I haven’t really been able to bring myself to write about it until now, and there’s not much to say. My thoughts and prayers go out to the people of Yaroslavl in their time of tragedy, but also in their times of joy. My experience there was amazing, and I will always be indebted to them for the warmth and hospitality they showed me, and for all they taught me. They will always hold a special place in my heart.

May the members of the Lokomotiv rest in peace, and may their loved ones and the city that loves them find comfort and healing.

Here is a recent story on the loss.

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November 13, 2010
Attack on Russian Journalist Stirs Online Allies
By ELLEN BARRY and ANDREW E. KRAMER

MOSCOW — Two years ago, Oleg Kashin was sitting in a sleek little coffee shop around the corner from the Kremlin when a novelist walked in and punched him in the face.

The fight had begun online, during an exchange that included such phrases as “a legless bum that crawled out of the sewer” and “unprincipled prostitute” and “primitively smash you in the mug.” In the course of the beating, the novelist said he realized several things about his adversary. First, despite his shock-jock online persona, Mr. Kashin was not a fighter. Second, he was not afraid.

“I began to look more attentively at him,” said the novelist, Eduard I. Bagirov. “I think that if you hit him in the face it won’t scare him, he does not care.”

Mr. Bagirov was right. What Mr. Kashin did after that was take on bigger and bigger enemies, including some who had the support of the Kremlin.

On Nov. 6, when Mr. Kashin was beaten nearly to death outside his doorway by unidentified assailants, his name was added to the list of journalists who have been silenced through violence in Russia, alongside opposition icons like Anna Politkovskaya and Natalya Estemirova, who were both killed.

But Mr. Kashin, 30, is from a different generation — one wary of both the state and the opposition, one that has flooded the Internet and come of age speaking freely there. And his brutal beating with a metal bar has hit a nerve somewhere deep in that group.

“I am reading the commentaries of people who have always been completely apolitical, and I am just stunned,” said Aleksei A. Navalny, 34, a prominent blogger. “It is a completely different generation, in their relation to life, to technology and to everything else. These are the people who Kashin was closest to, and these are the people he wrote for.”

The response to the attack on Mr. Kashin stands out not so much for its proportions as for who is speaking out. The news spread instantly online on that Saturday morning, penetrating an entire subculture before dawn. By the end of last week, some of the same people — a group allergic to political parties or demonstrations of any kind — were rallying at Pushkin Square.

“He is one of the best of us,” Vitaly Shushkevich told Vesti, a cable news station. “So the reaction of the blogosphere is understandable: they are beating us.”

Though Mr. Kashin worked for Kommersant, a major newspaper, many of the people at the rally knew him best through the stream of doggerel and profanity and Zen koans that was his Twitter feed. His online readership was not a huge group — maybe 5,000, Mr. Navalny estimated — but it included much of Moscow’s young media elite, and they followed him not only as a writer but also as a character. He reveled in the extraordinary freedom of Russia’s blogosphere and seemed to take a particular glee in challenging powerful men in the open air of his LiveJournal blog.

“Do you consider I have to apologize?” he wrote, during an online exchange this summer with the governor of Pskov. “What will happen if I don’t?”

Mr. Kashin arrived in Moscow at 23 from the port city of Kaliningrad. “Russian sailor Kashin,” as he sometimes referred to himself, became a persona — a blunt-spoken outsider in the ingrown world of Moscow politics. His own politics varied, he acknowledged cheerfully, in a list of 100 facts about himself.

“Kashin can find an ideological base for any nonsense,” he wrote. “Kashin would have been a dissident if he lived under Soviet power.”

In his mid-20s, Mr. Kashin found work at pro-Kremlin publications, which sought to mobilize young Russians against the pro-Western wave that had swept Ukraine. He took aim at liberal icons like Ms. Politkovskaya, the Kremlin critic who was killed in 2006, writing that he considered her more of a newsmaker than a journalist.

