It is nearly impossible to estimate how many homeless children are living in Russia nationwide. As Rick Hiebert concedes in his article "A New Russian Revolution," the country has as many as "two million street kids nationwide." This number includes not only really homeless and abandoned children, but children who run away from their homes and parents who lack their parental responsibilities. The sorrowful position of children in Russia, being the result of an unsatisfactory situation in this country in general, including decline of living standards, crisis of the family institution, growth of unemployment, and negligence of laws is a serious threat to the country's future. .
Since the Soviet collapse, the economic crisis and legal chaos has brought problems of child neglect out into the open. It is painful to watch ragged children, begging for money in the subway trains or on the street corners. Then, after the "work," they gather in knots, drinking vodka, sniffing glue, using drugs, and killing time. Running away from horrible conditions of life, many kids join the army of street children. As far as I know, the poverty forces their parents to sell their apartments or houses and move to one-room places for living (where several families live in the one small apartment). Thus, the decline of the standards of living is one of the causes why children come to the streets.
The next important reason why parents abandon their children is the crisis of the family institution. As a result of young men's mortality, divorces, and illegitimate childbirth, there are a lot of families with a single parent. These families have insufficient opportunities for support and education for their children. There are a lot of fathers and mothers who drink alcohol, beat their kids, and are stripped of parental rights because of child abuse. Parents discontinue to be the role models, and their kids choose another authority on the streets.
