communism attracted hundreds of multinational companies. With them, came their expatriates. Some rotated through in two or three year stints, Russia just another global stop on their corporate climb. Another breed of foreigners, however, have stayed put, crafting rich and often unexpected lives in Russia. None of them ever anticipated staying upwards of 20 years. These five have, and their stories reveal as much about them as they do about the attractive mystery that Russia exudes.
Writer, linguist, translator, and columnist Mickey Berdy’s mother told her once: “You were just born Russian. I don’t know how it happened, but it did.”
Berdy’s grandparents immigrated to the United States from different outposts of the Russian Empire in 1914: Ukraine and the Trans-Carpathian region. Berdy grew up listening to her parents and Slavic neighbors speaking to one another in a mix of “kitchen Czech, kitchen Ukrainian and kitchen Polish.” She traces her lifelong fascination with Russia back to trying to crack the code of the languages she grew up listening to.
Graduating from Amherst College in 1978 with a degree in Russian literature, Berdy first visited Russia in 1975 as a tourist and was hooked. “It was so mysterious, and I just wanted to know more about how people lived and how the whole thing worked.” After graduation, she signed up for a stint at the prestigious Pushkin Institute to improve her language skills. Eager to remain, she then secured a job at a state publishing house as a translator, plunging into the realities of the Soviet planned economy and workplace.
“We had daily work quotas,” she recalled with a smile, “I was supposed to do twenty-five pages a day.1 So, of course, anxious to do a good job, I did the American thing: finishing up before 1 p.m. This threw the entire production line off schedule!” Berdy soon learned to adapt: taking a number of mid-morning coffee breaks and spending her lunch hour trawling the shops for food staples along with her Russian colleagues.
In the early 1980s, foreigners were still highly suspect and the circle of friends Berdy cultivated were writers, musicians, and artists who were less concerned about compromising themselves through association with foreigners. In 1981, Berdy married bass player Yuri Ivanov in what she called, “a very romantic but not very well-thought-out move.”
Berdy realized that she was not fully prepared to spend her entire life dealing with the challenges of Soviet existence, with its food shortages and the inability to change her housing situation. She and her Russian husband traveled back to the United States in 1982 and tried to make a go of life in Brooklyn, but Ivanov, like many Russian transplants to the West, was unhappy. “He couldn’t really figure out his place in American culture,” Berdy said, “He didn’t really want to emigrate at all – and certainly not for the toilet paper,” she said, referring to the wave of “economic immigrants” from that period seeking better living conditions.
The couple separated amicably, and later divorced. Berdy went to work for IREX and later the Carnegie Corporation. In the late 1980s, when Gorbachev implemented glasnost and perestroika, Berdy found returning to the USSR both profitable and far less logistically challenging than it had been in the Soviet past. She began to split her time between Russia and Brooklyn, parlaying her language skills and knowledge of Russia into a rewarding career in documentary film production.
“One of the benefits of working in Russia then was that, if you were good at what you were doing, the sky was the limit. I started out in documentary film as a translator, then field producer, and finally producer.”
Berdy found herself much in demand in the 1990s as Russian television companies started to reinvent themselves. She worked as a consultant at Internews, an American NGO that supported the development of local TV stations, which then were mainly reading the news stiffly and running a few pirated videos. Berdy helped journalists learn to craft a news story, integrate different kinds of material, and explore new camera shots (instead of the traditional Soviet presentation of an anchor dominating the camera frame throughout the news segment).
In 1996, Berdy began work with the Center for Communication Programs at John’s Hopkins to develop national mass media campaign on issues such as family planning, HIV/AIDS awareness and other health issues. Traveling throughout Russia’s regions, Berdy worked with Ministry of Health officials, local doctors, hospital administrators and regional governors to produce PSAs and small scale behavioral change communication on issues such as neo-natal care, breast feeding, contraception alternatives to abortion, and mother and baby care.
