Moscow — "Don't sleep, you'll freeze," Russians often say in a metaphoric admonishment against complacency. For people living on the street during the long, icy winter, the warning should be taken literally.
Every winter in major Russian cities, the cold lulls hundreds of people into a slumber from which they never awake. Though killed by the sheer force of nature, few would succumb were it not for two human factors: affinity for alcohol and indifference.
Homeless children sleep on a hot-air vent above the subway near the Kremlin. Every winter in Moscow, hundreds of people who sleep outdoors, many of them drunk, die of hypothermia.
The majority of Russia's hypothermia victims are drunk, doctors say. The alcohol provides a deceptive warmth, making a pile of snow seem like a down quilt or an unheated attic a cozy spot for a nap. Then there's the apathy of passers-by, most of whom walk by bodies on the street without calling an ambulance.
In a sign of official indifference toward the problem, the Health Ministry says it has no national statistics on cold deaths, despite alarming numbers reported by individual cities.
The Moscow Ambulance Service picked up the corpses of 190 hypothermia victims from Jan. 9 to Dec. 23, 2001. Some 1,895 people, including two children, were hospitalized with hypothermia.
In Yekaterinburg, an industrial city in the foothills of the Ural Mountains, 269 people had died of hypothermia as of Dec. 21, according to the city morgue.
Possible factors in the varying cold deaths: Yekaterinburg's generally tougher winters and comparatively poorer social services for its 1.3 million residents. Moscow's population is 8.7 million.
"Dealing with hypothermia victims is left to the ambulance service and the police," said Leon Akopov, chief of Moscow's central ambulance station. "But this is a social problem."
The root of the problem is the government's unwillingness to confront homelessness, critics say. Though not all those who freeze to death are homeless, most people assume they are.
Moscow has eight homeless shelters with room for 1,500 people. The city has about 100,000 homeless residents.
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