“I can disillusion the romantic reader,” he wrote. “There is no such frightening truth for which a journalist can be killed.”

Then, two years ago, Mr. Kashin switched sides. He stopped writing for pro-government outlets and turned his attention to the youth movements around Vladislav Y. Surkov, the Kremlin’s leading ideologist. Some of his posts were needling — he circulated a screen shot of an online chat that appeared to show a former leader of one of the movements, Nashi, acknowledging having sex with a minor.

And some turned ugly. When Mr. Kashin, writing on LiveJournal in August, used a derogatory term to refer to Andrei A. Turchak, 34, the governor of Pskov and a former leader of the pro-Kremlin youth group Molodaya Gvardiya, a response appeared within two hours: “Young man, you’ve got 24 hours to apologize. You can do it here, or in a separate post. The clock has started.”

“Excuse me, is it a threat?” Mr. Kashin wrote, and gleefully elaborated: “I consider your appointment an insult to federalism, common sense and other things of the same order. I consider being related to a friend of Putin’s insufficient grounds to lead a region. I am sure if there were free elections you would not win more than 5 percent.”

Oksana Shiran, a spokeswoman for Mr. Turchak’s office, told Kommersant that the governor would not comment until the investigation was completed.

The list of people known to have been offended by Mr. Kashin seemed to grow longer every day this past week. He infuriated the police and Molodaya Gvardiya this summer with his coverage of antigovernment protests in Khimki. He clashed online with white supremacist gangs, according to Maksim G. Avdeyev, a close friend, and was finishing a book about Viktor I. Petrik, a scientist allied with leaders of the ruling party, United Russia.

“Kashin created enemies every day, and in huge quantity,” said Mr. Bagirov, 35, the novelist who hit Mr. Kashin in the coffee shop. (Their difference of opinion was about a woman, he said.) But all those clashes happened in a space that was protected — or at least seemed to be.

“Obscenities and threats are specific features of the Russian blogosphere,” Mr. Bagirov said in an interview from Indonesia, where he now lives. “Nothing was allowed for 70 years under the Communists, and all of a sudden everything is allowed.” You can say anything you want, no matter how vicious or profane, he said, “to an unknown person on the Internet.”

He reacted with horror to the attack, saying he reads Mr. Kashin’s articles “from the first word to the last period.”

“Those like Kashin — there are only a dozen of them in the country,” he wrote in his blog. “And if the mastermind is found, and his legs are inserted in his intestinal tract, I personally will be completely satisfied.”

Anna Tikhomirova and Karen Arpryants contributed reporting.

The orphanage depicted here is not like the orphanages where I worked. It seems better equipped and staffed, but given the frequent question from children cited by the orphanage worker at the end of this article, the children apparently aren’t much different.

I’m pasting the article below, but THIS LINK is worth clicking on; it leads to photos and a nice Back Story audio clip by New York Times Radio.

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May 3, 2010
Russian Orphanage Offers Love, but Not Families
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY

MOSCOW — There is nothing dreary about Orphanage No. 11. It has rooms filled with enough dolls and trains and stuffed animals to make any child giggly. It has speech therapists and round-the-clock nurses and cooks who delight in covertly slipping a treat into a tiny hand. It has the feel of a place where love abounds.

What it does not have are many visits from potential parents.

Few of its children will ever be adopted — by Russians or foreigners. When they reach age 7 and are too old for this institution they will be shuttled to the next one, reflecting an entrenched system that is much better at warehousing children — and profiting from them — than finding them families.

The case of a Russian boy who returned alone to Moscow, sent back by his American adoptive mother, has focused intense attention on the pitfalls of international adoption.

But the outcry has obscured fundamental questions about why Russia has so many orphans and orphanages in the first place.

In recent days, senior Russian officials have begun to acknowledge how troubled their system is.