“I think our programs were very successful because the doctors we worked with basically knew their stuff really well. The problem was that they were just completely unused to persuading people to behavioral change,” she said. Access to the political elite was much easier in the 1990s than it is today, and Berdy noted that, “in the 1990s everyone still liked each other. Essentially, we were doing the Ministry of Health’s job for them and they were very welcoming.”
In the decade that followed, Berdy found government officials less welcoming. As foreign NGOs and aid programs came under increasing fire, Berdy was forced to rethink her career. She recalls being hurt, angry, and a little scared when she saw a news program about foreign aid programs focusing on HIV and Family, which the media alleged were part of a CIA-funded conspiracy. Sophisticated camera shots included brochures she had translated and edited, and which bore the stamp of the Ministry of Health.
Berdy returned to translation and writing, trading in a wardrobe of business suits for work-at-home casual T-shirts and sweats. In 2002, she put in a successful bid to take over the popular “The Word’s Worth,” column about Russian language in the English-language Moscow Times, which she still writes today. “When I took it over, it was more of a classic expat newspaper column on the local language,” she said. Berdy injected the column with her own pithy humor, creating a likeable and approachable persona whose ongoing struggles to puzzle out the nuances of the Russian language have endeared her to thousands of readers. Berdy draws ideas for her columns from current events, cultural happenings, or “just stuff I keep in the hopper.” Memorable columns have explored everything from colorful prison slang to the declension of “Barack Obama.” Last year, Glas published over 250 of her columns into a book, The Words Worth.
These days, Berdy is still cracking the code, working from her book-lined study. Recently, she adopted a dog, Reilly, from the local animal shelter, who acts as a much-needed counterweight to “my almost endless capacity for reading and putzing. Other people would go nuts. I don’t.”
Berdy said she is currently percolating a number of possible writing projects, feeling that she is ready to write something, “bigger and more substantial,” or take on a major translation project. “Something humorous, like Zoshchenko,” she mused, explaining that her own wry humor would play well to interpreting the Soviet writer’s. She finds life in Moscow increasingly challenging, particularly driving, which she says she confines to her own neighborhood or weekends. She confessed that she increasingly thinks about a partial move back to the States. “I’m not sure if it’s a five year plan, or a twenty year plan, but I think I want to establish a community in the U.S. … I don’t think I want to be a very old person here in Russia. I think it’s very hard.”
“I will never live the Starlite Diner down,” Bernie Sucher confessed in his well-appointed offices at Investment Bank ATON Group, where he serves as a part-time Member of the Board of Directors, “Whatever else I do in Russia, I can’t get away from that.”
The list of “whatever else” is, nevertheless, as impressive as it is diverse. In the eighteen years since Sucher quit his job at Goldman Sachs and hopped on a plane to Moscow without a job or concrete plan, he has opened successful restaurants, gyms, a publishing house, been active in promoting and supporting charities, helped develop leading investment banks and asset management companies, and steered Merrill Lynch’s Moscow branch safely through the turbulent years of 2007-2010.
Sucher claims he never intended to become an expat and certainly never expected to live in Russia almost two decades when he arrived in 1993 to camp out on a friend’s floor. “No one thinks that,” he affirmed.
Sucher spent his teens believing that he would become a “Cold Warrior.” He visited Russia in 1980 and in 1991, and studied Russian language at Norwich University in Vermont. “I was a right wing nut job,” he said, “I really thought the world was going to hell because of socialism.” In 1991, while a successful equities trader at Goldman Sachs, he was riveted to see the Russians “take down the Evil Empire themselves.” He felt instinctively that he had to be a part of the immense change sweeping the country. He had some vague ideas about what to do, tempered with a strong conviction that he wanted to help with the “extraordinary difficulties and challenges the Russian people would experience after they had ripped apart the old regime.”
“Guys,” he told his bosses, “I gotta go.”
