The little republic of Moldova, which once provided fine wines for the tables of the Soviet elite, has now sunk into desperate poverty. It is beset by malnutrition, mass emigration and, in an extreme case, a grisly traffic in human flesh.
Yet at the state cancer clinic, where human body parts are said to have been purloined for sale, there are even more pressing concerns. The sickly-sweet smell of sewage from leaking pipes mingles with the scent of fresh cherry blossom. Pale-faced doctors and nurses hurry along dark corridors.
Dimitri, 56, a senior doctor with 30 years' experience, emerges from a chemotherapy unit and rubs his eyes. He is only halfway through a 20-hour double shift. Even if he can keep this up for a month, he will take home little more than $30 (about £22). His wife, also a doctor, receives similar pay, and together they try to feed themselves and put their two children through university at a cost of $800 a year.
Dimitri says he and his staff are grossly ill-equipped to look after the 1,000 patients who pass through the hospital every year, mainly women with breast cancer and men with lung tumours.
In the West, doctors have 30 or more medicines to use. 'Here we have a maximum of five and last year, at one stage, only one.' Spending on each patient, no matter how seriously ill, is capped at $200. The obsolete Soviet-made equipment has long been worn out.
Such tales of hardship, poverty and decay are now typical in Moldova, a republic of about 4.5 million people, wedged between Romania and the Ukraine. It has been plagued by political corruption and incompetence since it became a victim of the end of the Cold War, Dimitri says.
Other voters are as sick of it as he is. So much so that the country has become the first of the 15 ex-Soviet states to return communists to power.
Its economy has shrunk by 60 per cent since 1991. Illiteracy in villages has risen threefold, life expectancy has fallen by five years.
Dimitri can barely bring himself to talk about another shadow that fell on his clinic in the capital, Chisinau, last month. A cleaner is said to have sold body parts due for incineration to two local women, who sliced them into steak-sized portions and sold them to passersby in the town centre at $2 a kilo, half the market price for meat.
One shopper became suspicious, and tests proved the meat was human flesh. The Health Ministry has launched an investigation.
Moldovans are shocked and ashamed. One newspaper asked: 'Have we now resorted to cannibalism?'
The scandal, it is insisted, is a one-off. There are other examples, however, of desperate times begetting desperate measures. The World Health Organisation says the sale of body organs by healthy donors has become a thriving industry.
Recruiters acting for agents in western Europe, Israel and Turkey buy them for as little as $3,000 apiece - eight years' salary to the average Moldovan - to be sold on to sick people for 100 times more.
Balkan gangs are using Moldovan women as surrogate mothers. They women are paid as little as $5,000 to have babies they will never see again for childless couples in Italy, Greece and Germany.
'The girls go and live in the country where their customers are, or the foreign couples come straight to the hospital in Moldova after the birth and whisk the baby away,' one charity worker in Chisinau told The Observer.
Thousands of other women go abroad in search of menial work, and end up in the hands of human traffickers who steal their passports and force them into prostitution.
'Job offers' for women in the weekly paper Makler include almost 100 adverts that charity worker Olga Graur deems 'highly suspicious'. 'Young, good-looking girls' are wanted to 'leave immediately' for work in 'the best casinos on Cyprus and Asian nightclubs'.
Another advert reads: 'Know English? Can you dance? We'll sort out the contracts - $800 in two weeks.'
So desperate is the problem that charity workers now visit schools to tell girls about safe ways to find work abroad.
Between 700,000 and a million Moldovans are believed to be working elsewhere, mostly illegally, mainly in Italy, Greece, Portugal and Turkey. It is a sign of the desperation that young people even aspire to work in impoverished Moscow and Bucharest.
The World Bank says the millions of dollars sent home in hard currency is helping to hold the economy together.
But the mass emigration labour drain is having devastating social consequences. At the run-down 1,000-pupil high school in the village of Besalma in southern Moldova, headteacher Taysya Tashy has seen a third of her staff go abroad in recent years. The remaining 40 double up for each other as they take it in turns to do annual stints out of the country to earn money to survive.
'I'd love to go, but someone has to stay,' said Tashy. She and her staff were 'hungry for Soviet days', with reliable salaries and state care and a guaranteed heating system in a country where temperatures this winter fell as low at minus 15C.
The school is lobbying the World Bank for a $50,000 grant to repair its broken Soviet-made system. Children, many suffering from malnutrition, keep warm by doing exercises fully clothed.
Today the Moldovan Parliament will complete its withdrawal from a destiny in the West when it swears in as President a former baker turned Communist Party leader, Vladimir Voronin. He sees the country's future not in Europe but in the Russian-Belarus union. Meanwhile, he has promised to double state wages and pensions.
On display in Belsama's ethnological museum are exhibits depicting life in the village a century ago. 'But this could be today,' said curator Ludmilla Mazin.
Machines virtually phased out during seven decades of communist rule - among them spinning wheels, weaving looms, butter churns, wooden grape presses and stone bread ovens - are now back in use.
'The only way to survive is to be totally self-sufficient,' Mazin explained with a shrug, 'and that means turning the clock back.'
Moldova in profile
President:
Communist Party leader Vladimir Voronin
Parliament:
Communists won 71 of 101 seats in election last month
Policy:
Voronin is expected to reorientate from Western Europe back towards Russia
History:
Once ruled by neighbouring Romania, Moldova became part of the Soviet Union at end of the Second World War. Became independent republic in 1991
Geography:
Landlocked between Romania and Ukraine
Population:
4.4 million, mostly Slav (Ukrainian and Russian)
Languages:
Moldovan (official, virtually the same as Romanian), Russian, Gagauz (a Turkish dialect)
Economy:
Good climate but rich land heavily polluted. Imports all oil, coal and natural gas. Grows fruit, vegetables and tobacco and makes excellent wine