KALUGA, Russia -- For years, Marina Guseva longed for a child, but last year when the dollmaker turned 44, she and her husband realized it wasn't going to happen the usual way. So the couple began to consider bringing home a child from one of the many orphanages in this city, located about 110 miles south of Moscow.
"At first, I didn't know where to go or who to ask," Guseva said. But then a friend pointed out one of the posters that had begun to pop up around this city of 360,000 people. They featured pictures of children, from infants to teenagers, with the words "I want a mother." Guseva called the number listed on the poster last January, and in June, 8-year-old Masha Yakovleva came home with her as a foster child.
"I feel as if we have known each other all our lives," said Guseva, who is raising the girl with the help of a generous foster allowance. "And she saw me as her mother from the very beginning."
This family's story is all too rare in most of Russia. But here in Kaluga, the local government has launched a media and financial campaign that has helped bring hundreds of children into foster and adoptive homes. The city and the surrounding administrative region are offering an example that could address one of the country's most pressing and seemingly intractable social problems: the fate of 250,000 children warehoused in often-bleak institutions.
Domestic adoption rates have fallen over the past 10 years, and there is increasing hostility to foreign adoption following the reported killings of a number of Russian children at the hands of American parents. Of the 170,000 children who are available for adoption each year, only about 8 percent are adopted domestically and abroad. Another 80,000 children in institutions cannot be placed with families because their legal status has not been finalized or is disputed, officials said.
A recent opinion poll found that 72 percent of Russians surveyed would not adopt children under any circumstances and 56 percent opposed foreign adoption. Taken together, those results suggested that a large segment of the population was willing to condemn orphans to permanent state care.
"There are a lot of myths out there: that nearly all of the children are very sick or have mental problems," said Tatyana Lepekha, director of a public relations firm and volunteer editor of "Hey, Parents!", a newsletter on adoption
Lepekha and her husband, Sergei, recently adopted 2-year-old Lada and expect to adopt another 2-year-old this fall. "What we need is to educate the public," she said. "There are a lot of people out there, like me, who can't have children and want children. They need to be shown the way."
A small number of Russian regions, including Kaluga, are trying to do that. In 2003, Kaluga Gov. Anatoly Artamonov, a member of the Kremlin-backed United Russia party, formed a committee of seven state employees and charged it with getting children out of orphanages and into families' homes. The group quickly concluded that economic insecurity among prospective parents was the principal barrier.
For Russians, getting a child into a good kindergarten can be a financial burden, requiring bribes or special donations, although school is ostensibly free. Parental responsibility in Russia also often extends to providing housing for children when they reach adulthood.
Kaluga's government pledged to enforce a national policy that is often ignored but that guarantees orphans places in the education institution of their choice, from kindergarten to college. The government also promised to abide by policies that state adopted orphans get a free apartment when they turn 18.
At the committee's urging, Artamonov in 2003 increased the monthly payment to foster parents to about $285 per child, the highest of any region in Russia. In Moscow, the monthly payment to foster parents is about $125.
