The number of Russian children abandoned by their parents each year has risen by at least 250 percent since 1991 in a trend ascribed mainly to plummeting living standards, according to government officials.


Education Ministry officials at a national conference of orphanage directors this week predicted that 125,000 children will be orphaned this year, 25 percent more than in 1994 and a dramatic increase over the 50,000 children abandoned in 1991.


Some 95 percent of Russia's orphans are children abandoned by their parents, the officials said, meaning that they are not eligible for adoption because their parents have not relinquished rights over them.


As a result, the recent implementation of the long-stalled law on adoption, which in theory paves the way for Russian and foreign couples to give some of these children homes, is unlikely to have much impact. Most of the orphans will be forced to languish in institutions.


Irina Volodina, an adoption official at the Education Ministry, said economic instability is the main cause for the increase in numbers of abandoned children and the consequent overcrowding in the nation's orphanages.


"Unemployment and privatization play major roles," said Volodina. In many instances children are left in orphanages after their parents have privatized and sold off their apartments, leaving them out on the street with nowhere to live.


She said apartments are often privatized only for the money to be spent supporting a mother's or father's alcoholism.


According to ministry statistics, 393,000 children are currently wards of the state. Of these, 34,000 were adopted by Russian families, and a few thousand by foreigners in 1994.


Those who did not find homes, according to Deputy Education Minister Maria Lazutova, remain in institutions that are overcrowded and poorly maintained. Forty percent of the buildings are in precarious condition, she said. Twenty percent have no hot water and 15 percent have no indoor plumbing at all.


"Any bad family is better than life in an institution," said Valentina Stadnik, one of over a thousand orphanage directors who came in for the three-day conference in Moscow this week.


"Our goal is not to break up the family, but to take in children temporarily while their parents get back on their feet," she said. "We want to make them realize what it means to lose a child."


Just how long it takes for a parent to grasp that meaning, however, varies from case to case. In Stadnik's experience, families leave their children for anywhere from a month to over a year. Some have to serve out prison sentences, others have to receive treatment for alcoholism or other medical problems. Still others are looking for jobs.


More than half of the parents who do leave their children end up coming back for them, Stadnik said. When they do it is a holiday, she says, for all but the other children who ask, "When will my mother come and get me?"


"If I know the parents have good intentions, I tell them to hold on, to be patient," Stadnik said. But in some cases the parents never come back. "Sometimes the mother just goes from prison to prison," Stadnik said. "And sometimes, they just disappear altogether."


In these situations the state can start court proceedings in order to force the parents to rescind their rights to the children, thereby giving them the possibility of adoption. But this process takes time and money that are not often forthcoming for Russia's most defenseless population.


In massive state institutions, where the director has responsibility for the care, feeding and education of some 200 children, trying to track down little Sasha's mother does not often make it to the top of the priority list.


In the meantime, when children ask Stadnik when their mommy will come and get them, she does not tell them to hold on and be patient. She just says as gently as she can, "You'll live here with us."