Russian adoptees should be taught Russian

The Russian government is demanding that children adopted by American families in future will have to be taught Russian, according to the Moscow press today. This is one of the demands included in a draft agreement to be discussed by the US and Russian governments on Friday (30 April). The Russian children's rights commissioner, Pavel Astakhov, has said: "If the child already speaks Russian, his social, cultural and linguistic environment should be preserved."

The agreement is said to include a requirement that US adoptive families be monitored by the Russian authorities who would have the right to take the families to court.

Signing this agreement is the price demanded by Russia for resuming adoptions to the US, following the scandal over a Tennessee woman returning her adopted son, Artyom Savelyev, to Moscow on the grounds that she could not look after him.

These conditions look on the face of it impossible for the US government to sign up to. Perhaps there is an some grandstanding going on before the talks start.

Some other bits and pieces: It's been getting harder to adopt from Russia for a few years, and new figures confirm a sharp decline. In 2009, 3813 Russian children were adopted abroad, compared with about 14,000 a year in the 1990s, according Alina Levitskaya, an official of the Russian education ministry. (source: news.ru)

Here's a good article from The Washington Post which looks at the terrible effect on child development of being brought up in a Russian orphanage. See "The origins of the Artyom Savelyev story" below.

And a piece from the NYT on the Montana boot camp for troubled Rusisan adoptees which I think exaggerates the effect of fetal alcohol syndrome and underplays the effect of institutionalisation.