Tanya and Natasha, two blond girls of about nine or 10 years old, leave the U.S. Embassy in Moscow on a Tuesday afternoon. They briskly force their way through the crowd of people, much of which is composed of American families lining up for a visa for their just-adopted Russian babies and toddlers. Tanya and Natasha´s new mother Ellen is a middle-aged, stylishly dressed American woman, and her husband can hardly catch up with them. "That was fast," she says of the visa-issuing procedure, smiling. She spreads her arms to hug the two small figures dressed in new leopard-pattern coats, one in gray, and the other in brown.

Ellen still stumbles when pronouncing Tanya´s name and says the girls are from Peskov. "Pskov," Tanya quickly corrects her in Russian, and says, "We are sisters," pointing at Natasha. Ellen and her husband, who preferred not to give their last name, are parents of two 26-year-old sons, one of which the Arizona family adopted in the United States.

Ellen said she "fell in love" with the girls when her family hosted them on their trip to the United States. "Who could not fall in love with them?", Ellen added, looking at the girls, who seemed to be unfazed by the drastic changes yet to come.

AGENCY ADOPTIONS

Tanya and Natasha´s departure leaves more than 500,000 Russian orphans Human Rights Watch (HRW) says are living in Russian orphanages. They are joining a smaller cohort of some 6,000 Russian children who are annually adopted by foreigners, according to the Education Ministry, which oversees adoption in Russia. According to the United Nations, Russia is second only to China in the annual number of adoptions to the United States, and many go to other countries as well.

As such, adoption from Russia has become a highly profitable business for the 60 accredited Russian foreign-adoption agencies. Indeed, a family wishing to adopt a Russian child can expect an average financial outlay of $15,000 to $22,000, according to the U.S.-based Adoption Center of Washington (ACW), a third of whose adoptees come from Russia.

The demand for Russian children is high because many American parents seek white babies. Additionally, the adoption procedure is quick and children are relatively healthy, Janeth Pears from the Baltimore-based Adoptions Together, Inc., said in a phone interview. Her agency annually places some 50 children from Moscow, St. Petersburg or Siberia in the United States.

With 6,000 children being adopted a year, the Russian adoption business brings in $90 million to $132 million a year. Linda Brownlee from the ACW, however, said much of that money goes to strictly bureaucratic fees, such as the $1,600 payment to naturalize the child with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in the United States, a $12 fee for each of the 22 notary certificates required for the adoption - a total of $264 - high costs for translators and $60 fees for Federal Express services to facilitate document transportation between the countries. The sum also covers the $2,500 flight, $125-a-night accommodation cost and a home-study fee of $1,200. The net income of the agency, according to Brownlee, comes to just $4,000.

ON THE CHEAP

Many prefer to save money and adopt their child through so-called "facilitators" - individual red-tape cutters who deal with the logistics of adoptions from the Russian side - rather than through an accredited adoption agency; in other words, in contravention of Russian Law.

This route can cut adoptive parents´ legal fees in half, and Brian and Alicia, a U.S. air force couple from Oklahoma who asked not to reveal their last name, decided to take the facilitator route.

They adopted two three-year-olds, Olesya and Anton from Blagoveshchensk for just $8,000. They paid the money directly to a Russian lawyer in the United States who linked them with her colleagues in Russia.

Alicia said she and her husband are now filing a lawsuit against the original agency they tried to work with, but the case has been delayed because the agency - which had been invoicing Alicia for lawyers´ fees - does not have a lawyer.

"They rip people off," Alicia said. "They are scamming American people." She said she wanted to adopt the child legally but could not even read the Russian adoption law on the Internet because she did not read Russian.

According to legislation issued in 2000 regulating the work of foreign-adoption agencies, only accredited agencies have the right to operate.

The board that decides who gets accreditation consists of representatives of the Justice Ministry, Interior Ministry, Foreign Ministry, Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Transport and Ministry of Health. To get accreditation, agencies have to have a license and at least five years´ experience in their home countries, which in turn have signed the Hague Convention. This would automatically guarantee a child the right for residency, Galina Prostanetskaya of the Ministry of Education said.

RED TAPE

Irina Osipova, an industry insider from St. Petersburg who used to work for the U.S. agency "Gift of Love," said she believes the new law deprives people with lower incomes of the possibility of adopting a child. She said the adoption procedure is so bureaucratic that many people leave without adopting anyone.

