By Sarah Larson, Dispatch/Argus staff writer

A retelling of `Cinderella' put a smile on the face of two-year-old Anya, despite conditions in the orphanage in which she lives.

ZNAMENKA, Russia -- Two-year-old Anya has the bluest eyes and sweetest smile of any child around. She cocks her blonde head to the right and twirls her powder-blue dress when a visitor talks to her. The dress is three sizes too big, but she is lucky to have it. Other children at the temporary children's shelter where she lives outside of Oryol, Russia, wear worse-fitting clothes.

When Quad-Cities volunteers from ChildLife International visited the center recently, Anya enchanted them with her angelic smile. The little girl listened intently as Karen Paytash, of East Moline, told the story of Cinderella, which an interpreter translated into Russian.

Anya smiled when the fairy godmother magically transformed Cinderella into the belle of the ball. She looked concerned when the clock struck midnight and Cinderella lost her beautiful dress and carriage. She laughed and clapped when Cinderella won her prince in the end.

After the story, Ms. Paytash and fellow volunteer Terri Gleize, of Donahue, gave goody bags to each of the 32 children at the Regional Center for the Social Rehabilitation of Minors. The women had filled the bags with stuffed animals, small toys and chocolates.

From her blue-and-red-striped fabric bag, Anya pulled a pink stuffed bunny someone in the Quad-Cities had donated for the trip. She hugged it to her face to feel its softness. She clutched the bunny in the crook of her arm for the rest of the day. It may be the only toy anyone has given her.

Anya does not know what ``economy'' means. She can't even say the word. That word, however, has condemned her to live in an institution with dozens of other forgotten children.

Anya is the youngest of seven children. Her parents brought her to the residential children's shelter in December because they could no longer afford to feed her.

She is one of more than 620,000 Russian children classified as ``without parental care.'' The vast majority of them -- 90 to 95 percent -- are called social orphans because they have at least one living parent.

Beset by unemployment, alcoholism, drug addiction, illness, and financial ruin, parents are giving up their children in alarming numbers. More than 113,000 children were abandoned to the state during each of the past two years, according to the Russian Ministry of Labor and Social Development. That is nearly double the 1992 rate of 67,286 children.

The driving force behind the skyrocketing cases of child abandonment is money.

The collapse of the Soviet Union brought economic and social chaos to Russia and its former republics. Encouraged by Western leaders, Russia tried to emulate capitalism, but had no experience on which to draw.

The transition from a centrally planned, state-owned economy to a free-market economy was rocky from the start, but it took a dramatic turn for the worse last summer.

On August 17, the Central Bank stopped supporting Russia's currency, the ruble, then held at 6.2 to the dollar. Over the next six months, the ruble lost more than 72 percent of its value, plunging to an exchange rate of 23.05 to the dollar.

Overnight, Russians who were already struggling financially lost everything.

Larissa Sokolovskaya has a doctorate in mathematics and researches solar flares at the University of Moscow. Her monthly salary of 2,000 rubles ($320) was good before August. Now it is worth $87.

Irina Maslova, 21, translated for the Quad-Cities group in Oryol. The young woman is studying to be an English teacher, even though a teacher's starting salary is about 230 rubles a month. Before August, that was $37. Now it is $10.

Ms. Maslova's mother, a retiree, lives on a monthly pension of 430 rubles. Once worth about $70, it is now worth only $19.

The August crisis had other effects, too. Mrs. Sokolovskaya remembers watching panicked Muscovites trying to get their deposits out before the banks failed.

``It was terrible,'' she said, shaking her head. ``There were lines at the bank, people pushing and shoving to try to get their money. They didn't succeed.''

Mrs. Sokolovskaya now keeps her salary in cash in her apartment, like most Russians.

Escalating inflation has slashed that money's buying power. Inflation reached 26 percent in 1998 and could double this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. That figure seems tame after rates of 2,500 percent in 1992 and 130 percent in 1995, but it still pushes prices higher.

By contrast, U.S. inflation in 1992 was 2.9 percent. Last year, it was 1.6 percent.

Russians working with the Quad-Cities volunteers agreed food is the biggest expense for most families. When Irina Zacharova, a 29-year-old disc jockey in Oryol, goes grocery shopping, she finds prices that quickly eat up her monthly food budget.

She must choose between Gouda cheese, at 84 rubles per kilogram ($1.70 per pound), and imported German cheese, at 112 rubles per kilogram ($2.20 per pound). A small tin of coffee costs 39 rubles ($1.70).

With average food budgets of $10 to $20 a month, most Russians stick to domestic foods like bread, potatoes and cabbage. Thick, hearty, delicious bread, long the staple of Russian life, still is affordable, at 2.5 rubles (11 cents) per loaf. Though filling, it is not especially nutritious.

