Officials took away children from a woman who gave birth to ten children because of poverty.

Children – for need

44-year-old Olesya Romantseva gave birth to ten children. That is, in all respects it even exceeded the plan for raising demographics in the Russian Federation. But this is only statistically.

Unfortunately, mothers of many children are one of the most powerless creatures in our country.

Most often, these are women who are beating against bureaucratic walls, overcoming poverty, everyday and housing difficulties, exhausted women, not the most fit and efficient, sometimes with husbands, sometimes without, to whom everyone can tell them how to live.

To regain your right to be with your children, if they have once already attracted the attention of guardianship, must be earned, and often almost impossible.

Over the course of 18 years, all ten children were taken away from Olesya Romantseva. Half of them were returned home; it took 3.5 years of trials.

We met for the first time in 2021. Olesya looked for help in Moscow. She told her story calmly. Nothing hurt, but how much can you tear your soul…

Olesya’s parents separated when the girl did not yet go to school; she remained with her father and his new wife. In her family, she said, she was unloved and unneeded.

Olesya wanted everything to be different in her own adult life. But where could she get an example of this “otherwise”?

She has children from four marriages. Two civilian and two official. On birth certificates there are dashes instead of father. Olesya motivates this decision with economic and personal reasons: single mothers are entitled to benefits, and her men were in no hurry to take responsibility for the family. She was deprived of parental rights to her first two children back in 2005.

“My daughter and son were not given a kindergarten, I got a job there at the request of guardianship, but my own children were still not accepted into the kindergarten, I took care of strangers, and was forced to leave my own children to my friends during the shift. That’s why I quit on my own, because they blamed me. “I went to work unofficially for a farmer for a salary twice as much and food,” the woman recalls.

In the summer of 2004, the heating boiler broke down, there was no money for repairs, and in September the guardianship staff advised Olesya to write an application for temporary placement of the children in an orphanage. Because in winter they can freeze. I wrote it, I thought it was better this way. But the children were not returned.

Their son and daughter were given up for adoption in Germany, then this happened everywhere, especially in border Kaliningrad. There was no money for a lawyer, Olesya, as best she could, wrote a cassation appeal to the court herself, but it was all in vain.

Many years later, the eldest daughter contacted Olesya on the Internet. The girl hardly speaks Russian anymore. Lives in Canada. Her brother lives in Germany and does not communicate with his mother; the guy has already become a father himself.

Having lost her older children, Olesya tried to re-create life from what was. She was then pregnant with her third child, and hid from guardianship for a year so that the baby would not be taken away. I tried for 12 years not to attract attention to myself…

In 2017, the wiring caught fire in the attic of a pre-war German apartment building, where Romantseva lived at that time with five children. The family was not registered for the improvement of living conditions, since there was no money to order archival certificates for this house; Romantseva owned 1/12 of the apartment. Part of the roof collapsed directly onto the children’s beds.

Officials offered to move into the school gym as help; out of the 80 thousand allocated in financial aid from the state, Olesya gave 60 thousand to restore the roof. With the remaining 20, I bought furniture and things for the children.

While renovations were underway, we moved in with our then common-law husband and his disabled brother. The apartment was a bachelor’s apartment, unkempt, also after a fire. The youngest son Vadim (name changed) was born. After some time, the roommate started drinking, let go, if he didn’t like something, he kicked him out. Olesya called the police there several times. They issued fines, which were paid from the fragile general family budget.

It was also impossible to return to the old home; another owner, a former mother-in-law, sold her share to a citizen who had served time on a particularly serious charge; it was downright scary to live next to someone like that.

Out of despair, Olesya asked her guardian to place her and her children in the Center for Support and Assistance to Women in Difficult Life Situations. She believed the advertisements of such centers for women and went to social security herself. But it turned out that children over 4 years old are not allowed there. There are no options left, you can’t go back to your abusive husband, and there’s nowhere else to go.

She was taken to the center only with her youngest son. The rest had to write a statement in order to be temporarily placed in a shelter. She visited them there regularly, but what was the point?

Why didn’t the woman compare that she had already separated from her eldest son and daughter under exactly the same circumstances? If only I had known where to fall, I would have laid some straw.

The children were taken away, and strict conditions were set for their return: to formalize the marriage with the father of the youngest son, that is, the last common-law husband to whom they had to return. Both must find work. In addition, a man must register with a drug treatment center. Renovate the apartment.

The wallpaper was glued together.

Then Olesya became pregnant again… Twins Josephine and Katerina (names have been changed) were born in 2019. Josephine is an unusual name, beautiful, like an apartment with a brand new European-quality renovation, like a pass to a world in which the woman herself has never been. There is no European-quality renovation, so at least there will be a name.

