Russia Finds It Takes More Than Love to Aid Orphans

Kaluga also created a monthly child allowance of about $105 for adoptive parents, another first in Russia, and increased the allowance for guardianship, a legal mechanism used mostly by relatives of orphaned children. Nearly 400,000 orphaned or abandoned Russian children are being cared for by relatives, officials said.

The committee launched a major public relations campaign depicting adoption as rewarding and civic-minded. It flooded the city with posters and postcards with pictures of children. It placed articles in all the local newspapers about families that had successfully taken orphans into their homes.

"People stopped being scared of the words 'adoption' and 'foster child' and 'foster parent,' " said Gennady Radchenko, a member of the committee. He said he believed a screening process weeds out people who are seeking to profit from parenting. "We want to say yes, but we often say no," he said. "We won't take just anyone."

The campaign is slowly emptying the region's orphanages. Five of 18 institutions have closed in the last two years; Artamonov has said his goal is to have only one orphanage in Kaluga five years from now. The number of institutionalized children has dropped from 1,000 to 600 in the last two years, and the average age of those remaining in state care is steadily rising as more and more infants and younger children, the easiest to place, move quickly into families' homes.

"This is a difficult problem but it's not an impossible problem," said Antonina Belkina, chairman of the local committee. "If you educate people, if you show them these wonderful children and if you have the money to help them, you can see the change."

Kaluga's program has begun to draw national attention from the federal government. In the last two months, the Education and Science Ministry launched a Web site picturing orphans and offering information on adoption and other forms of custody for Russians in the country's 89 regions.

Prospective parents can type in the preferred sex, age and physical characteristics of a child to retrieve pictures of orphans in their neighborhood, with a short description of the children, including their temperament.

The ministry recently produced television advertisements encouraging adoption and other forms of custody and is negotiating with the country's TV networks to place public service spots in prime time. The ministry has also put in place a system that allows Russians to find phone numbers for more information by simply text-messaging the word deti (children) to a number on their cell phones.

"We looked at the experience of a number of regions that have made very good progress," said Sergei Apatenko, director for youth policy at the ministry, pointing to Kaluga as well as the cities of Samara on the Volga River and Perm in the Ural Mountains region. "We understand that raising a child in a family is always the best option, and that's our priority because every child has the right to a family. It's a huge problem, but we are taking the first steps, and new forms need time to take root."

Skeptics fear that the country's system of orphanages, which cost $1 billion a year, will be difficult to dismantle because of entrenched bureaucratic and economic interests. Moreover, critics say, most regions don't have the staff with the training or will to welcome prospective parents, and many people are turned off after their first encounter with the system.

"There are many people with great interest in not allowing these children to get out into the world," said Boris Altshuler, head of the advocacy group Right of the Child. "Adoption and foster care threaten their budget and their jobs."

To address that concern, Gov. Artamonov has declared that vacant orphanages in Kaluga will be converted into family support centers and employees will continue to have jobs.

The number of children adopted, both by domestic and foreign parents, has grown slightly to about 120 a year, but the number of children in foster care has gone from close to zero in 2002 to 500 today. In all of Russia, only 3,517 children entered foster care in 2004, according to the Education and Science Ministry.

For Galina Ivicheva, a divorcee who became the foster mother of a brother and sister, ages 6 and 7, the financial support in Kaluga allowed her to have the children she always wanted.

"These children are mine and I will always be their mother," said Ivicheva, 44, who works in a local store. "But the support I get makes a big difference. Recently, I was out of work for nine months, and I didn't have to worry about how I would care for them. That gives you great peace of mind. It helped me make my decision."