Sucher’s first evening in Moscow included a long trek out to Sadko Arcade, then one of the country’s only shopping malls, to have dinner at a Swiss Steak House. His second evening involved a visit to Rosie O’Grady’s Irish bar. Both influenced his next steps. Sucher knew from his tours of duty with Goldman Sachs in London, Tokyo and Hong Kong that expats had two choices about the environment they found themselves in: “You can either wait until someone builds it, or you can build it yourself.”
Sucher saw immediate business opportunities in satisfying his own basic needs. “After a couple of pints of Guinness,” he said, “I need to eat. I’m not very adventurous with my food, and I like steak.” Famous for keeping bizarre hours, Sucher was also upset that he couldn’t get breakfast when he wanted it. He liked to work out, but balked at the over-subscribed, $3000 a year membership at the two hotel-based gyms in Moscow at the time. Thus were born first the phenomenally popular Uncle Guilly’s Steak House, the American-style 1950s Starlite Diner, Moscow’s first 24/7 restaurant, and the wittily-christened Moscow Beach Club, a gym housed in an unused part of LENKOM Theatre, later sold to the Planet Fitness chain.
Sucher shrugged off these achievements. “You get a lot of credit for being an entrepreneur,” he said, “but it was literally just a question of realizing that there was no competition in a city of 12 million people. And if I built it, I figured someone would want to come. I just wanted to make the city work for me.”
When not making sure Muscovites had cheeseburgers to eat and the means to work them off, Sucher was playing a major role in the developing banking sector in Moscow. Russian financier Ruben Vardanian approached him in 1993 with a compelling argument to help him start a bank.
“When I met Ruben,” Sucher recalled, “ he concluded his conversation with me by saying, ‘I know this is not a normal country, but maybe if I build a normal business and then other people build a normal business, then maybe that is how we can build a normal country. Will you help me build a normal business?’”
That normal business became Troika Dialog, one of Russia’s leading investment banks, which Sucher helped run until 2002, when he moved to Alfa Capital to establish their Asset Management arm. In 2007, Sucher was recruited by Merrill Lynch to build their Moscow franchise. He stepped down three years later, after overseeing the transition of Merrill’s sale to Bank of America.
These days, Sucher is successfully crafting what many Moscow expats perceive as the Holy Grail of gradual exit plans: a portfolio of advisory roles in both private business and charity which gets him home in time to share dinner with his family: wife Fatima (a Muscovite), and his children, ages 8 and 6, who attend the Anglo-American School in Moscow.
Sucher said he feels the gradual easing back is in step with where Russia is now politically and culturally. He sees it as a positive sign that he is welcome to live, work, make money, and donate some of it to charity in Russia. But in terms of setting and raising standards in Russia, it is frankly no longer his place.
“I may have contributed something to this country,” he said, “but it ain’t my country.”
Sucher said he has a lot of concerns about the current state of his own country and in particular his hometown of Detroit. Some of the appeal of his part-time roles is that he is able to spend some time in Detroit, where he hopes to bring his considerable energy and expertise to help find solutions there.
“I’m going to do what I can,” he explained, “but I’m going to be strategic about it, and whatever I do in Russia is going to compete with what I feel is a lifelong calling to help my own country. I think most Russian people are going to be fine… I’m not sure I can say that about my own country.”
Teri Lindeberg’s first week in Moscow was spent in her bathing suit in an non-air conditioned apartment on Leningradsky Prospekt. “It was kinda gross,” she admitted, “it would get so hot that I would fill up the bathtub with cool water, get in and just sit there until I could stand to get out for a while.”
Lindeberg came to Moscow in 1996 on a whim with a boyfriend, who had been offered a job in the Russian capital. “I was tired of living in New York City,” she said, “and it was either move back to the suburbs and join the country club or move to Moscow.” She didn’t know anything about Russia, didn’t speak Russian, and did very little research. Her initial few weeks in Russia made her wonder if she had made the wrong choice, but she decided to stick it out.
Thousands of young Russian job-seekers are very grateful that she did.
Today, Lindeberg is President and CEO of Staffwell, one of Moscow and Russia’s leading executive recruitment companies, which she founded in 2000 after a successful five-year career as a partner at Antal International, a UK-based recruitment agency that opened offices throughout Eastern Europe in the 1990s.
