To Russia for Love

Behind the walls and down the winding corridors of an uninviting, yellow concrete building in Pechory, western Russia, a few kilometres from the Estonian border, there’s a room full of small, wooden beds. 

It’s February, 2020, just as the world is starting to realise Covid-19 is indeed a pandemic,  just before international borders are shut down, and Stuff Circuit has come to Russia to film a documentary with our workmate, Emma Barrett.

Now aged 27, Emma was just two weeks old when she was placed into this orphanage by her alcoholic mother. She spent the first three years of her life here, sleeping in these wooden beds.

Nothing has changed. Yet everything has. 

Back then, Emma was Yekaterina Viktorovna Finenko, a tiny toddler with cropped blonde hair, inquiring brown eyes and a slightly asymmetrical face; one of 120 children here at any given time. Until a woman from Howick, Auckland, arrived to take her away for a new life in New Zealand.

We work with Emma; she’s employed at Stuff under the Creative Spirit initiative, which gives people with intellectual disabilities regular jobs. She’s an administration assistant, walking at pace around the office with her signature bounce, ticking off her list of duties. She’s incredibly smart, well organised, and very driven. She’s also strategic and good at asking for advice.

And so it was that, in 2017, Emma came to us wanting a favour. She’d had a happy life in New Zealand in a loving family (eventually, at least - it’s complicated).

But for Emma, as for many of the 700 Russian orphans adopted to New Zealand in the 1990s, something was missing. She wanted to find her birth family, and she knew we were investigative journalists so figured we might be able to help. 

We said yes, of course, and then realised that sometimes the best stories are right in front of you. We decided that if we succeeded in finding Emma’s family, perhaps we could take her to Russia to meet them - it could be a beautiful documentary. 

We were naive, though: it was three years between that conversation and finally boarding a plane with Emma bound for Moscow.

On the way, we re-read a quote our director Toby Longbottom had found when we first started researching, from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” 

It could not have been more apt.

 

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought with it social upheaval and a sharp rise in the numbers of children in orphanages (whether or not their parents were actually dead), and with that, an opportunity for New Zealand families who’d struggled to adopt here.

The bureaucratic machine of the new Russian Federation is perfectly illustrated in documentation around Emma’s adoption - records for three-year-old Yekaterina are held at the Centralized Bank of Data on children left without parental care. 

“There has been no chance to place the child in a Russian family for upbringing within time terms stipulated by the law”, the documents state.

And so on May 29, 1996, the Pskov Region Administration of the Ministry of Education issued an order that little Yekatarina - “an inmate of Region Pechory Orphanage” - was permitted to be adopted, “taking into account the fact that the single mother agreed to the adoption”. (It would become a useful clue for Emma’s search that the documents record a living parent.) 

The signs were there, though, in her medical notes, that things might not be smooth sailing.

Born prematurely to a “needy family” and weighing just 700 grams, there are diagnoses of perinatal encephalopathy (brain injury in the newborn), hypertension hydrocephalus (an abnormal buildup of fluid in the brain), and slow psycho-motor development.

Emma’s adoptive father Terry Barrett recalls Emma’s behaviour was problematic from the moment she arrived at Auckland airport. 

“She was pretty wild. Most children would just stand there and wait, but Emma had to run around in circles and disappear and dash off.” 

He admits that on first sight of Emma he felt, “a little bit scared and wary. I thought ‘this is not going to be easy’”.

He was right.

Emma was soon diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome, a condition resulting from alcohol exposure during her mother’s pregnancy, causing brain damage and growth problems (Emma states proudly that she is “four foot ten, which is 147 centimetres”).

She also had reactive attachment disorder (RAD): emotional dysfunction stemming from not having formed an early bond with parents or caregivers. 

As an adult, Emma feels she has grown out of the RAD, and she doesn’t really think much about her fetal alcohol syndrome.

“I try to look at what it means, but to me it doesn’t really make much sense, apart from you’re mentally underdeveloped. That’s all I get, you know.”

There are no official figures, but Rita Vestfall from the charity foundation Arifmetika Dobra (Arithmetic of Good) tells us a “high proportion” of orphans in Russian institutions have fetal alcohol syndrome, and that only 10 per cent of Russian orphans will live to the age of 40. They commonly experience drug addiction, homelessness, and imprisonment. 

