In their chapters on Dzerzhinsky Square, travel guidebooks to Moscow never fail to note the dominating presence of the building that once housed the All Russia Insurance Company ... but would in our time acquire a name of its own: Lubyanka.
This never changed through the decades even though the entity it housed went by almost a dozen — Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, MVD, MGB, KGB, are the ones you probably know best. Even though the state it propped up is now a casualty of its own tragic history, there is still a similar agency in its offices and corridors called the FSB. And it still evokes the same wariness, if not outright fear, from the Russians and foreigners alike who walk past it.
Yet, every day, lots of children come through this foreboding place where blood runs so deep. For just across from it is Detskiy Mir ("Child World"), the most popular toy store in both Soviet and post-Soviet Moscow.
At first one has to laugh at the absurdity. Why put a toy store next to the headquarters of the secret police, a building where many who entered never left? Communism was not known for its sense of humor.
But the better guidebooks also explain this. You see, Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of Soviet Russia's internal-security organs, also oversaw the care of the many orphans left by that country's Civil War. He performed both jobs with equal relish, and reportedly considered them two sides of the same coin.
Whether that is true or not, the connection has long outlived not only him, but the state he gave so much of his life (and, we should remember, that of so many unwilling others) to.
In fact, it has found fertile soil for new growth, of its philosophy if not its methods, in a place its creator could never have expected.
***
Today, Russia deals with its still-large orphan population largely by allowing their lucrative export in the form of adoption by citizens of wealthier foreign states — predominantly America, its longtime Cold War adversary.
And it is the sort of irony that Dzerzhinsky himself might have been amused by, that in the United States one can find the inheritors, of sorts, of his other legacy — the many-named adoption agencies that place those orphans in American homes.
It might seem to be too much to compare the American international-adoption industry to the Soviet "competent bodies," since, after all, they never killed or imprisoned anyone (on purpose, anyway — at least so far). But, as you will see, they have by and large learned to take the same stance toward those who might threaten their position.
Like the KGB, they continuously put out propaganda that showed adoption of Russian children as all sunshine and smiling blond-haired and blue-eyed faces, a world where all dreams were realized and nothing could go wrong ... until you asked a few too many of the wrong questions a few too many times.
It was from those who asked, or rather had to ask, those questions that a counternarrative emerged. One that they could ridicule, marginalize and generally keep out of view of the unsuspecting world ... but not forever.
As we took this website from concept into reality, more and more we realized how much we owed to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, which told its own story of what Dzershinsky wrought.
Like his samizdat classic, this work was assembled from bits and pieces of others' stories, from rumors confirmed, from private emails to people too afraid for their future children to use their own names on public Internet fora, from frantic phone calls across time zones late at night.
(We did, however, have one tool not available to Solzhenitsyn (at least not officially): laws that state that certain federal and state records must be open for public inspection and review. We made good use of those, too).
Many times, we have gone back to reread the introduction to that three-volume epic and been struck by how much, in so many ways, it echoed the situation we had been placed in.
"How does one get to this clandestine Archipelago?" he asks. "Hour by hour planes fly there, ships steer their course there, and trains thunder off to it — but all with nary a mark on them to tell of their destination ... [Travel agents] know nothing and they've never heard of the Archipelago as a whole or any of its innumerable islands."
So, too, it has been with those of us who know, who have seen with our own eyes the dark realities of international adoption. What many outside it entirely, and even some on its peripheries, couldn't even imagine existing.
Solzhenitsyn's metaphor of the prison-camp system as an invisible parallel world to the apparent Soviet reality, scattered and hidden in tiny bits within the world that would collapse if its shadowy partner were revealed in full (as indeed, it ultimately did), one scattered across space, finds its parallel in both the orphanages scattered across Russia even today and the houses of the United States where so many inhabitants of those orphanages now reside ... anywhere part of the story that contradicts the "official" version can be found and told.
We cannot improve on the words he uses to describe the coexistence of these two very different worlds. Their truth is our truth:
And this Archipelago crisscrossed and patterned that other country within which it was located, like a giant patchwork, cutting into its cities, hovering over its streets. Yet there were many who did not even guess at its presence and many, many others who had heard something vague. And only those who had been there knew the whole truth.
But, as though stricken dumb on the islands of the Archipelago, they kept their silence.
***
What you will be reading if you choose to go on from this page is not the totality of what can be told. It is merely the experiences of several clients of one adoption agency, centered around the horrific tale we have to tell, a tale which became increasingly intertwined with those of others who had suffered at the hands of the same woman and her lies and hostility to those she professed to be helping, a woman who continually breaks hearts and runs roughshod over the emotional lives of people who give her thousands of dollars.
Our tale, the first link from here, is centered around our son and his tragic death. Doubtless that will have an impact on you, as it should. But we want you to read the whole story to understand.
We do have links to pages of others who experienced similar treatment at the hand of other agencies, sadly demonstrating that the problem is widespread (but that yet at the same time, all is not lost).
Many of them sought us out only after we had shared our story with the Eastern European adoption community, having thought for a long time that they were suffering all alone. Eventually they began to compare notes not just with us but others, and we realized that our experiences were not the result of aberrant or unusual circumstances but malfeasance complicated by incompetence (or is it the other way around? Does it matter?) on the part of the adoption agency, and indeed the entire international adoption industry.
Almost all of them were ultimately successful in completing their adoptions and bringing home children they love very much. That does not mean they forgot ... or forgave.
Since raising these children takes so much time, they have delegated to us the task of telling their stories, because at present the law is such that it is far better to seek historical justice in the courts of public opinion than its judicial counterpart. We promise them only that, as Alexander Isayevich assured his informants and readers alike, “everything will be told.”
These are not the happy stories of foreign adoptions which fill megabyte upon megabyte of web servers all over the Internet. If you want to read some of those, click here and here.
But these are stories you should read if you are yourself considering adopting from Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union. We certainly hope you won't have to add to them; but if you want to stand less of a chance of doing so, go on.
At the very least, there's one adoption agency we can tell you not to use.