I don't know what to make of the story that showed up on RIA Novosti yesterday.

RIA Novosti is a news agency owned and operated by the Russian government. It grew out of a news service started by the Soviets in 1941. And as such, you probably wouldn't be surprised to see stories on it that reflect an official viewpoint.

The story that showed up yesterday on its English-language site (RIA Novosti publishes in Russian, English, German, French, Arabic, Persian, Japanese and Chinese) carried the headline "40,000 Russian adoptees in America". A box at the bottom identifies the author as Svetlana Sorokina, who is the Russian equivalent of Diane Sawyer--tough but fair. When privately-owned media outlets began popping up under perestroika, Sorokina was a key journalist for the NTV television channel. But according to a recent story in the Ukranian newspaper Zerkalo Nedeli, she, and many others from the independent press era, have been relegated to the sidelines. What I didn't know until I read the box is that Sorokina is also an adoptive mom.

RIA Novosti credited the story to Rossiiskaya Gazeta, and a little sleuthing discovered that it ran there on November 28 of last year. Rossiiskaya Gazeta also hews a fairly official line, but it has a supplement, Russia Beyond The Headlines that appears in English and is distributed by The Daily Telegraph, The Washington Post and The Times Of India.

In the piece, Sorokina largely lives up to her promise of impartiality. She mentions problems, but also talks of children whose lives improved when they joined American families. She takes readers through an interesting history of adoption in Russia: I didn't know that, during the Spanish Civil War, Russia took in the orphans of Spanish Republicans. And she takes a poke at her fellow countrymen for latching on quickest to the stories about problem adoptions. (One quibble: The total number of Russian-born children adopted by Americans is not 40,000, but 54,816 if you add up all the yearly totals I listed in this post.)

But I get the feeling that her fellow countrymen are not the intended audience of this piece. We are. And Sorokina seems to have some news for us. She says that Russian legislators will soon begin reviewing a bill to ban independent adoptions, i.e. those that don't go through an accredited agency. That's been expected for some time, and frankly, it's good news: A thoroughly vetted agency is an adoptive parent's best ally.

Sorokina also says, however, that Russia "is willing to make bilateral agreements with interested countries, starting with Italy, France and Spain, to guarantee adoptees’ rights. Dealing with the United States will be more complicated, as separate agreements will be necessary with each state." Hmmm. Russia is a signatory to the 1993 Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, but, unlike the U.S., Italy, France and Spain, it has never moved on to ratification. If somebody with a better legal mind than mine has a clue to why a bilateral agreement would be necessary when the Hague treaty is a multilateral document, please speak up.

Read Sorokina's piece and let me know what you think.

Image credit: jeltovski at Morguefile.com.