August 9 1999

ARTICLE TOOLS

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In 1990, I helped run the first independent human-rights conference in the Soviet Union, which, in a roundabout way, offered a lesson in the importance of families and a loving home. I accepted an invitation to visit an orphanage for oligophrenics ("little brains" or "imbeciles") and was amazed to find bright, eager, and articulate children. I was more amazed when their teachers repeatedly emphasized that they will never hold a "proper" job.

I asked my guide why these bright children were being treated like this. He replied, "The Soviet Union needs unthinking, unskilled manual workers."

What I saw the next day was worse. We visited the locked unit for adolescents in St. Petersburg's biggest psychiatric hospital. The ward was bare, save for the urine-soaked mattresses on which lay drug-induced male "zombies." The case notes I saw read, "Nothing abnormal on admission"; then scrawled in as the diagnosis: "schizophrenia." I discovered that many of the boys there had run away from the horrors of the orphanages for oligophrenics. Little Ivan, with a shock of brown hair falling over his face, pleaded, "Please, will you find me a mother? I want to get out of here."

Once children have a psychiatric record they cannot aspire even to be an "unthinking manual worker." For the boys, the only option was the army. "Maybe it was not a coincidence," my guide said, "that soldiers who slaughtered women and children at Tbilisi were said to be 'orphan soldiers,' never having known a family's love."

I was asked to return to the new, postcommunist Russia to do further research on the situation for children and then write a report to submit to the government. We researched 15 orphanages for oligophrenics in Moscow and St. Petersburg and visited several ...