Work and play often commingle in Kitezh, an experimental orphan community about 190 miles southwest of Moscow that combines features of an orphanage with those of foster care. With its colorful wooden cottages, Kitezh appears as distant from the cruelty of the children's frequently alcoholic and abusive parents as it is from the stale, often crowded government institutions where many Russian orphans still live.

The founders of Kitezh hope that their village can be a model of reform for Russia's decrepit child welfare system, little changed since Soviet days. Though perhaps hard to replicate on a large scale, Kitezh still stands as one of the few largely successful alternatives here to institutional care for orphans.

Dmitri Morozov, a former radio talk-show host, founded Kitezh in 1992 as a kind of orphan collective

Today, there are about half a dozen houses built in Russian-folk style, a school, a communal dining hall and a small Orthodox church.