Lindeberg joined Antal reluctantly, after about eight months of exploring Moscow and taking Russian language lessons at Moscow State University. Recruitment was not an industry she’d found to her liking when she’d tried it right out of college, but something about head hunting in the Wild 1990s appealed to her “Up and at ’em” personality.
“It was wild,” she laughed, “I was the top producer in the banking sector… I had two old fashioned telephones and they had twelve lines each, and I worked them both at the same time. I was like a trader in the pit.”
Lindeberg was made an Antal partner in 1997, the first female and non-UK partner the company had ever created. In 1998, however, with the collapse of the ruble, Lindeberg’s trajectory was severely curtailed. Banking recruitment slowed to a trickle and Lindeberg was transferred first to London, and then New York. She hated both.
“My heart wasn’t in it,” she said.
Eventually, in 1999, Antal sent Lindeberg back to Moscow, where she found the Russian team demoralized and unmotivated. Lindeberg got back on her old-fashioned phones and did her best to generate new business.
When a company-wide memo came soliciting ideas for the new corporate website Antal was developing, Lindeberg found the process of brainstorming and the potential fusing of the internet’s capability with recruitment to be irresistible. She fired off a number of lengthy memos to the management team with her ideas, only to be curtly ordered back to the phones.
“They made it clear that my job was to produce revenue, not ideas.”
Lindeberg decided to keep submitting ideas, and set a goal of sending 50 memos to management. When she hit 50 with no response, she took her ideas off the table and began to plan her exit strategy.
In the summer of 2000, she cashed in her savings and investments and created Staffwell, which she staffed with locals at very low salary levels and a few expat partners to help with the legal and financial establishment of the company.
“The beginning of the company was a mess,” she recalled. “It was very new for me to be a CEO, running my own company. I jumped into it without a lot of planning, and at times I was just coasting.” After a few years, however, Lindeberg had a much more finely-honed sense of what she wanted the company to be, and how she would set about achieving those goals. Today, Staffwell is emerging from the 2008 global recession as one of the strongest players in the Russian market, and Lindeberg is looking forward to top numbers for the company by 2013.
In addition to growing a successful company, Lindeberg has been busy growing her family. She married a Russian, Timur, in 1999, and has three sons, Vovi, Leo and Saava. A few years ago, in order to facilitate her sons attending the Anglo-American School, Lindeberg decided to move the family to Moscow’s suburban gated community, Pokrovsky Hills. It was a decision that provoked much reaction from her friends, some of whom tried hard to dissuade her from the move, telling her she would be stuck in an expat ghetto, isolated and cut off from life in the center of the city. Lindeberg dismissed their arguments, saying she enjoys the diversity of the community, the safety, and the freedom it affords her small children, who walk to school instead of spending hours in traffic.
Lindeberg, however, spends a lot of time in traffic herself, traveling to and from work, a journey that can take up to three hours when Moscow is in the throes of one of its legendary traffic snarls. It is one of the things she relishes escaping when she and her family go for extended visits to their home in Asheville, North Carolina.
“I wanted to buy a house in the States,” she said matter-of-factly, “so I looked it up on the internet and Asheville kept coming up as one of the top places to live. So I flew down there and found a house.”
This bold “move forward” attitude is Lindeberg’s signature management style. “I just carry on,” she said, “I never contemplate where I am or what I’ve become. I don’t reflect. I never look back either. When my management team starts to do that, I stop them immediately and refocus their attention.”
This strategy has worked well for Lindeberg in weathering economic slumps and the recent recession. Unlike other companies, Staffwell gave its employees the option of taking unpaid leave instead of being let go. Lindeberg kept as many employees on salary as she could, mandating them to go out in the field and keep in touch with what their clients were going through. She was able to introduce a new range of services to clients to help them “exit” laid-off employees with training and advice on how to seek new jobs.
