‘They’re falling back into the hell they escaped from’ Theater director Zhenya Berkovich describes the toll her arrest has taken on her adopted daughters
In a new interview, theater director Zhenya Berkovich, who was arrested in early May on charges of “justifying terrorism” for her production of the play Finist the Bright Falcon, spoke about her separation from her teenage daughters, whom she adopted four years ago, and the impact her arrest has had on their mental health.
According to Berkovich, her daughters were 13 and 15 years old when she adopted them. She said they were “nearly unable to read or write” and had “lived through beatings, betrayal, and the deaths of their loved ones.” It took great effort for the girls not to break down, she added: “I can’t even tell you how much this cost us all.”
If you have teenagers with prickly tempers, with the same shoe size as you, hormones instead of brains, and a desire to tear the whole world apart, just imagine they were born like that. No pink booties, no desire to send your little miracle to violin lessons as soon as possible. Then multiply all that by the main thing that motivates adoptive parents: fear. Fear that they’ll be beaten, that they’ll disappear, that they’ll be thrown out again.
Berkovich says her daughters “need a mother twice as much” because they’re “simultaneously 17 and four years old.” She told the story of how one of her daughters spent her birthday “hoping until the night” that her mother would call her from prison to wish her happy birthday.
In orphanages, my daughters saw thousands of children whose mothers couldn’t call them because they were in prison. As a rule, those mothers don’t return to their children’s lives. For a child who’s been in an orphanage, having a mother in prison means almost the same thing as having a mother who died. I write them letters, send them doodles, give them silly tasks and scavenger hunts. We have the best family in the world: my husband Kolya, our friends, a nanny. To be honest, those people deal with a lot of things better than I do. But they’re not their mother.
Berkovich said her daughters have done “incredibly well” and that, so far, they’re “maintaining the growth we were able to achieve over the last four years.” At the same time, she said she fears that “with every day of this new loss, they’re falling back into the hell that they miraculously managed to escape from.”
According to Pravmir, Berkovich asked the testifying psychologists at one of her court sessions if there’s a chance her girls will recover after she returns. “There is a chance, but only if you return right now,” the woman said.