In December 2012, President Vladimir Putin signed a law prohibiting Americans from adopting Russian children. The ban was revenge for the Magnitsky Act, which outlaws mostly Russian human rights offenders from entering the United States. It was a puzzling and sadistic move: retaliating against the U.S. Congress by punishing Russia’s own orphans.

Even before the ban, Russia was facing a crisis. In 2011, Pavel Astakhov, the Russian president’s children’s rights commissioner, released a report that counted more than 700,000 orphans in the Russian Federation’s population of 143 million. Astakhov noted that this is “slightly more than in the Soviet Union at the end of World War II”—when the country lost 27 million people. Today, there is no war to blame. The majority of Russia’s orphans are born to parents with substance-abuse problems, and many suffer from fetal alcohol syndrome, which can cause delayed development and intense hyperactivity. Their parents are either incapable of caring for them or do not want disabled children. Most Russians, for financial and cultural reasons, are largely unwilling to adopt.

The Russian government has argued that it was protecting children from abuse and death in America, following several high-profile cases that included a child who died in a hot car and another who was put on a plane and sent back to Russia. Others worried that, abroad, these children would lose their connection to their culture.

In thinking about how to document the effects of the ban, we decided not to focus on Russian orphanages—their quiet, shabby tragedies have been well trod by photographers. Instead, we wanted to meet children who have been adopted by American families—to capture the kinds of lives that might have been possible for tens of thousands of orphans had the Russian government not closed the door.

The Wengers