So-called "child protective" "services" (CPS) as it is known throughout the rest of the modern world is new to Mother Russia. One gets the feeling when tracking the history of the way the nation has dealt with their unfortunate children that even though they have signed on to the United Nations' "Convention on the Rights of the Child" (UNCRC) and made all sorts of politically-correct "noises, "moves," and "pronouncements" since the "Fall of Communism" in 1989 that they are actually reluctant participants in all that modern "CPS" entails.
(senedresearch.blog)
And who can really blame them? It has been said--and is still being said with a straight face in certain corners of the global CPS milieu--that the United States is the model for CPS interventionism globally, and yet the results (even just those that can be measured and admitted) are woeful and getting worse, here. There has certainly been no windfall to the Senate's unwillingness to join Somalia and be the only other nation not to sign on to the UNCRC. America's children are certainly NOT better off than they were prior to the time when CPS became a "real thing" here in the 1970s, and it certainly has not made any great positive impact, to date, in Russia either.
Every time Russia has been through a major geopolitical crisis in the past, the nation's children have, understandably suffered mightily. This was certainly true in the 19teens and 1920s during the First World War, the revolution, and the Civil War that came in the wake of the Bolshevik seizure of power. However, despite the displacement of so many children, the situation, understandably was worse in the cities than the countryside, and the parents were in nearly as dire straits as their children. Nothing much changed from the way orphaned and abandoned children were treated under the czars. The orphanage was THE extent of specifically-geared "child protection" throughout the 20th century in the Soviet Union, just as it had been for centuries; and, to be honest, that did not change during and after the horrors of WW II, and also up until the end of the Soviet Union either.
(Children in a typical Russian orphanage. Courtesy of theguardian.com.)
In fact, truth be known, the orphanage is still the backbone of what passes as CPS in Russia to this day. The latest crisis of the 1990s and the political upheavals in the wake of what I like to call the "re-organization" of Russia into a "modern globalist state" has resulted in certain genuflections toward the global CPS game, but the reality on the ground, especially in rural areas is that not much is really changing despite official attempts to at least present a different picture to the world.
Seven-plus decades of Soviet Communism was never particularly kind to families. The apparatchiks of the cities did fine, of course, but they were a tiny proportion of the overall population, and the grinding poverty of the countryside continued and was actually quite a bit worse than it had been under the Czars-- due to Bolshevik pogroms, grain seizures, etc. Russia/USSR has always had a higher percentage of orphaned children than most nations of the West, whether of the genuine kind (both parents dead) or the "created" kind--due to alcoholism, starvation and abuse.
(02varvara.wordpress.com.)
The orphanage was thus even a more critical element of the bare bones Russian/Soviet "safety net" for desperate children than in the West, but whether state-run or run by the Russian Orthodox Church, it seems the results were always pretty decent for the relative few starving and abandoned children fortunate enough to find themselves in their care.
Consider this link:
http://demokratizatsiya.pub/archives/20_1_0M68882RR3WM363J.pdf
Here is an excerpt about that:
"One of the most serious criticisms of the Russian child welfare system is its well-documented over-utilization of orphanages or “institutions.” Current international research indicates that institutional care by its very nature limits the development of children. Very young children placed in institutions with minimal staffing may spend much of their time in their cribs without the necessary physical and intellectual stimulation that is critical for child development:
'A rule of thumb is that for every three months that a young child resides in an institution, they lose one month of development.' However, one author—himself a graduate of a US orphanage—conducted a survey of orphan graduates in the US, concluding that as a group, the orphanage alumni, categorized by age, outpaced their counterparts in the U.S. general population on almost all social and economic measures, not least of which
were education, income, and positive assessments of their life experiences, both during their upbringing and afterwards.
More recent research has argued that orphanages can be a viable option for orphaned and abandoned children—and, at times, an even better option than placing children in a family-based setting with stranger."
(balticwords.com.)
Such a strange juxtaposition of concepts above, huh? "Orphanages stink" but "they work" AND, I should add they work demonstrably BETTER than the children of the affluent USA who have had legions of psychobabblers and progressive politicians "guiding" their development in whatever the latest new-fangled arrangement (someone wrote a successful book about recently) happened to be. AND, this was all done in Russia/USSR at a fraction of the cost, and without the state routinely super-imposing itself in opposition to families.
That is NOT to suggest that Russia has not always had an acute problem with protecting their most vulnerable from more immediate threats like death from beatings, cold, or starvation. But there is little evidence to suggest that Russian orphans (of whatever description) suffered any worse than anywhere else once they found their way to the orphanage. The only way in which they suffer more than in the West is that there is a certain social stigma attached to having been raised an orphan that even remains, somewhat, to this day.
(thefix.com.)
In Part III, tomorrow, we will examine the advent of "modern CPS" in the Russian Federation. There will be some surprises, for sure, as Russia remains an unique nation--not only because of it's immense size, but also because of its (mostly) brutal climate, history of collectivism (even prior to Communist times) and unique relationship of church to family, and state difficulty in projecting its power and influence equally/evenly throughout Russian society given both the distances involved and the comparative lack of resources.
In some ways, despite the periods of starvation and the alcoholism that have been a famous underbelly of Russian culture for well over 100 years, Russian children--even the abandoned and hungry--are better off than American children who are often trafficked and abused more AFTER coming into CPS contact than before. This, despite the amazing chasm between the two "super powers" in terms of financial resources and bureaucratic attention to the problem of homeless children.