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As I have noted before, Russia has 86 governing subdivisions that are potential locations for an adoption. The 59 agencies that are now seeking accreditation and re-accreditation from the Ministry of Education each operate in only a handful of these regions. I’ve given you five tips on choosing a region once you have selected your agency.
But there’s a lot more to learn about Russia’s regions. Not only for the prospective parents now waiting for referrals and travel dates, but also for those of you who have already brought children home and are looking to add pages to their lifebooks.
So I’ve decided to begin a new series of profiles on Russia’s regions. I’ll be drawing from information online and off, from printed materials and photos, Russian sources and outsiders. I’ll pull from my experiences traveling through Russia and what I’ve learned from some of the adoptive parents I’ve talked to already. I’ll try to work in an organized fashion through the list below. (I am posting the full list even though some regions, like Chechnya, are clearly not possibilities now.) But if there’s a region on the list that you need information on ASAP, let me know by sending me an e-mail from my bio page. I hope you’ll also write if you’ve been to one of these regions and have resources and information to share.
Republics: Adygea, Altai, Bashkortostan, Buryatia, Chechnya, Chuvashia, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Kalmykia, Karachayevo-Cherkessia, Karelia, Khakassia, Komi, Mari El, Mordovia, North Ossetia, Sakha (Yakutia), Tatarstan, Tuva, Udmurtia
Territories (Krai: Altai, Khabarovsk, Krasnodar, Krasnoyarsk, Primorye, Stavropol
Regions: Amur, Arkhangelsk, Astrakhan, Belgorod, Bryansk, Chelyabinsk, Chita, Irkutsk, Ivanovo, Kaliningrad, Kaluga, Kamchatka, Kemerovo, Kirov, Kostroma, Kurgan, Kursk, Leningrad, Lipetsk, Magadan, Moscow, Murmansk, Nizhny Novgorod, Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Orel, Orenburg, Penza, Perm, Pskov, Rostov, Ryazan, Sakhalin, Samara, Saratov, Smolensk, Sverdlovsk, Tambov, Tomsk, Tula, Tver, Tyumen, Ulyanovsk, Vladimir, Volgograd, Vologda, Voronezh, Yaroslavl
Federal Cities: Moscow, St. Petersburg
Autonomous Areas And Regions: Agin-Buryatia, Chukotka, Evenk, Jewish Autonomous Region, Khanty-Mansi, Komi-Permyak, Koryak, Nenets, Taimyr (Dolgan-Nenets), Ust-Ordynsky Buryat, Yamalo-Nenets
We have been to Russia to meet a “blind” referral. I believe the one question that I did not ask, or even see in all of my research, is how much time do you have in the orphanage? And really understand the answer… we went to Kirov, a VERY quick region, which is great is you have an obviously healthy or unhealthy referral. If I had understood the consequences of only having a few hours in the orphanage with the referral, meaning that we would have to come home, get a good night’s sleep and a second IA opinion, before turning her down… I would not have chosen to go to Kirov.