Kaluga Region, Russia: Standing in a row, sweating in the bright sun, a group of boys hammer into the outer wall of a partially built log cabin. Nearby, two others paint a picnic table, while another pack of children scurry by dressed in green tunics, wooden swords drawn for a play battle.

Work and play often commingle in Kitezh, an experimental orphan community about 300 kilometers, or 190 miles, southwest of Moscow that combines features of an orphanage with those of foster care. At first glance it can seem more akin to a summer camp than a sanctuary for abused and neglected children.

"If we can, we try to create the atmosphere of a fairy tale," said Mikhail Shchurav, who has lived at Kitezh for three years and has an adopted son. "Fairy tales help these kids forget what they've been through."

With its colorful wooden cottages scattered amid forests and fields of wildflowers and berry bushes, Kitezh appears as distant from the cruelty of the children's drunken and abusive parents as it is from the stale, often over-crowded government institutions where many Russian orphans live.

The founders of Kitezh hope that their village can be a model of reform for Russia's decrepit child welfare system, which has changed little since Soviet days. Although difficult to replicate and an affront to the bloated bureaucracy now in place, Kitezh is one of the few largely successful alternatives in orphan care available here.

Russia's orphan problem stretches back for most of the last century: wars, revolution, the purges and famine all thinned the adult population.

Even now, as Russian wealth accumulates, rabid alcoholism and social decay prompted by the Soviet collapse continue to plague the countryside, destroying families. The Education Ministry has classified about 750,000 children in Russia today as orphans. Most of these have been abandoned or taken from parents because of neglect or abuse.

There are also tens of thousands more who are homeless, living in the dank train stations and fetid stairwells of the cities and succumbing to the same addictions as their parents or meeting worse fates.

Foster care, which is widespread in the United States and Europe, has been slow in coming to Russia. Although increasing numbers of orphaned children live in foster families, more than 200,000 still live in orphanages, according to government statistics, and thousands enter government institutions each year.

The quality of orphan care at these facilities can vary widely. There have been reports of underfunded orphanages unable to provide children with sufficient food and basic medical care. A year and a half ago, the staff of a Yekaterinburg hospital was charged with taping shut the mouths of abandoned babies in their charge to prevent them from crying.

Vasily Burdin spent four years in an orphanage after his parents died from complications related to alcohol abuse when he was 4. He said he was treated fairly well there, but gained "an understanding of the world" only when he moved to Kitezh.

With almost-fluent English picked up from British students who at times volunteer in the village, Burdin, now 18 and enrolled in law school in Moscow, described his arrival in Kitezh at age 9, his struggle to overcome the past and - something few Russian orphans have - his hopes for the future.

"I will proceed with law for my business, for my career," he said. "But after I have stability, I will do something with music - maybe open my studio. It's a dream."

Kitezh was named for a mythical Russian city that escaped decimation by an invading army by disappearing, leaving only the peal of church bells behind.

Dmitri Morozov, a former radio talk-show host, founded Kitezh in 1992 as a kind of orphan collective, building the village with the help of volunteers and adoptive parents on a rural plot of land donated by the Kaluga Region government with donations largely from foreign organizations.

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

The 30 or so children who now live there study, work and eat together, and live in private homes with their adoptive parents, who are also trained teachers, psychologists and medical personnel.

"Kitezh is a large experiment," said Shchurav, the adoptive parent who has lived there three years. "We are trying out the latest methods in psychological therapies: play therapy, art therapy, drama therapy. We even play economic games. No one in Russia has tried what we are doing with these children."

So far, the experiment has had notable results. Of the 40 or so children who have graduated from Kitezh, about 60 percent have gone on to higher education and all have found good jobs, parents in the village said. Even the community's one problem child, after a brief flirtation with alcohol and drugs, found his calling designing women's dresses in Moscow.

Maxim Tarasenko, the village's youngest resident at 7 years old, describes his life before Kitezh as "very bad."

"My parents were very drunk, and didn't understand anything," he said. "They didn't understand that you're not allowed to drink only vodka and that you're not allowed to smoke."

He was antisocial and often picked fights with other children, said Tamara Pichugina, Maxim's adoptive mother. After a year in Kitezh, though, the slight, affable boy has become something of a social butterfly, fluttering about the village chatting with whoever will listen about a fat grub he dug out of the mulch pile, or the witches that haunt the surrounding forest.

Despite the successes, few have been able or willing to follow Kitezh's example. "Our experience is not being put to use, because it requires that adults receive a significant amount of training," said Morozov, the founder. It also requires a strict allegiance to the collective that can be at odds with Russia's burgeoning materialistic and individualistic society.

The government, however, has begun to take an interest in revamping the country's child welfare services and has started promoting adoption to ease the strain on orphanages.

Government money allotted to adoptive families, including the parents at Kitezh, increased by 28.2 percent in 2007, about 120,000 orphans were moved from state institutions into foster families, and 7,000 more left orphanages in 2006, according to the Education Ministry.

Still, those removed from orphanages were replaced by some 120,000 new orphans registered by the ministry last year. Adoptive parents also give back thousands of children each year.

There is now enough money donated largely from Russian and foreign companies and nongovernmental organizations that Morozov is building a new orphan village called Orion, about two hours away from the original village. Orion already has four houses, a school and a dining hall, and four families with 10 children have moved in.

Sipping a cappuccino at Moscow café during a lunch break from his internship at the American law firm Baker Botts, a large Kitezh sponsor, Burdin said he was considering starting a business with Morozov, his adopted father, to generate funds for Kitezh's development.

"I think Kitezh is like a fairy tale," he said. But, he said, "You need to work to hold this beauty."