The girls were one month old when guardianship took them and Olesya’s youngest son, who was still in her arms. Also due to “inappropriate” living conditions. The formal reason for the seizure was the same renovation, which was still in progress.

The first lawsuit to deprive Olesya of parental rights in relation to daughters Josephine and Katerina and son Vadim was filed by the guardianship authorities of Zelenogradsk a month after the removal of the children.

The court deprived Olesya of her rights to her three youngest children and limited her rights to her five older children. But the decision on deprivation never entered into legal force; the Kaliningrad Regional Court overturned it on appeal and left, as before, the restriction on parental rights.

All the last years Olesya, like that frog in a jar of milk, tried to twist her paws and fight for the children. Her story thundered throughout Kaliningrad. Governor Anton Alikhanov on his social network page fought back from comments, explaining that he could not talk about the nuances of this high-profile case due to “ethical restrictions.”

Olesya managed to return the four eldest ones through the courts only in 2022. Under close scrutiny and with the help of the public, she was able to rebuild her life step by step. They helped her get a job, now she lives with her children in a large, comfortable country house (bought with donations from ordinary people) in the suburbs of Kaliningrad, there are rooms for children of different ages and genders, and a plot of land.

“And about the younger girls and boys they said this: first you must establish communication with them. The girls never saw their mother; they were taken to their guardians at 7 months of age. The boy is a little older. But if parental contact with the mother improves, then it’s a different conversation,” says Nadezhda Goltsova, a lawyer who worked on this case.

Too “self-centered”

In order for contact to improve, children must at least get to know their blood mother. However, the foster family of two twin sisters and the family where Olesya’s youngest son is growing up acted as a united front: the children will not benefit, communication is psychologically traumatic. The circle is closed. It is impossible to return children to an unknown biological mother. But they don’t want to get to know her either.

Josephine and Catherine’s guardians gave them new names. In ordinary life they are now called simpler.

The family is wealthy, living conditions are good. The twins, who are already four years old, also have a younger sister, the guardians’ own daughter, who was born less than a year after Josephine and Katya were granted guardianship. All three girls still know nothing about the past at such a young age. They don’t need to know, the guardians say.

The Kaliningrad Regional Court agreed with the position of the guardians and defended their interests.

In 2022, Romantseva achieved meetings with her daughters and son through the court – twice a month for 2 hours, on the basis of Article 75 of the Family Code of the Russian Federation: parents with only limited rights have the right to communicate with their children. But in practice, there are no meetings with girls at all, and very few meetings with boys.

Based on the case materials, the guardians conducted a paid correspondence examination of Romantseva’s personality, which was presented to the court. The document was attached to the case.

The expert, who has not seen the woman in person, wrote that Olesya is “self-centered” because she speaks and thinks only about her children and how she wants them back.

“This means that when guardians defend the rights to adopted children, this is normal, but when Olesya declares this, this, from the point of view of experts, indicates a lack of empathy in her and a lack of understanding of the true needs of children,” say the lawyers.

Olesya is reproached for the fact that human rights organizations help her protect the rights of children, that she is looked after and helped by social activists. Now, if she did everything herself, alone, then yes, it would be cool. And with community members, anyone can do it.

Let’s be honest, if it weren’t for the social activists and their support, Olesya would most likely have given up.

“I get bullied because I don’t give up. You see, the system never admits its mistakes. But I slowly but surely continue to move forward for the return of my daughters and son home. Because I’m a good mother and I love them very much,” Olesya says today.

It should be noted that initially children entering the state system have two statuses – either, possibly, adoption, or guardianship. That is, mothers of children with guardianship status are not deprived of their rights and can return them.

And for some reason no one thinks that, according to Article 54 of the Family Code of the Russian Federation, any child, if not adopted, has the right to know his real parents.

Are Josephine and Katerina too young to know the truth? Yes, they are only four years old. But then there will be ten, fourteen, twenty… They will become adults. When and who will decide that it’s time to reveal the secret to the now grown-up girls and how will this affect them later?

Now the guardians of the two girls and the guardians of the youngest son have filed lawsuits to deprive the biological mother, Olesya, of her parental rights once again.

On December 5, a new trial was supposed to take place in Kaliningrad, all on the same grounds: the mother does not communicate with the children, with whom she is not allowed to communicate.

The meeting was postponed indefinitely.

…Does anyone else want to have many children?

Yes, Olesya is probably not as rich and prosperous as the families where her children are growing up. But children are born without choosing their parents based on their wealth, and they are not to blame for their parents’ poverty.