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Even in hard-drinking
Russia, the Tulimovs stood out for their drunkenness and the neglect
of their children.
The Tulimovs had come to the part of Siberia known as the Russian
Far East in 1988 from Turkmenistan, 3,000 miles away, looking
for work.
Olga Ivanovna Tulimova, who had been a telephone operator and
a postwoman, had a daughter with her first husband, a factory
worker who died from chemical burns. When she and her second husband,
Sergey Yevgeniyevich Tulimov, arrived in the village of Busse,
home of a collective farm, she was pregnant.
Winter comes early in that part of the world and stays a good
long time. The first snows typically fall in October, and morning
temperatures dip into the 30s well into May. In the depths of
winter, the temperature can bottom out at 40 below zero and rarely
will rise above zero. The landscape is ruggedly beautiful, but
bleak.
Olga did housework for a while, then started to work on the farm,
caring for cows and planting.
Sergey was an operator of a heating station and worked at the
farm, doing some household repairs, fixing boilers. But in an
economy as harsh as the environment, the Tulimovs failed to thrive.
In the next eight years, they had six children, including Viktor
on Sept. 17, 1993, and twins Yevgeniy and Vladimir on Dec. 9,
1995. Money was tight, but there always seemed to be enough for
a bottle of vodka, and villagers began to notice the children
weren't being cared for.
On May 14, 1997, local officials, accompanied by the local militia,
came to the village of 700 and found Sergey inside the family's
log house, drinking and reading the Russian translation of a Guy
de Maupassant novel, "Bel-Ami." Olga was outside planting
potatoes.
A videotape made that day by a regional Russian television crew
shows officials in the dirt yard alongside the log house, pulling
back some dirty blankets from inside a pair of galvanized steel
washtubs. In the basins, naked and listless, curled tight against
the morning chill, were the twins, 17 months old and still unable
to walk.
"Auschwitz, it was," said Anatoly Divyatkin, a photographer
for Amurskaya Pravda, a regional newspaper, who was present. "When
they opened the blankets, what they found were almost skeletons."
Viktor, then 31⁄2, also naked and malnourished, was found
nearby. A daughter, Yelena, was nearly 10 at the time, and two
more sons, Alexander, 9, and Ivan, 7, were there, hungry and dirty
as well.
Olga protested when the officials told her they were taking away
her six children. The militiamen, she said in an interview later,
told her that if she resisted she would not see her children again.
Sergey said, okay, take the children.
The twins, extremely weak from malnutrition and exposure, went
to a hospital in Svobodniy, where they stayed 11 months. On April
17, 1998, they were placed in Dome Rebyonka, an orphanage for
infants and toddlers in the regional capital, Blagoveshchensk,
a seven-hour drive from Busse.
Viktor went first to an orphanage called Nadezhda, Russian for
"hope," in Svobodniy, a city of 70,000 about 90 miles
north of Blagoveshchensk. In October 1997, shortly after turning
4, he was transferred to another children's home, Detskiy Dome
No. 3, in the same city. The three other siblings were put in
homes for older children, similar to boarding schools.
Although it took him a while to open up to the other children
at Detskiy Dome No. 3, little Viktor was a natural leader, his
teachers said. He was the one who organized games among the kids.
Viktor's teacher, Natalia Mikhailovna, remembered him as a bright
child who took time to reach out to his peers and his teachers.
"He was very quiet, very shy, when he arrived here,"
she said in an interview at the orphanage. "He was introduced
very slowly to the group, and he found good friends when he was
here six months."
In his teacher's view, Viktor was academically gifted. He was
reading by age 4, spoke well and had a good memory.
A videotape made at the school before his adoption shows him reciting
verses and performing a long, elaborate song and dance.
The classroom where Viktor spent much of his time also served
as a playroom and eating area. There was a dormitory lined with
child-size wooden beds covered with cheerful bedclothes, and with
a small table at the end of each bed for clothing and shoes.
"They live modestly, but the main idea is to keep it warm,
clean and well-lighted," said Ludmilla Petronova Mechenkova,
director of the orphanage.
In August 1997, two months before Viktor arrived at the orphanage,
the Svobodnenskiy District Court stripped Sergey Tulimov and Olga
Tulimova of their parental rights, finding: "The Tulimovs
abused alcohol and did not provide for their children's upbringing.
The children wandered around and were hungry. They did not have
any clothes."
On April 23, 1999, the names of the six Tulimov children were
entered in the Russian Federation's Central Registry for Orphan
Children, the first step toward their adoption.
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