The Adoption Service´s Pears said the recently changed law on adoption in Russia makes the process difficult. Only prospective parents who have already met a child can view his or her medical records, as opposed to earlier times when agencies had access to records before offering a child, she said.

"The problem is that we consider it our own [duty]. We would like to provide parents with information and the opinion of a pediatrician," said Pears. "It´s difficult for parents not to adopt a child once they have seen him or her."

ADW´s Brownlee, however, sees no problem with the legislative change. "In some ways it is easier that we do not have information before [we offer the child]. It relieves us of responsibility."

The real problem, she said, is that most adoptive parents want babies, not children who are three or four years old, marginalizing a whole sector of orphans. Only 5 percent of U.S. families, she said, adopt children who are older than babies.

BRIBES?

Most parents interviewed who adopted children through agencies denied or simply remained silent when asked if they had to bribe Russian officials to facilitate the bureaucratic adoption procedures.

And agencies themselves denied any allegations about bribery paid to managers of baby homes or orphanages to facilitate obtaining complex health certificates, passports or other notoriously bribe-heavy endeavors.

Osipova also denied that bribery takes place. "I never ran into bribing, either at orphanages or in courts," she said in a phone interview.

Alicia, however, burst out laughing when asked to confirm whether Russian authorities demand bribes. Alicia said that facilitators do not want families to pay bribes directly, but make financial arrangements beforehand so that plenty of gray cash is on hand. "We just gave $8,000 to our lawyer in the United States, and she paid her colleagues to arrange it for us," she added.

REPORTS OF CORRUPTION

On Feb. 21, the Russian daily Gazeta - which also has an Internet version, Gazeta.ru - published a report by

Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov in which he wrote that 300 children from the orphanages of the Volgograd region were "sold" to Italians under the aegis of adoption between the years 1993 and 2001.

Ustinov added that four managers from this orphanage, several town officials and an unnamed translator are allegedly involved in the case face charges.

Continuing the apparent Italian connection, the Russian daily Kommersant reported on Oct. 30 that the same translator involved in the Volgograd case, who at the time represented the international association Arkobaleno, was released on $10,000 bail. The translator is charged with paying bribes and falsification of documents, according to the newspaper, which also said none of the placed children suffer ill treatment or experience any health problems.

Kommersant reported that, over the last seven years, only 600 children have been adopted through legal channels.

In another incident, Rossiskaya Gazeta reported on Mar. 11, 2000, that the head doctor of the hospital in Shchekinsk, Russia, was offering large sums of money to pregnant women to give up their babies, which would then be apparently sold to foreign adoptive parents.

According Russian legislation, Russian citizens have the right of first bid, as it were, on Russian children for adoption - but they are subject to much more stringent application procedures than their foreign counterparts. But in many cases, according to Rossiskaya Gazeta, potential Russian adoptive parents are not even shown the same children that foreigners are.

The newspaper reported that, during a series of recent random checks on adoption procedures in seven Russian regions, officials found 1,771 children - who should have been, by law, offered meetings with potential Russian adoptive parents - never even made it into the relevant database.

The same story happened with 400 orphans in Tver, the newspaper said. None of the 50 cases of foreign adoptions from Kemerovo region showed any records that those children had been primarily offered to Russian families for adoption.

The Ministry of Education´s Prostanetskaya said Russian families adopted some 8,000 children last year, as opposed to 6,000 adopted by foreigners. Even though last year´s figures showed higher figures for Russian adoptions, she said the number of Russians willing to adopt is on the decline - just a few years ago, she said, annual adoption rates by Russian parents were around 14,000.

Zoya Soloveva, manager of Moscow orphanage No. 5, said Russians usually take wardship over children rather than adopt them. This leaves them a legal chance to get monthly government subsidies of about 2,000 rubles ($70) for a child.

Managers of Russian orphanages have different opinions on foreign adoption. Yury Petushkov, head of Moscow orphanage No. 12 thinks Russian children should stay in Russia. "I do not trade in children," he said over the phone.

Soloveva, however, disagreed. "I vote with my hands and feet for it," she said. "Foreigners adopt those whom nobody will adopt here."

According to HRW, some 15,000 children who have reached the age of 18 and can no longer stay in state care leave Russia´s state orphanages every year. Some 5,000 will not be able to find a job; 6,000 will not have homes; 3,000 will have criminal records; and 1,500 will commit suicide, HRW reported. Hopefully, fate will be kinder to Tanya and Natasha.