Cruel Russians

Moscow (Reuter) - About 2,000 Russian children and adolescents have committed suicide in the past year, mostly victims of cruelty in the home, a doctor said in an interview published in Pravda yesterday.

Tamara Safonova also said that investigators in the former Soviet Union had uncovered more than 1,500 cases in the past five years of mothers killing their own new-born babies. Child abuse in Russia was an extremely grave problem that was aggravated by the harsh social and economic climate, she said.