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Grantee Profiles

A Eurasia Foundation Grantee Profile

Moscow, Russia

Alan Moseley, Eurasia Foundation Central Russia Regional Office

In 1991, when Alexei Golovan and his partner Nail Shamsutdinov founded the Assistance in Destiny orphan support organization, they knew they were getting into something that could last a lifetime. "It’s a very personal question," Alexei explains, "but there came a time when I understood that I couldn’t leave this work. Sometimes it’s tough, but when you help one kid, from the beginning to the end, at that moment there’s always another who comes along and who trusts you, and trusts your organization, and I see that no one else can help him like we can." Nine years later Alexei estimates that Assistance in Destiny has given help to nearly 900 young people—all orphans struggling to take their first steps in the world beyond the orphanage walls.

Though Assistance in Destiny works exclusively with orphans in their post-institutional lives, they will help in any way they can. "We don’t divide their problems into those areas where we’ll help and those where we won’t. We’ll try to help them with any problems life puts in their way," says Alexei.

And the problems of orphans in today’s Russia are legion. Among the children and young adults leaving state care in the Russian Federation, one in three becomes homeless, one in five ends up with a criminal record, and as many as one in ten commits suicide. Such grim statistics can partly be explained by the large-scale institutional approach still taken in Russia to childcare and its severely negative effects on child development. While other countries have increasingly turned to smaller residential and foster-care programs, Russia has kept its Soviet-era system of large institutions mostly in place. Today it is estimated some 625,000 Russian children are under state care, and the numbers are growing. Russian children are abandoned to the state at a rate of over 100,000 a year—up dramatically from just under 70,000 in 1992.

Against this backdrop, Alexei and Nail and their colleagues at Assistance in Destiny saw that orphans leaving the orphanage, independent for the first time in their lives, desperately needed a stable place to live. "A person who doesn’t have his own place to live, a person without parents or without any connection to them is at an extreme disadvantage," Golovan explained. "He’s dependent on people who don’t care about him—people who often lie to him and cheat him. If a person doesn’t have his own corner of the world, it’s useless to give him money or help him find a job—none of this will make a difference unless there’s somewhere for him to go."

According to Russian law, orphans are entitled to receive housing from the state when they graduate from the orphanage. The city of Moscow each year determines the need for housing based on the number of orphans leaving the orphanage system and sets aside municipally-owned living space for their use. The housing orphans have received in the past, however, has often been uninhabitable, overcrowded, or back with the families who originally gave them up—many of whom have serious problems of their own.

Aiming to improve and expand legislation protecting the housing and property rights of orphans, Assistance in Destiny won an $18,776 grant from the Eurasia Foundation in 1998. They drafted a law that included a number of major improvements on existing legislation. First, the group recommended that an initial period be established during which orphans cannot sell the apartments they have received, and that orphans being resettled not be moved back in with the family members who had originally abandoned them to state care. Their proposed law also stipulated that orphans graduating from state care must receive a one-bedroom apartment, and not merely a room in one of Russia’s notoriously overcrowded communal apartments. Finally, their new legislation outlined a clear set of procedures for processing the paperwork related to arranging housing for orphans and included orphans in the "risk group" category—groups that are understood to be especially vulnerable and who receive special legal protection.

After Assistance in Destiny had researched the problem and determined the shape of legislation to remedy it, the group endeavored to raise public awareness and win the support of Moscow lawmakers. The mass media was a key element of their strategy: they managed to capture the interest of local journalists, who ultimately published a number of articles revealing the tragic fates of many orphans in their post-institutional lives. They also began a letter-writing campaign, which eventually caught the attention of Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov himself. Finally, on August 31, 1999, a year after the Eurasia Foundation grant, the provisions of Assistance in Destiny’s new law were adopted by the Moscow City Duma.

Anya Martinova is a graduate of the Russian orphanage system who went to Assistance in Destiny for help in 1999. Her mother, a severe alcoholic, relinquished her parental rights when Anya was in the second grade and gave her over to state care. While Anya was able to see her relatives on occasional weekend visits and holidays, her only real home was the orphanage. When she graduated from the orphanage at age 15, Anya’s official residence should have been back in the apartment with her mother and several other relatives; but, she says, her mother and an uncle there were drinking heavily, making it impossible to live in the same apartment with them. Instead, she moved in with a friend from the orphanage, sharing a single room in a communal apartment with six other people. Now, nearly eight years later, Assistance in Destiny is helping her leave the communal apartment and move to a place of her own for the first time. "Of course it’s scary," she admits, "because I’ve never had any place of my own. All my life I’ve lived in a group with other people, but now, when I’m working and trying to study all at once, I need peace and quiet."

Anya, who works at a recording studio and takes legal classes, heard of Assistance in Destiny through a friend. "They don’t turn anyone away," she says in amazement. "No matter what kind of problem you have, they listen to you, and they help you solve it." Alexei and his staff helped her collect all the required documents, pursued her case with the city authorities, and in less than a year a new one-bedroom apartment was found and transferred to her possession. "If I hadn’t found Assistance in Destiny, I really don’t know what I would have done," she says. "I’d probably still be in that little room with six other people, everyone trying to get along and keeping different schedules. . . . You can imagine how difficult it is."

The new law that Assistance in Destiny drafted is proving useful even for those orphans lucky enough to have received an apartment earlier. Elena Zorina-Kinkler, an employee of another orphan-assistance organization, explained that, before the legislation, children leaving orphanages often ended up homeless.

"Kids coming out of the orphanage would be in a rush to sell their apartments. They’d sell their apartment, spend all the money, and that’s it… these kids would end up as bums—that’s the only thing you could call them. They had nothing." Now that the law prevents them from selling their apartments for five years, Alexei Golovan explains, "they have a chance to get used to life outside of the orphanage and to find out how much that apartment is really worth. That way, they won’t sell it for, say, a couple of chocolate bars and a few bananas. They have a chance to get used to the idea that this is theirs. They’d never possessed anything before this apartment; they could never really feel like owners."

October 2000

This document (c) 2001, The Eurasia Foundation.
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