The chairwoman of the parliamentary committee on family and children, Yelena B. Mizulina, spotlighted what she said was a shocking statistic: Russia has more orphans now, 700,000, than at the end of World War II, when an estimated 25 million Soviet citizens were killed.

Ms. Mizulina noted that for all the complaints about the return of the boy, Artyom Savelyev, by his adoptive mother in Tennessee, Russia itself has plenty of experience with failed placements. She said 30,000 children in the last three years inside Russia were sent back to institutions by their adoptive, foster or guardianship families.

“Specialists call such a boom in returns a humanitarian catastrophe,” she said.

She reeled off more figures. The percentage of children who are designated orphans is four to five times higher in Russia than in Europe or the United States. Of those, 30 percent live in orphanages. Most of them are children who have been either given up by their parents or removed from dysfunctional homes by the authorities.

Her comments offered a sense of the frustration over the state of Russia’s orphanage system, which has long been resistant to reform.

Over the years, proposals to reduce the system’s size — the deinstitutionalization that occurred decades ago in the United States and elsewhere — have gone nowhere.

Despite the horror stories recounted about Russian orphanages, social welfare experts say that conditions in many are not terrible; some are excellent. The more pressing issue is the warehousing of young children in large-scale facilities, which experts say can hold back their social and intellectual development.

But the system’s defenders said that until the government figures out how to cut down on social problems like drug and alcohol abuse to improve family life, there is no alternative.

“It would be a lot better if there were no orphanages, and every child were happy in the family that he or she has,” said the director of Orphanage No. 11, Lidiya Y. Slusareva. “But if there are bad families, then it is better that the children are here.”

The scrutiny of the Russian system comes as Russian and American diplomats are working out new rules for adoptions.

Russian officials, who have often seemed embarrassed that their country cannot care for all its children and has to give some up to foreigners, demanded the new rules after Artyom was returned.

The Foreign Ministry said adoptions by Americans would be suspended until an agreement is reached. It is not entirely clear whether adoptions are actually frozen, or whether the process is just being dragged out.

In recent years, the Russian government has repeatedly pledged to bolster efforts to help families stay together, to increase the number of children who are adopted and to expand foster care. But it has not had notable success.

Indeed, while Russia has its share of social problems, the large number of orphans stems in part from a policy that does not place a high value on keeping families together.

The Russian government spends roughly $3 billion annually on orphanages and similar facilities, creating a system that is an important source of jobs and money on the regional level — and a target for corruption.

As a result, it is in the interests of regional officials to maintain the flow of children to orphanages and then not to let them leave, child welfare experts said. When adoptions are permitted, families, especially foreign families, have to pay large fees and navigate a complex bureaucracy.

“The system has one goal, which is to preserve itself,” said Boris L. Altshuler, chairman of Right of the Child, an advocacy group in Moscow, and a member of a Kremlin advisory group.

“That is why the process of adoption in Russia is like going through the circles of hell,” he said. “The system wants these children to remain orphans.”

He said that in 2008, 115,000 children in Russia were designated as without parental care, typically after being removed from their homes by caseworkers. Only 9,000 children were returned to their parents that year. In the United States, where reuniting families is a primary goal, the percentage is far higher, he said.

Over all, 13,000 children were officially adopted in 2008 — 9,000 by Russians and 4,000 by foreigners, officials said.

The system’s stagnation can be seen at Orphanage No. 11, which houses 45 to 50 children. Most have health or behavior difficulties, but the staff coaxes wonders from them.

In the auditorium on a recent day, a group rehearsed a dance wearing 18th-century ball costumes, then went back to the dressing room before returning in Russian peasant outfits for a traditional dance. It was hard not to be charmed.

Even so, only a single child has been adopted from the orphanage this year.

Since the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, a total of 74 children have been adopted — an average of about four a year, said the director, Ms. Slusareva, who plays no role in their placement. The total comprises 20 adoptions to Russians, 24 to Americans and 30 to other foreigners.