Many Russians rely on subsistence farming to supplement their pantries. Lucky ones have dachas -- small, unheated ``summer homes'' often no more than shacks. Rows and rows of dachas surround big cities and march across the barren countryside. In winter, their abandoned air and dilapidated exteriors cast a depressing pall over neighborhoods, but they are busy places in warm weather.

Ms. Zacharova spent last summer at her dacha growing cucumbers, potatoes, onions and other vegetables. The beautiful brunette made pickles and canned vegetables to last her and her husband through the winter.

Rent and electricity are subsidized by the government. Disabled people and pensioners in Oryol pay about 100 rubles ($4.30) per month for a two-room apartment. The regular rate is about 200 rubles ($8.60) per month.

Prices are higher in Moscow, as they are in any big city. One translator pays 300 rubles ($13) a month to rent one room in a friend's apartment. Rent for a two-room apartment starts at about 800 rubles ($35) and rises depending on location, furnishings and other amenities.

Meanwhile, the average national salary has sunk to 752 rubles ($33) a month, down from 1,000 rubles ($43) in October, according to a recent report in the Moscow Times.

Sometimes salaries are not paid at all. Mrs. Sokolovskaya routinely waited two or three months to be paid. In the far corners of Russia, government workers have gone for nearly a year without a paycheck.

Many educated Russians see emigration as a way out of the economic distress of the last eight years. For decades, athletes, composers and dissidents defected to Western countries to escape Soviet rule. Now, the most talented and educated Russians flee the country to find salaries that will feed their families.

Mrs. Sokolovskaya's husband left Russia four years ago to take a position at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His salary supports his wife, their 10-year-old daughter and both sets of parents. The family reunites twice a year. Mrs. Sokolovskaya visits Colorado in January for a month, and Mr. Sokolovskaya spends every summer in Moscow.

Most of the couple's friends also have left Russia. Many have gone to the United States, while others went to Germany, Scandinavia or Great Britain. Mrs. Sokolovskaya acknowledged this brain drain hurts her country, but said the people must leave to live.

``It is unfortunate for Russia, but unavoidable. There is no money,'' she said, her voice rising and her hands gesturing emphatically. ``When there is no money, people cannot eat. We have no choice but to leave.''

Back in Russia, those with no chance of escaping are hit hard. Basic survival takes everything they've got. There is no room for luxuries.

The struggle to survive is etched on gray, somber faces waiting stolidly in the snow for the next overloaded bus. They do not even cough when noxious, metallic-smelling exhaust blows in their faces.

It is written in the wrinkles of old women searching garbage cans for food scraps. It is scarred into the blank stares of middle-aged men who lost their jobs when the factory closed and have no skills to get another.

Part of the depressing blankness is cultural, our translators said. Russians are not as outwardly emotional as ``loud'' Americans, one young woman said with a small, wry smile.

Part of it, though, is the undeniable fact that the present is bleak and the future uncertain. And like other dark times in Russia's history, children arguably suffer most.

A group of Quad-Citians spent a week in Russia trying to alleviate that suffering in some small way. Quad-Cities-based Christian charity ChildLife International organized the trip. Seven volunteers worked in Moscow suburbs, and eight volunteers went to Oryol, a regional capital 230 miles south of Moscow in Russia's prime agricultural belt.

The volunteers went armed with physical and monetary expressions of Quad-Cities generosity. They stuffed dozens of suitcases full of handmade caps and quilts, brand new mittens and gloves, medicine, baby bottles and small toys.

Every bit of it proved necessary.

The economic meltdown brought Anya and thousands of children like her into an already strained system of shelters, orphanages and boarding schools. Russia's social shelters are feeling the economic squeeze just like the families they try to help.

The financial crunch, though, does not explain why staff members at some centers nurture the children in their care while others neglect their children. Nor does it rationalize horrific cases of abuse and torture at the worst institutions. The United Nations, New York-based Human Rights Watch and the leading Moscow children's advocacy organization, Right of Child, have documented such abuse across the country.

Quad-Cities volunteers saw no outright abuse on their visits, though there were signs of neglect at some institutions. Anya's current home outside Oryol was one of the places volunteers noticed problems.

Anya does not have long to worry about problems at the center, though. Because it is a temporary shelter, children are only allowed to stay three to six months.

When Quad-Cities volunteers visited in February, the little blonde girl already had been there for two months. A decision soon will have to be made about her future. It does not look good.

According to Anya's teacher, her family is in such dire financial condition they may have to give up more of their six remaining children. Anya's next stop, she said, is a dyetskii dom -- a children's home.

Ms. Paytash wants to cry every time she thinks about it.

``That little girl should be in a home, being held and cuddled,'' Ms. Paytash said one night in her hotel room overlooking Lenin Square, as snowflakes drifted against the window. ``Instead, she's in that place, just a number.''