Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1998 For the Hindustan Times From: Fred Weir in Moscow DIMITROV, Russia (HT) -- Seven year old Maxim claps his hands and smiles delightedly as he rummages through a package of New Year's treats brought by visitors from Moscow. The goodies include a toy car, a chocolate figure of Ded Moroz -- the Russian version of Santa Claus -- a bag of apples and a bunch of bananas. ``I hope he'll share it. None of the children here have seen fresh fruit since last summer,'' mutters Nina Sergeyeva, head doctor of the Dimitrov Specialized Children's Home, a facility for severely disabled orphans. Little Max, paralyzed from the waist down by a birth defect and abandoned by his natural mother, looks radiant as he chatters excitedly with Alyona, a Moscow professional woman who has been helping out financially with his care for the past couple of years. But otherwise it's not a pretty picture. The orphanage, which occupies the outbuildings of an old Orthodox hillside monastery in Dimitrov, about 100 km north of Moscow, looks like something Charles Dickens might have described. About 120 children live in the combination school-hospital, sleeping on narrow cots, four per tiny room, amid peeling paint, fraying linoleum and rattling pipes. In a small, cold common room, about a dozen kids crowd around a single TV set -- with no adult supervision in sight. ``I know that many of these children wouldn't be institutionalized in a Western country,'' Ms. Sergeyeva says. ``But here there are so few options for them.'' She admits that life in the orphanage is tough. Ms. Sergeyeva is the only permanent doctor in the entire facility, with just four nurses to help. None of the staff has been paid in at least two months. Morale is extremely low, she says. State funding, never very much, has virtually dried up since financial crisis struck Russia last August. ``It's a lucky thing we have our own garden in the orphanage. We still have some potatoes, cabbage and beets left from last summer's crop,'' Ms. Sergeyeva says. ``Otherwise there would be very little. We haven't eaten meat, cheese or eggs for months now.'' Despite the grim conditions, the children in the Dimitrov home appear reasonably well cared for and their relations with the staff seem warm and friendly. That is not the case everywhere in Russia's vast network of state orphanages, according to a report issued this month by the non-governmental monitoring agency Human Rights Watch. The result of a year-long investigation, the report alleges that Russia's 200,000 institutionalized orphans are subjected to systematic ``cruelty and neglect'' and are deprived of their most basic human rights. It says that Russian orphans are routinely mislabelled as ``ineducable'' and warehoused in closed institutions -- like the Dimitrov facility -- where minimal resources are expended on caring for them. The report alleges a widespread pattern of abuse by staff in Russian orphanages that includes beatings of children, sexual assault, criminal neglect and punishment by public humiliation. ``The abuse in orphanages cannot simply be attributed to Russia's economic crisis,'' says Kathleen Hunt, the report's author. ``The problem of scarce resources does not justify the appalling treatment children receive at the hands of the state.'' Photographs accompanying the study depict concentration camp-like conditions in some Russian orphanages, including starvation, filth, overcrowding and physical mistreatment. (The entire report, with photos, is available on the internet at: http://www.hrw.org). Russian experts say the abuses cited in the Human Rights Watch report are the exception rather than the rule, but admit that the system is not working. ``In today's harsh economic climate many parents are simply dumping their children on the state,'' says Maria Ternovskaya, director of Children's House number 19, a clean and apparently well-run orphanage in downtown Moscow. ``More than half the kids we get have parents somewhere. The numbers are increasing every year, and the system is overburdened''. Ms. Ternovskaya says it is true that the state medical commission is often too quick to diagnose a child as ``retarded'' or ``disabled''. ``Resources are stretched to the limit, and we have no staff to bring up all these children properly,'' she says. ``The easy way is just to say nothing can be done with them, and that's what happens all too frequently.'' About half the children from Children's House 19 have been given to foster families over the past year, an experimental approach for Russia that Ms. Ternovskaya believes should be widely adopted. ``We pay professional foster parents, often unemployed women, to do what we cannot: give the children some sort of normal family life,'' she says. ``It doesn't cost more, but it seems to work much better.'' -- Gregory Schwartz Department of Political Science York University 4700 Keele St. Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3 Canada tel: (416) 736-5265 fax: (416) 736-5686