The case of Artyom at first spurred a strong reaction, with some Russians saying that a country whose population is shrinking should never send its children abroad.

But Ms. Slusareva did not agree. The primary goal, she said, should be to locate good homes for these children — preferably in Russia, but if not there, then elsewhere.

“The hardest thing is when a child asks, ‘When will a mama come for me?’ ” she said. “So the best moment for me is when a child leaves the orphanage with a family.”

Adoption freeze urged after boy returned to Russia
NATALIYA VASILYEVA and KRISTIN M. HALL, AP
Fri Apr 9, 12:01 PM EDT

A top Russian official urged Friday that all child adoptions by U.S. families be frozen after a woman from Tennessee put her 7-year-old adopted Russian grandson alone on a one-way flight back to his homeland.

The grandmother, Nancy Hansen, told The Associated Press from her home in Shelbyville, Tennessee, that she put the child on a plane to Russia with a note from her daughter. She said the family paid a man $200 to pick the boy up at the airport and take him to the Russian Education and Science Ministry.

She said that boy had been violent toward his mother in the U.S.

A previous string of U.S. adoptions gone wrong — including at least three in which children died — had already made Russian officials wary. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called the latest incident the last straw.

The boy, Artyom Savelyev arrived unaccompanied Thursday in Moscow on a United Airlines flight from Washington.

The Kremlin children’s rights office said the boy, whose adoptive name is Justin Hansen, was carrying a letter from his adoptive mother, Torry Hansen of Shelbyville, Tennessee, saying she was returning him due to severe psychological problems.

“This child is mentally unstable. He is violent and has severe psychopathic issues,” the letter said.

The U.S. ambassador to Russia, John Beyrle, said he was “deeply shocked by the news” and “very angry that any family would act so callously toward a child that they had legally adopted.”

But Nancy Hansen said the boy was sent back to the ministry because the family thought officials there would take care of him. There was no child abandonment, she said, because a stewardess was watching the boy on the flight and a reputable person picked him up in Russia.

Russian state television showed the child in a yellow jacket holding the hands of two chaperones as he left a police precinct and entered a van bound for a clinic.

The boy is now in the hospital in northern Moscow for a checkup, Anna Orlova, spokeswoman for Kremlin’s Children Rights Commissioner Pavel Astakhov, told The Associated Press.

Orlova, who visited Savelyev on Friday, said the child reported that his mother was “bad,” “did not love him,” and used to pull his hair.

Savelyev was adopted last September from the town of Partizansk in Russia’s Far East.

Russian officials said he turned up at the door of the Russian Education and Science Ministry on Thursday afternoon accompanied by a Russian man who handed over the boy and his documents, then left, officials said.

Savelyev holds a Russian passport with a U.S. visa that expired April 4, Russian officials said.

The education ministry said it had decided to suspended the license of World Association for Children and Parents — a Renton, Washington-based agency that processed Savelyev’s adoption — for the duration of the probe.

Foreign Minister Lavrov said in televised remarks that the ministry would recommend that the U.S. and Russia hammer out an agreement before any new adoptions are allowed.

“We have taken the decision … to suggest a freeze on any adoptions to American families until Russia and the USA sign an international agreement” on the conditions for adoptions and the obligations of host families, Lavrov was quoted as saying.

Lavrov said the U.S. had refused to negotiate such an accord in the past but “the recent event was the last straw.”

Astakhov said in a televised interview Friday that a treaty is vital for protecting Russian citizens abroad.

“How can we prosecute a person who abused the rights of a Russian child abroad? If there was an adoption treaty in place, we would have legal means to protect Russian children abroad.”

But placing children inside Russia remains difficult. There are more than 740,000 children without parental custody in the country, according to UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund.

Previous incidents have increased Russian officials’ wariness of adoptions to the U.S.

