Selective Gaze: The Politics of Care in Specialized Orphanages

This article, drawing on materials from a boarding school for children with “mild intellectual disabilities,” investigates how recent reforms over the past decade in family welfare, disability, and education have impacted staff at a specialized boarding institution. It argues that, as “islands of socialism,” state-run boarding schools persisted long after the USSR’s dissolution, allowing staff to operate within an educational system rooted 25 in discipline, loyalty, and work ethic—but, above all, in the principles of exclusion and selection, sustained by entrenched patterns of institutional interaction. The article explores the causes and recent changes in the educational and pedagogical methods of these institutions, illustrating how staff have been forced to reevaluate their societal role, the purpose of their work, and the concept of care itself. The author argues that, from the staff’s viewpoint, the primary focus of care is not the orphans or their future but an imagined society needing cleansing of “external” and “useless” elements—such as children with problematic behaviors or conditions that, within the institutional context, may be categorized as psychiatric issues. By examining fantasies of an imminent social catastrophe and nostalgic visions of a former social order, the author reflects on how imagination functions as a mechanism for producing ideological beliefs.

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