MOSCOW – Thousands of Russians marched on Sunday in condemnation of the Russian Parliament’s move to ban adoption of Russian children by American families, an event dubbed a “March Against Scoundrels,” where participants chanted, “Take your hands off children,” and carried posters showing the faces of lawmakers stamped with the word “Shame.”
Marchers flooded tree-lined boulevards for many blocks on a bitterly cold day. The police estimated the turnout at 9,500; organizers said it was much larger, in the tens of thousands.
The sight gags and clever slogans of last year’s anti-government rallies were gone, and many participants had emotional answers for why they had come to march. Many questioned the moral principles of a ban on adoptions by Americans in a country with so many children in foster care or orphanages.
“Even I can’t afford to adopt, and I’m supposedly middle class,” Yekaterina Komissarova, 31, said, adding that perhaps this affected her so strongly because she is the mother of two children.
Marina Lukanova, a teacher, said many of her friends had tried to adopt children and found it nearly impossible. “What they found was endless bureaucracy – they fill out forms and nothing happens,” she said. “And now they have given up.”
President Vladimir V. Putin approved the adoption ban in late December, as part of a broader law retaliating against the United States for the so-called Magnitsky Act, an effort to punish Russian officials accused of human rights violations.
Russian leaders have complained bitterly for years about light sentences handed down in cases where American adoptive parents abused or neglected children adopted from Russia, and named the ban after Dmitri Yakovlev, a toddler who died of heatstroke in Virginia in 2008 after his adoptive father left him in a parked car for nine hours.
But the decision has proven divisive in Russia, even within government circles. More than 650,000 children live in foster care or orphanages in Russia, of whom about 120,000 are eligible for adoption. Many children in orphanages are sick or disabled, and most have little hope of finding permanent homes.
“The authorities thought we would do what we usually do – swallow it and be quiet. They did not expect such a reaction,” said Elena Rostova, 61, who attended the march. “But we had two weeks to consider what awaited these handicapped children.”
A series of high-ranking officials openly expressed their disagreement before the ban was enacted, and figures from the art and entertainment world have recorded emotional messages of dissent and published them on the Internet. Opposition groups have hoped that outrage sparked by the adoption ban would reinvigorate a Moscow-based protest movement that has sagged in recent months, as the government began to prosecute and impose tough sentences on street activists.
A poll released in December by the Public Opinion Foundation showed that 56 percent of Russians approved of the adoption ban. A top official from United Russia, Andrei Isayev, last week described Sunday’s protest as a “March of Child-Sellers,” and tried to refocus attention on the Magnitsky Act, which he described as a “public, demonstrative humiliation of the Russian Federation.”
“All the enemies of Russian sovereignty showed themselves the ardent supporters of American adoption,” Mr. Isayev wrote on a party Web site.