Lindeberg also executed a comprehensive evaluation of Staffwell by her employees in lengthy one-on-one interviews, where they flagged issues they felt needed improvement. From the 33-point questionnaire, Lindeberg not only created a clear blueprint for moving the company to its next level, but is also writing a book about the process, which she feels will have relevance for companies inside and outside Russia.
Lindeberg is far too busy for much reflection, as she races from client meetings to Tae Kwon Do classes she and her son take together. Her one regret is that she has not been able to master Russian, although her sons are fluent. “I keep coming up with great excuses for not learning Russian,” she chuckled.
Annette Loftus has the job everyone thinks they want: Chief Exploration Officer for the Moscow-based adventure travel company she owns and runs, which provides customized itineraries to some of the most challenging parts of the world to Russia’s well-heeled business elite. Her schedule is unpredictable: some days are spent scouting remote patches of the Sahara Dessert, others popping down to the Caucasus Mountains in a helicopter to meet with possible suppliers, or sampling the delights of spas in the mountains of New Zealand. Other days, she spends long hours in the office overseeing the day-to-day operations of the company. She has two Blackberries, an iPhone and a small Nokia phone, and often they are all ringing and buzzing at the same time.
Loftus thrives on unpredictability and is exceptionally adept at seizing opportunities as they arise, like the scheduling glitch that initially led her to Russian Studies in 1986. Loftus was part of a summer program for high school students at Dickinson College. To resolve a timetable issue, she sought out Dean of Students Nikolai Weisman as he delivered his lecture on Comparative Sociology of the Soviet Union. She sat through the lecture and was fascinated. She approached Weisman and begged to take his class. He told her “no,” the class was for seniors in college and Loftus was only in high school.
“That was the beginning of my life in Russia,” Loftus recalled, “I learned you can always negotiate.”
She talked her way into Weisman’s class and went on to study Soviet and Eastern European Studies and Art History at Yale. Loftus’s first experience in Russia came in 1991, when she went to St. Petersburg on an ACTR program. She quickly made friends with a number of Russians.
Returning to the States, Loftus applied to graduate school and for fellowships, while doing job interviews with multinational companies. One night, she received a phone call from a friend who was working for Ernst & Young in St. Petersburg: “Dude,” her friend urged, “You have to get over here!”
Convinced that Russia was an opportunity not to be missed, Loftus borrowed $1000 from her mother, and hastily arranged for an internship that, on paper, looked ideal: a joint venture with the Hermitage Museum and an American company to produce high-end reproductions for the Museum’s new gift shop. Arriving in St. Petersburg, Loftus was taken out to dinner by the Russian émigré heading up the operation, plied with two bottles of French champagne and told he had no budget to pay her anything. “I probably should have gone home and re-applied to graduate school,” Loftus mused. Instead, she began knocking on doors and eventually ended up working for Business Link, a Russian consulting company set up by a handful of very well-connected St. Petersburg University professors. Business Link’s recruitment arm initially contacted Loftus about working for an American multinational as an office manager. Loftus turned the tables on them, offering to work for Business Link for a token salary, and a cut of the business she generated.
Loftus’s hunch about Business Link’s potential proved correct. She worked on a range of innovative projects: privatization auctions, the first media buy in Russia, and rubbed shoulders with a number of the men who govern Russia today, including Alexei Kudrin and Vladimir Putin. In 1993, RJR Reynolds lured Loftus away to work on their marketing team in St. Petersburg, and later Coke poached her to work for them in Bucharest and Zagreb.
At the height of her success as a multinational marketing manager, Loftus felt she was getting stale. She teamed up with her friend Jennifer Neufeld, who had established a successful marketing agency in Moscow, on a number of exotic trips. During their travels, the two Americans fantasized about running their own adventure travel company based in Latin America, a region both enjoyed. Convinced they could make a go of it, they booked the most expensive trip on the market – a trek of the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal – to see how an upscale agency worked. Once there, they scribbled business plans on the backs of envelopes for their company, which they named Aspera in token of some of the personal goals they’d also outlined, for “finding life/work balance and very cool husbands.” Loftus laughed, “I think it was the lack of oxygen up there that made us think it was all so easy.”