In 2006, Peggy Sue Hilt of Manassas, Virginia, was sentenced to 25 years in prison after being convicted of fatally beating a 2-year-old girl adopted from Siberia just months earlier.

In 2008, Kimberly Emelyantsev of Tooele, Utah, was sentenced to 15 years after pleading guilty to killing a Russian infant in her care.

And in March of this year, prosecutors in Pennsylvania met with a Russian diplomats to discuss how to handle the case of a couple accused of killing their 7-year-old adopted Russian son at their home near the town of Dillsburg.

The cases prompted outrage in Russia, where foreign failures are reported with gusto, and calls for tougher rules governing foreign adoptions.

Last year, nearly 1,600 Russian children were adopted in the United States, according to Tatyana Yakovleva of the ruling United Russia party.

Rob Johnson, a spokesman for the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services, said the agency is looking into Friday’s allegations, although they do not handle international adoptions.

Torry Ann Hansen is listed as a licensed registered nurse in Shelbyville, Tenn., according to the Tennessee Department of Health’s Web site. No work address is listed.

Her name appears in a list of August 2007 graduates from Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tenn., with a Masters of Science in Nursing degree.

Bedford County Sheriff Randall Boyce said Torry Hansen is under investigation although no charges have been filed. Officers were expected to interview her on Friday afternoon.

United Airlines requires a parent or guardian dropping off a child for a flight to show an ID and to list who is picking the child up at the destination. United Airlines allows unaccompanied children as young as 5 years old on direct flights. Children age 8 and above can catch connecting flights, as well.

United spokeswoman Robin Urbanski said all the unaccompanied minors on the flight that arrived in Moscow on Thursday were picked up by the person listed on the form.

A new report says that at least four out of five children in orphanages around the world have a living parent.

The charity Save the Children says some institutions coerce or trick poor parents to give up their children.

As a result, the report says, millions of children are put at risk through living in an institution, and face rape, trafficking and beatings.

Save the Children says resources should go into projects which support families so they can look after their children.

To read the full article, click here or the link above.

For more info, click here.

June 28, 2009
U.S. And Russia Differ on Treaty for Cyberspace
By JOHN MARKOFF and ANDREW E. KRAMER

The United States and Russia are locked in a fundamental dispute over how to counter the growing threat of cyberwar attacks that could wreak havoc on computer systems and the Internet.

Both nations agree that cyberspace is an emerging battleground. The two sides are expected to address the subject when President Obama visits Russia next week and at the General Assembly of the United Nations in November, according to a senior State Department official.

But there the agreement ends.

Russia favors an international treaty along the lines of those negotiated for chemical weapons and has pushed for that approach at a series of meetings this year and in public statements by a high-ranking official.

The United States argues that a treaty is unnecessary. It instead advocates improved cooperation among international law enforcement groups. If these groups cooperate to make cyberspace more secure against criminal intrusions, their work will also make cyberspace more secure against military campaigns, American officials say.

Hello, Julie,
This is Anton, I am doing fine, answering your question about the hospital – i went to the hospital just for a check, i do not have any pains, it was just a medical examination.
Julie, I go in for sports, I play soccer, volleyball, basketball. I also can balance a stick on my nose, I learnt to do it myself, nobody taught me this.
I can speak and read a little English, I like to read about animals and birds, I also like to have a walk and perform tricks from high roofs.
Julie, my [CD] player [that the incredible Glenn gave him and told him was from me] got stolen at night by the graduates, I had put it in a cabinet. I got an A for my dictation, and a B for my test.
Here’s my short story, I don’t have a photograph.
Love

He also drew the flower in this photo. The caption says, “This rose is for you.”

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BusinessWeek ran a great story recently about how the global economic crisis is affecting Yaroslavl. I highly recommend it to everybody!

The BusinessWeek article is accompanied by a slideshow of terrific photos. Be sure to check them out!

Fascinating. Must watch.

On an unrelated note, I received another letter from Anton recently. He’s doing great!