The Orphan as Propaganda
Somehow we are already about a week into March, and it is basically spring in Philadelphia. In the spirit of clearing out some cobwebs, a little missive in this neglected newsletter.
On Friday, I was listening to “The Daily” while alone in the car and started talking back to it in utter frustration. The episode features reporter Emma Bubola in conversation with Sabrina Tavernise (IMO the best “Daily” host) telling the story of how Russia has stolen about 16,000 Ukrainian children since the start of the war, placing them in foster and adoptive families and giving them Russian citizenship. This is, to be clear, a war crime, a violation of the Geneva Convention.
From the very beginning of the episode, Tavernise tells us that the children Russia has kidnapped are “mostly orphans.” Already, I tensed up. While children in Ukraine have no doubt actually suffered the deaths of their parents since the start of the war, I knew that these so-called “orphans” were likely mostly not literal orphans with dead parents. In Ukraine, as in many other countries where orphanages are still in operation, most “orphans” are children living in group homes and institutions who had either been removed from their families by child protective authorities or left by parents unable to care for them because of poverty or other hardships.
When Bubola tries to clarify this point to Tavernise, she ends up muddling things further:
So Sabrina, it looked like there was a pattern of systematic removal of Ukrainian children, many from group homes that are very common in Ukraine — orphanages or institutions that care for children who are not necessarily orphans. And they were relocating them to Russia with the plan to give them Russian citizenship and placing them in Russian families.
And Ukrainian authorities say that while the majority of these children who have been forcibly taken to Russia were orphans, there were many who were also taken from their parents, separated from their parents at filtration points, or who have relatives or family who would be ready to take them back in Ukraine.
In one breath, the children in group homes taken by Russians are “not necessarily orphans.” In the next, the majority of the children kidnapped are “orphans,” and there are some others who were separated from their families directly by the Russians. What?!
Over the course of the episode, it becomes clear that when Tavernise and Bubola are talking about orphans, they are not talking about literal orphans. They’re talking about vulnerable, institutionalized children who were already separated from their Ukrainian families when the war began—the equivalent, roughly, of American children in foster care.
This is the case of Anya, the fifteen-year-old girl whose situation is exemplified in the episode and this October 2022 article by Bubola. Anya’s disabled mother was deemed “unfit” by the state, and she was one of about 90,000 Ukrainian children living in institutions before the war began. Anya’s group home was in Mariupol, and while she survived the shelling there, she was unable to regain contact with her mother. While in the process of evacuating the city, Anya was picked off by Russian forces at a checkpoint and sent to live with a Russian foster family, given Russian citizenship, and brainwashed with Russian propaganda at school. In the meantime, her mother’s parental rights were terminated back in Ukraine, making their chance of ever reuniting exceedingly slim.
Russia is using Ukrainian children like Anya—children who are not orphans but whom it is convenient to think of as orphans—as pawns in their larger propaganda machine. On one level, they’re portraying the move as humanitarian: they’re saving these children, giving them “better” lives. On another level, Russia says they are merely taking back children that already belong to them, since the entire war is premised on the idea that Ukraine doesn’t exist and that Ukrainians are really Russian. As Bubola explains, the Russian families taking these children think of what they’re doing as patriotic, an idea furthered by state media.
I spoke to a mother who told me that she took into her family four children from Ukraine. And she told me we’re not taking anything that is not ours. And she even likened what her family did to what Russia is doing because Russia annexed four territories, and our family took in four children. So it’s there is really like a parallel between this broader idea of a war in which Russia is rescuing Ukraine, and these families are rescuing these children.
Part of what is so infuriating and sickening about Russia’s use of “orphans” as propaganda is that it’s not just working within their country. Toward the end of the episode, Tavernise plays “devil’s advocate,” arguing that even though these children were kidnapped and are being brainwashed in a cultural genocide, “they’re in potentially better and safer environments than they were before, even if it’s not necessarily what they themselves would have chosen.” I bet that a lot of people listening to the episode thought the same thing—that what Russia was doing wasn’t that bad, that these children were probably better off in Russian families, even if this is a war crime.
The reason why it is convenient to think of children like Anya as parentless orphans is because it forgives the ways in which we allow our (classist, ableist, racist) prejudices to decide who gets to have a family and what is in a child’s “best interest.” And while it’s true that individual prejudices like those underlying Tavernise’s “devil’s advocate” line of thinking don’t have a direct bearing on the lives of so-called “orphans,” they do get translated into policy, and they do effect what we as a society will and will not abide.
Ukraine’s stolen children represent an extreme of “orphans” being used as propaganda, but as I’ve said before, the orphan is always a symbol, always a pawn in a larger power play.