Neufeld nonetheless found her cool husband on that trip – their guide Jimyang, and was soon expecting the couple’s first child. Plans proceeded to start Aspera, with Neufeld as head of Operations and Loftus as head of Sales & Marketing. In 2001, when Neufeld went to the United States on maternity leave, Loftus came back to Russia for another “temporary” visit: almost ten years to the day of her original “temporary” visit to Russia. Aspera developed steadily. Originally conceived as an outfit to service expats, Loftus and Neufeld were soon struck by the number of incoming phone calls from Russian nationals wanting to take the trips Aspera advertised in the English-language Moscow Times, and quickly re-aligned their business to service Russian clients. Word soon spread amongst an influential circle of well-heeled Russians of the small but intrepid company’s ability to take on almost impossible itineraries and deliver consistent results.
Today, Loftus has an enviable client list that includes some of Russia’s top businessmen, who can afford to send her on 30-day scouting trips to ensure that every minute of their 10-day itinerary is hassle-free and exactly in line with their expectations.
“Last year,” she explained, “we scouted all the way down one side of Costa Rica, then thought, nah… it’s just not right. So we went right down the other side and found what we were looking for.”
The high altitude work/life balance Loftus scribbled on the back of her envelope in the Himalayas remains elusive. Aspera doesn’t have a peak season or an off-season, which affords Loftus little down-time to recharge her batteries. She finds Moscow challenging to live in, particularly during March and November, when navigating the icy streets is particularly treacherous. She occasionally thinks about expanding Aspera to other, more congenial cities, but acknowledges that Russia is where she needs to be to continue to tap into her lucrative client base. “What I love about my business are these incredible clients who want to do absolutely outrageous things that billionaires in other countries would never consider.”
Loftus finds it hard to believe it’s been 20 years since she first visited Russia. “I never expected to spend this amount of time here,” she exclaimed, “I know I’m going to spend another five, but I hope I’m not going to be here for another ten.” As Loftus’s Blackberry buzzes insistently, however, it’s anyone’s guess how much longer she’ll be here.
When she was 38 and single, Elizabeth Sullivan, the frighteningly capable and accomplished COO of UBS Russia, found herself alone with a bowl of ice cream watching an episode of Sex In The City on a Saturday night. In one episode, Miranda confessed to Carrie that she worried about “getting to that scary age… you know, the age you don’t want to get to and not have kids.” Carrie agreed, noting, “mine’s 42.” Sullivan sat up and immediately thought, “Mine’s 40.”
Being Elizabeth Sullivan, she got to work.
Sullivan has lived in Russia since 1993, enjoying an enviable and deserved career development. Her fascination with Russia dates to her late teens, when she read Hedrick Smith’s The Russians.
“Communism never made any sense to me,” she said, “it just seemed like a mess.” Sullivan doesn’t like messes, and has made a career out anticipating and avoiding them in a very messy country going through a very messy transition. A graduate of the London School of Business, Sullivan initially came to Russia in 1994 to run the school’s pilot project to teach Russian managers how to write business plans, something startlingly new in an economy long dominated by State Planning Committees. Sullivan found the work challenging but rewarding, and ultimately persuaded a number of Russian banks to come to final presentations and a few to actually invest in projects.
Unlike many veteran expats, Sullivan doesn’t recall the “Wild 90s” as a halcyon period. “Lots of people came here in the 1990s to escape their problems,” she recalled, “and they just ended up bringing their problems with them.” Sullivan watched a number of talented people fall into the trap of Moscow’s cheap, alcohol-soaked nightlife, and observed “If you lost control here, you could fall very, very far.”
In 1997, Sullivan was recruited as Head of Operations for the independent Russian bank, Brunswick, which later sold itself to UBS. In 2003, Sullivan was made COO, a position she still holds today. She is responsible for the entire logistical spine of the bank’s operations, oversees 120 employees, and runs departments that many expat managers do not even attempt to tackle without a parallel Russian colleague or three international accounting firms on retainer: legal, tax, HR, and compliance.
