On the longest night of his life, Alexander Dunayev lay on a bleak stretch of snow beside a railway track through the lonely hours of darkness.
Some time during the night, cunning fingers slipped into his jacket to steal his wallet and documents. As the night wore on, Moscow's temperature dropped to minus 28 degrees Celsius.
At home in the city's Khovrino district, Irina Dunayeva waited for her husband and worried. The television engineer and father of two had called from the Khovrino station at 8:10 p.m., sounding sober and his usual self, and had promised to take the quick path home along the railway line.
It was a 10-minute walk, but he never arrived. Police later told Dunayeva that her husband, who was 42, died of hypothermia, probably the next day, Feb. 3, at about 9 a.m.
"He was just lying there dying and nobody helped him. It is impossible that nobody passed that way," said Dunayeva, a tall woman with dark eyes rimmed red with raw grief. "My heart is breaking to think about him lying there all night in that terrible frost. Maybe somebody passed by and didn't do anything, thinking he was a drunk or something. He must have been very lonely and miserable in his death."
Death is a wintry companion in Moscow. Last year alone, 557 people froze to death on the city's streets, just an average year for hypothermia. News bulletins record these deaths almost as an afterthought, dropping in the winter casualty list with all the ease of a weather report - and there is little evidence of official alarm.
Among the reasons these deaths raise so little public concern here are both the popular myth that most of the dead are homeless people, the bomzhi, and the reality that most victims are drunk before they die. The police who pick up the bodies share the prevailing contempt for those who freeze on the streets - the view that decent people do not die this way.
The families of those who freeze to death are often confronted by official prejudice. On the night her husband failed to return home, Dunayeva, 39, called the police many times, frantic for news. When the police got sick of her calls, they hung up on her. A cruel and bizarre regulation meant she found out nothing until her husband had been officially missing for three days - though police found him at 10 a.m. the next morning.
"I realize now that it's no use calling the police at a time like this," she said. "All they say is `We don't know.'" Dunayeva can only guess at her husband's fate. Police said it was not yet clear whether alcohol was involved, but she thinks not. She said her husband had slipped on ice a week earlier and cracked three ribs. She believes he fell again and was unable to get up because of the pain.
Despite the number of casualties, the official attitude is offhand, perhaps because 74 percent of hypothermia deaths do involve vodka, according to figures from Moscow's Department of Forensic Medicine.
"The situation with people who freeze in the streets is not that terrible because mostly these people were drunk when they froze," said Nikolai Kudinov, a senior official of the city's Social Protection Committee specializing in homelessness.
Every large city has its homeless. In Moscow the plunging winter temperatures and the limited shelters for homeless people leave them particularly vulnerable to hypothermia.
One recent winter night, Nikolai Sukhorukov, 42, reached into the voluminous folds of a grubby overcoat to draw out a small icon of the Mother of God as protection against the winter's wrath. Shirtless, with neither socks nor gloves, Sukhorukov sheltered from the cold in Arbatskaya metro station.
Answering uncomfortable questions about a life of homelessness, he admitted his fears. Two of his homeless acquaintances froze to death and he believes that he too might join them. "I'll end up as a corpse in the street, for sure," he said. "I don't want to die like a dog in the street."
He cradled the little icon, muttering that he hoped God would protect him. The skin of one of his legs was covered with a large ulcerating sore. His fingernails were black, but his fingers were delicate.
Most Russians believe that the hypothermia victims are for the most part men such as Sukhorukov: bomzhi who do not have the required document registering them as an official resident of Moscow.
But Professor Vladimir Zharov, chief of the Department of Forensic Medicine, said his agency's statistics show that only 40 percent of people who froze to death in the streets last year were homeless. The rest consisted mostly of those who drank too much and could not find their way home.
The problem stems in part from the huge role vodka plays in Russian culture. "We sometimes have very intelligent, professional people who die," Zharov said. "It's a friendly get-together or banquet. A person has had way too much to drink and he's on his way home. He feels very warm, but it's an illusion. He decides to sit down in a snowdrift for a rest. And he dies. Unfortunately, that's life."
Despite the official numbers, Sergeant Pyotr Kalyakin, who patrols the streets in a chunky little car picking up the dead and dying, insists that 99 percent of the frozen bodies found are bomzhi. Cruising central Moscow one recent night searching for the winter's victims, Kalyakin did not disguise his contempt for the job.
"It's basically like putting the garbage out for someone else," he said.
Kalyakin said frozen bodies that are found without identifying documents and registration are the lowest priority for police.
According to city authorities, there was a big boost in homelessness - and hypothermia deaths - in the early 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed, but now the situation has stabilized.
The city government does not attribute homelessness to a housing shortage but to migration from other areas of Russia or former Soviet republics. Hence a key part of the city's policy on the issue involves monthly police raids to round up the homeless and take them to reception centers - jails with appalling conditions on the city's outskirts - where they are held for up to 30 days before being driven to the nearest railway station to be sent out of Moscow. Kudinov, of Moscow's Social Protection Committee, said about 15,000 people a year were processed through the reception centers.
"The city has to look hygienic and clean," he said. It is an offense to be without residence documents, Kudinov said, labeling a large percentage of bomzhi as criminals from outside Moscow.
Kudinov pointed with bureaucratic pride to homeless shelters that the city has built in the last few years, including 1,500 beds in six special facilities. At any time, he boasted, each has seven to 10 vacancies - in a city where thousands of homeless comb garbage bins and creep into basements or stairwells to avoid freezing.
The reason for the vacancies is simple: Those who, like most of Moscow's homeless, have no registration documents and are not "socially rehabilitated," Kudinov said, are turned away, no matter how cold the weather.
"Without documents, they could give you any made-up name, Kudinov said. "We don't admit them. We tell them to go to the police."
But, other than sobering-up tanks and reception centers, the police have nothing to offer the homeless.
Sergeant Kalyakin speaks as though Moscow is at war with its homeless. "When they get into basements, it becomes a war between the first-floor residents and the bomzhi, he said, pointing out a basement ventilator, welded shut to keep the homeless out.