Fires have killed almost 12,000 people in Russia so far this year, according to fire department statistics, bringing the number of deaths to at least 10 times more per capita than in the Western Europe and up 20 percent from last year.


Vladimir Zotimov, head of the statistics department at the Federal Fire Department, said on Friday that 11,639 people had died in the first 10 months of the year, compared to 9,730 in the whole of 1993.


Taken as a percentage per capita, that rate is 30 times higher than in the Netherlands, 10 times higher than in Germany and eight times higher than in Great Britain, according to statistics officials in the West.


Moscow, with 442 fire deaths up to Wednesday, stayed just below the national average, but that is still 60 deaths more than last year, according to Sergei Kochetov, spokesman for the city's fire department. In total, firefighters responded to 22,187 fires in the city this year.


Drunken people cause about 45 percent of all fires in Russia, often passing out while smoking, Zotimov said.


"People are getting drunk all the time," he said. "And people are drinking more."


In Moscow, shortcircuiting and other electronic mishaps are the second largest cause of fires, as many of the plugs and wires are worn out or date back to days when safety standards were virtually non-existent, Kochetov said.


The only good news is that television sets, a major cause of fires in the past, no longer explode as often as before because many Russians now own imported sets, he added.


Zotimov insisted that low fire-safety standards in Russian apartments did not explain for the disparity with fire statistics in the West.


"If a person is sober, he can safely get away. A fire ladder won't help a drunk," he said.


Zotimov added, however, that Moscow is a particularly unsafe city because the rescue ladders of the city fire department cannot reach up to the top floors of its newest highrises.


But Kochetov said the city had recently imported Western fire ladders that could stretch 68 meters, as well as helicopters equipped for fire rescues. "We didn't have those things in the Communist days," Kochetov said.


Besides, apartments with 10 or more stories are equipped with staircases that are separate from the elevator shaft, he said.


Zotimov added, however, that Moscow is the only city where the majority of the firemen are conscript soldiers, rather than professionally-trained fire fighters.