Mikhail Metzel/Associated Press
Pavel A. Astakhov at a news conference in Moscow last month.
MOSCOW — Long before joining the federal government as Russia’s child rights commissioner and, more recently, becoming the leading force behind a ban on the adoption of Russian children by Americans, Pavel A. Astakhov transformed himself into a celebrity lawyer with mass market appeal — no small trick in a country where encounters with the legal system are as desirable as a tooth extraction.
There was “The Hour of Trial with Pavel Astakhov,” a courtroom reality television show casting him as Russia’s Judge Judy along with a radio program of the same name. There was a second radio program called “Advocacy Defense Techniques of Pavel Astakhov”; a series of books titled “Your Attorney: Pavel Astakhov,” with installments on housing, property rights, inheritance, pensions and family law; several legal-thriller novels fashioned in the tradition of John Grisham; a seminar series called “Pavel Astakhov’s School of Advocacy Skills”; and a law firm named the Pavel Astakhov Moscow City Law Bar.
The law banning adoptions by Americans was not named after him, but it might as well have been.
In the weeks before and after the law was approved by Parliament and signed by President Vladimir V. Putin, Mr. Astakhov was its loudest and most visible champion, insisting that Russia take care of its own orphans and not sell them to foreigners.
And it was Mr. Astakhov who this week stoked a furor over the latest death of an adopted Russian child in the United States, Max Shatto, with a post on Twitter that said: “Urgent! In the state of Texas, an adoptive mother killed a 3-year-old Russian child.”
Investigators say the circumstances of that death remain murky, and Mr. Astakhov has backed away from the murder accusation — but only slightly. At a news conference, he equated the boy’s mother, Laura Shatto, with two adoptive fathers, Miles Harrison of Virginia and Brian Dykstra of Iowa, who were acquitted of killing their toddler sons.
“Well, the presumption of innocence, you know how it is — sometimes it becomes so rigid,” Mr. Astakhov said.
Referring to the acquittals of Mr. Harrison and Mr. Dykstra, he declared, “For everyone it was completely clear that in one way or another they were guilty for the deaths of their children.”
In frequent television appearances, Mr. Astakhov denounces international adoptions in general as a sinister, profit-driven business, and he is pushing to extend the ban to all countries. He has been advocating that since 2010 after a woman in Tennessee put her 7-year-old adopted son on a flight back to Russia alone, with a note saying, “I no longer wish to parent this child.”
THIN, impeccably dressed and telegenically handsome with perfectly coifed hair that occasionally glints with an unnatural shade of bronze, Mr. Astakhov delivers nearly every statement that he makes with the silver-tongued flair of a courtroom closing argument.
“Don’t present me as an America-hater,” Mr. Astakhov, who holds a Master of Laws degree from the University of Pittsburgh, said after a recent news conference. “I am a fighter for the rights of Russian children. I am fighting with those who violate children’s rights.”
He added: “I am only saying that it’s a shame that Russia is giving away its children. America does not give away its children, does it?”
But he also often peppers his remarks with references to abusive American parents who he says have mostly escaped proper punishment, calling them “bastards” and “pedophiles.”
In response to his aggressive promotion of the ban, critics have denigrated his nationalist statements as hypocrisy, noting that the eldest of Mr. Astakhov’s three biological children attended private schools in England and the United States, while the youngest was born in 2009 in the same private hospital in Nice, France, where Angelina Jolie gave birth to twins.
A magazine spread showed Mr. Astakhov; his wife, Svetlana; and their children posing in luxurious surroundings in France where they spend the summers, and in an accompanying article he marveled at the prenatal care that his wife received, saying that while pricey it was still cheaper than elite maternity hospitals in Russia.
The Saturday Profile: Pavel Astakhov: The Man Behind U.S. Adoption Ban
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The Saturday Profile: Pavel Astakhov: The Man Behind U.S. Adoption Ban