She says there are currently more than 70,000 orphans in Russian institutions, and 45,000 of them are eligible to be adopted. 

“The rest have parents who are alive, so they may, at some stage, be reclaimed.” 

But for those who are not, there are now fewer options available to them - Russia banned adoptions to New Zealand in 2013, objecting to our legalisation of same-sex marriage. It’s now banned most international adoptions for the same reason - only Italy and Israel are exempt - and instead, adoptions are encouraged within Russia.

Given the tens of thousands still forsaken in orphanages, the strategy doesn’t appear to be working.  

And to make a bad situation worse, research from Human Rights Watch shows nearly half of the orphanage population is children with disabilities, who are often transferred to state institutions for adults when they reach 18, without their consent.

Prospective adoptive parents are not on their own, though.  

Intercountry Adoption New Zealand (ICANZ) has helped with more than 1000 intercountry adoptions over the past 30 years. Executive director Wendy Hawke says each child, each birth family, has a unique and sad story. 

“In an ideal world, every child would be born into a family that is in a position to care for the child and raise them in a healthy, happy environment. 

“Sadly, in every country, there are times when that is not the case.”

She says when efforts to reunite the child with their family fail, adoption is one way to help the child. 

“While some children have experienced huge trauma and abuse prior to adoption”, she says, “with help and time, many can recover and go on to lead happy lives. It is a joy to see this happen.” 

AUT senior lecturer in psychology Dr Rhoda Scherman collaborated with Hawke on the outcomes for adult adoptees in a 2011 study, “The adopted children from Eastern Europe grow up”, and it’s given her a positive outlook. 

“The children who have early institutionalisation suffer a host of behavioural, emotional, psychological, medical, social issues as a consequence. So following the line of logic from the many studies that report on these myriad problems, one could easily assume these children are doomed.”

Dr Scherman admits her study was statistically small - around 70 people aged over 18 - and notes a possible response bias because those doing well in their lives were most likely to participate.

But the results showed the cohort smoked and drank less than same-aged New Zealanders, considered themselves healthy, and were not overly prone to illness. 

In education, slightly fewer had finished high school and just over a quarter were in tertiary education at the time. They had a slightly higher unemployment rate.

“We were pleased to see the people in our study had such good outcomes,” recalls Dr Scherman. “I think most of the kids do well and the research, decades of adoption research, (finds) 70 to 80 percent of adopted kids come out just fine.”

She believes only a small proportion of children go on to have troubled lives as adults, but they tend to attract the attention.

“Negative stories make the news, they create the false perception that they’re common when I think they’re very atypical.”

Maybe it’s a product of the many challenges and rejections she has faced, or maybe it’s just who she is, but Emma Barrett has a remarkable capacity for optimism.

In small-town western Russia we find the apartment where she was born and spent the first two weeks of her life. Where we see a dilapidated, depressing, Soviet-era block housing unhappy-looking people, Emma notices only the “cute little playground. It’s really nice”.

When we visit her orphanage, unnervingly named the Oblast Baby House, she doesn’t comment on the bleakness of the building, but on the children’s music room. 

Principal Natalya Aleksandrovna has run the institution for more than 30 years, and in the course of our research trying to find Emma’s family, it was a phone call with her that gave us hope. She was there when Emma was in the orphanage, and she remembered her. Aleksandrovna delights in showing us a photo, one of hundreds, of herself with a little girl; it’s Emma.

Spoiler alert: with us on this visit to the orphanage, is Emma’s biological sister, Yulia Letkova, who spent part of her childhood in an orphanage and part of it with their mum. 

There’s a moment in our filming when it becomes sadly clear the hand that fate has had in each of their lives. 

Yulia has picked up a toddler and is cuddling him like she doesn’t want to let him go - because she doesn’t. Through tears, she tells us she wants to take all the children home with her and she has a message to the parents of these children: “Do not leave your kids behind in such places”. 

“Because you know what it feels like when you are the child who’s been left behind?” we ask.

She nods, explaining that even though she had nothing during the years she was with her mother, she had just that: a mum.

“When I was living with her I didn’t have any toys”, she tells us through our translator. “The only thing I had was a pillow and a curtain and I used to wrap the curtain around the pillow and pretend that it was my doll. I used to play with that.” 

That’s the thing. Each unhappy family may be unhappy in its own way. 

But it is a family.