“It’s complicated,” she says, “but it’s not impossible.”
Sullivan said she believes that the key to success in Russia lies in a firm commitment to doing things to a high standard, consistently, every time. This includes keeping on top of the often-Byzantine paperwork that dominates Russian life and business. Sullivan prides herself on never having paid a bribe in Russia.
“Okay,” she eventually admitted, “when you drive yourself around, you do need to keep a stash of cash handy… but most of the time when I get stopped, they let me go. My paperwork is in order, my car is in order, I have an emergency kit in the back… they can’t really fault me on anything.”
Experience with handling mountains of paperwork stood Sullivan in good stead when she set out on the long road to create her own family in Russia. Her tenure as a Board Member and later Chairman of the Board of Directors of United Way Moscow had exposed her to the plight of orphans in Russia, and early on she felt a firm conviction that adoption was the right choice for her.
Sullivan, the first employee at UBS to openly admit that she was adopting a child, was unprepared for the vigorous debate her announcement sparked. She encountered two polar reactions from her Russian friends and colleagues. Some congratulated her on being an angel of mercy, praising her for rescuing a poor child from a pitiful existence. Others, a much larger group, echoing the prevailing opinion about adoption in Russia at the time, were outspoken in their concern about her welfare: warning her of the dangers of letting a child of potential criminals or drug addicts into her home. Nevertheless, Sullivan moved forward with her plans to adopt.
One Saturday, in the middle of a hectic apartment move and getting over the death of one of her many cats, Sullivan got a call from her adoption lawyer, advising her to drop everything and prepare to “come and see pictures of your daughter.” Eighteen-month-old Victoria’s paperwork had just come through, and Sullivan’s presence in Russia made it possible for her to be at the orphanage the following Monday to apply to adopt her. Sullivan visited Victoria each week for the requisite eight-weeks, during which time the two were observed by social workers and orphanage officials. Sullivan brought Victoria home in September 2004, and took Russian maternity leave of four months to help her new daughter settle in.
To complete her family, Sullivan renewed the adoption process five years later seeking a child from different and more challenging circumstances: Vladikavkaz in the war-torn Caucuses, knowing that children in that region faced a much bleaker future than those in Central Russia. She also chose a child with severe health issues, including major kidney problems, whose mother had undergone radiation treatment for cancer when she was pregnant. Few expected baby Katya to live long, and Sullivan’s lawyer tried to dissuade her from proceeding with the adoption, telling her, “you will get your heart broken.” Undeterred, Sullivan forged ahead. Her biggest challenge, however, lay in overcoming the intense anti-foreigner opinion of the general populace and the court officials. The mountain of paperwork the court demanded rose higher and higher as Sullivan progressed, the final tally being a staggering 102 reports, including extensive testimonies by Moscow-based social workers who had monitored Victoria in her post-placement period.
The compelling document, however, that more than any other finally convinced the court to award Sullivan custody, came from a very unexpected quarter. At UBS, 137 Russian employees lined up to sign a petition in support of Sullivan’s bid to adopt Katya. Almost all added their addresses and telephone numbers – something Russian citizens normally avoid, and many added lengthy notes about how their opinions on adoption had been radically changed by Sullivan’s example. The usually practical and unemotional Sullivan chokes up when she speaks about the difference the UBS employees’ petition made. “It was huge,” she said.
Today, Katya, Victoria, and Elizabeth Sullivan are a very busy and happy family. Katya’s health problems will eventually necessitate a kidney transplant, which Sullivan feels will inherently mean a move back to the West. She worries more about her own ability to adapt to that, than what it means for her daughters: “I read somewhere that for every year you live out of your home country, it takes one month to adapt once you move back.” Sullivan is exploring options of where to live, mindful that her daughters are pestering her to add to their family again: they want a dog. RL
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