Allegations of extreme cruelty and neglect have been made against some Russian orphanages in a report by the international human rights body, Human Rights Watch.
It alleges that disabled babies are left without stimulation or medical care in "lying-down" rooms reminiscent of the "dying rooms" of China.
Human Rights Watch was one of the bodies instrumental in publicising the mistreatment of unwanted babies in Chinese institutions.
"From the moment the state assumes their care, orphans in Russia - of whom 95 per cent still have a living parent - are exposed to shocking levels of cruelty and neglect," the report, published just before Christmas, says.
It stresses that not all orphanages set out to treat children badly, and that staff in some of them work hard to promote the children's well-being.
However, the conditions it found in other orphanages were very harsh.
One long-time orphanage volunteer told the investigators that in the lying-down rooms "they're all dying, lying on their backs, staring at the ceiling, generally fed on their backs. I've seen them putting the bottle of boiling hot food into children's mouths. It must be burning, but they're too hungry and just swallow it."
The worst off are children deemed "ineducable" from the age of four who are then "warehoused for life" in institutions in which they "may be restrained in cloth sacks, tethered by a limb to furniture, denied stimulation, and sometimes left to lie half-naked in their own filth".
Children who are bedridden "in some cases are neglected to the point of death".
"Those who grow to adulthood are then interned in another `total institution', where they are permanently denied opportunities to know and enjoy their civil and political rights."
While the worst neglect is reserved for those who are regarded as mentally retarded, children deemed to be "normal" suffer active mistreatment and cruelty at the hands of some staff, the report alleges.
"The `normal' abandoned children - those whom the state evaluates as intellectually capable of functioning on a higher level - are subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by institution staff. They may be beaten, locked in freezing rooms for days at a time, abused physically and sexually. They may be humiliated, insulted and degraded, and provided inadequate education and training.
"Staff members may also instigate or condone brutality by older orphans against younger and weaker ones, incidents such as beatings and humiliation," the report states.
"Some children describe treatment as outrageous as being thrown out a window while nailed in a small wooden chest."
In some institutions, staff force children to beat one another up, both for punishment and for their own amusement, the report says. Children have their heads forced down toilet bowls or are stripped naked in front of other children to humiliate them.
In one orphanage, according to testimony given to Human Rights Watch, a child was taken into a storage room by the institution's director and by a teacher who crushed his hand in a vice for stealing. He had to be hospitalised.
But these children, too, are often denied medical services, it says. "Should orphans happen to be transferred to a hospital for services, they are less likely to receive proper medical treatment than children whose families can cajole and bribe hospital staff to carry out their work appropriately."
Older children who run away from the institutions are interned in psychiatric hospitals where they are subjected to the use of heavy tranquillisers and, when they return to the institution from which they escaped, "appear disoriented and confused to their peers".
Russian human rights organisations and child welfare experts complain that senior officials of the ministries charged with maintaining the orphanages have blocked their efforts to investigate reports of neglect and mistreatment.
The report is based on interviews with orphans from some 17 institutions, with doctors, other orphanage workers, children's rights activists, journalists and Western volunteers.
In the report, Human Rights Watch urges the Russian government to stop medical personnel from pressurising parents to institutionalise new-borns with disabilities, to introduce a programme of de-institutionalisation for those already in orphanages and other facilities and to provide assistance for families in caring for children with disabilities.
It also calls on the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child and the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture to investigate the conditions detailed in the report.
The Irish Times sought a comment on the report from the Russian embassy in Dublin and was referred to the Ministry of Health in Moscow. A request for a comment, faxed to the Ministry early last week, has so far gone unanswered. A Human Rights Watch spokesman in Moscow told The Irish Times that officials in the relevant department had stated at a meeting that they would have to study the report before responding to it. He added that he was not hopeful of receiving a response.
As many as 200,000 children are in Russian institutions and thousands more are temporarily quartered in various public shelters and institutions under police jurisdiction waiting for an available space in an orphanage.
"During each of the last two years, more than 113,000 children have been abandoned, reflecting a breathtaking rise from 67,286 in 1992. Their families are often poor, jobless, ill, and in trouble with the law; this burgeoning class of abandoned children has come to be called `social orphans' - indicating that 95 per cent of abandoned children have a living parent."