Genetic Online Community, the Russian Aristocracy and Adoption: What Comes After Putin
How the State Department might use genomic sequencing to foster realistic regime change.
I often think a lot about adoption.
Many of my dear friends growing up were adopted and I’ve dated more than a few women who were adopted. I’m not sure what that says about me.
In some cases I’ve helped them track down their family members through genomic genealogy. In other cases I’ve helped them figure out health considerations based upon their genomics.
There are these weird things I’ve noticed through the adoption frame:
There’s actually a case to be made that children have become very precious indeed.
I’ve more or less come to believe that a high birth rate doesn’t work with this sort of thing. As with so many things this’ll have plus and minuses, most of which remain to be seen. A world of only children (as in no siblings) is probably a world that’s less likely to see large scale war, for example.
And yet this birth dearth is taking place at precisely the same time that much of the world is moving in an imperial direction.
All throughout human history empires recruited the children of conquered peoples. Think the Turks and the janissaries. Think America and its immigration system which for years tried to select the proverbial “cream of the crop.” Immigration is often seen as a “free lunch” — altogether costless for the host country.
Countries with declining fertility could well snatch other people’s kids. Indeed that may well have been what was going on when the Russians seized children from Ukraine.
NPR wrote about it in February 2023:
The Russian government is operating a systematic network of at least 40 child custody centers for thousands of Ukrainian children, a potential war crime, according to a new report by Yale University researchers in a collaboration with the U.S. State Department in a program to hold Russia accountable.
The report, "Russia's Systematic Program for the Re-Education and Adoption of Ukrainian Children," describes a system of holding facilities that stretch from the Black Sea coast to Siberia.
"This is not one rogue camp, this is not one rogue mayor or governor," says Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab. "It is a massive logistical undertaking that does not happen by accident."
Could it be that part of the Russian plan is to re-educate the Ukrainian children they’ve captured? You could imagine these Ukrainians being sent back into Ukraine upon maturation.
Like I said, I’ve noticed weird things.
In recent years I noticed that a lot of my Chinese-American friends started to refer to themselves as American-born Chinese — a curious trend that I fear may portend something more dangerous in the future.
Isn’t it interesting how many of the social media influencers are adopted Chinese kids? Why it’s almost as if their numbers are being artificially inflated by a rogue power!
I sometimes wonder if the Russians recruit adopted kids or use the adoption process as a way of leveraging desperate parents. Something to think about particularly when you think about all the prominent people, particularly conservatives, who have been allowed to adopt children in Russia.
These are, of course, terrible things to think but I think about them often all the same.
I’ve had a number of Russian friends over the years, most of whom are descended from the Russian nobility. You run into these types whenever you whisper that your grandfather was a Russian major or when you quote from War and Peace a little too loudly after drinking too much at that D.C. cocktail party.
A project I’ve been contemplating for some time is offering to sequence anyone who is of purported Russian noble blood and then creating social media around their shared connection. Think of this as a genetic government in waiting or in exile. Or an imagined online republic.
I don’t think that there’s much thinking about what a world after Putin might look like and who might lead it. You could imagine a cadre forming through these genetics communities. You could even imagine them grouping together to work on shared health concerns as well wherever the diaspora should be. This transnational genomic community is something that’s altogether missing from conventional political analysis though we know that there are quite a number of immigrants who effectively still live mentally and virtually in their home countries even while living in another polity.
Russia, unlike say, Turkey, is blessed in that it has an aristocracy that’s still out there engaging in the world. There’s a long, proud tradition of a Russian aristocracy influencing events in other countries though not always for the better. (I highly recommend reading The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945 by Michael Kellogg.)
I know, I know. It’s gauche to talk about there being a “natural aristocracy” but that’s exactly what John Adams and Thomas Jefferson believed in.
Maybe our foreign policy should be about encouraging natural aristocracy rather than bleating about democracy? Who knows!? It could well prove more effective, seditious though it may well be.
Jefferson as always put it best:
I think the best remedy is exactly that provided by all our constitutions, to leave to the citizens the free election and separation of the aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi, of the wheat from the chaff. In general they will elect the real good and wise. In some instances, wealth may corrupt, and birth blind them; but not in sufficient degree to endanger the society. ~Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 28 Oct. 1813