A few weeks ago, there was a story on Interfax about a policeman shooting an Uzbek woman in the neck on Tverskoi Bulevar, after an argument about her documents. I’d just started stringing for a newspaper, so I decided to check the story out. It was exactly the kind of story London news-desks go for.

I walked to the house on Tverskoi Bulevar outside of which the incident was supposed to have occurred, casting my reporter’s eye over the pavement for blood. Not finding any, I ventured inside. It was strange to find such a dilapidated house in such a posh street. Here, just 100 metres or so away from the oligarchs eating $20 pelmeni in Pushkin Café, was what appeared to be a squat for Uzbek immigrants.

OK, it wasn’t quite a squat, but it was 30 or so Uzbeks living in close, pungent proximity. I passed one on the stairs, and asked him in my bad Russian if he knew anything about the woman who had been shot. He told me to go to flat number 7.

I knocked on the door, and a young man opened it. He’d just got out of bed, but welcomed me in nonetheless. It was a small room with two beds and a little table. The boy, whose name was Dmitri, lived there with his mother. He looked Russian, though his mother was Uzbek.

I asked him what had happened. It turned out the Interfax journalist had got the story wrong. This is what really happened: “Two days ago, it was my 18^th birthday”, Dmitri said. “So some of my friends came round here for a drink.” A typical Russian affair, probably – a large bottle of beer, some dodgy wine, plenty of vodka, shared out in plastic cups, with a bit of vobla and a few slices of dry cheese, some guy with a guitar, everybody singing.

A policeman came round. He was known to Dmitri and his friends –“not exactly a friend, more an acquaintance”. He may have been attempting to woo Dmitri’s Uzbek mother, but I’m not sure of that.

Anyway, the cop sits down with everyone, tips his hat back, unbuttons his shirt a little, and gets down to some drinking. He’s toasting Dima, he’s toasting Dima’s mum, pretty soon he’s a little sweaty and drunk. Someone asks him about his gun, and he pulls it out and starts playing with it, maybe it’s his party act. The gun goes off and shoots Dima’s mum in the neck. Dima showed me the bullet hole, about two feet from the little table. The cop panics, runs away. Dima’s mum gets taken to hospital. A lady from the same kommunalka dropped by as I was leaving, returning some cleaned glasses from the party, and asked Dima how his mum was. He said calmly she was doing alright.

So that was that. Not really a story for the foreign press, just one more drunken accident in Russia. I thanked Dima, said I’d send him a copy if it got published, which it wouldn’t, and left.

But I remembered that incident, long after I’d written my hundredth article on oil revenues or the Yukos affair. This was a world I never saw, of hard-up people crammed together in little rooms, of people rallying round and helping each other. A world where incidents as horrific as your mother getting accidentally shot in the neck were…perhaps not normal, but one of those things that happen.

That’s what stayed with me – the cheapness of life, the proximity and familiarity of horrid violence and death. I think that’s a difference between the West and Russia. The West, particularly the US, has learnt to compartmentalize death, pain and violence. As Francis Fukuyama wrote, modern civilized societies “raise to the first order of concern the question of preventing the body from suffering”.

America is a giant protection device against pain and death. Every other commercial break on TV has an advert for some painkiller or another pharmaceutical therapy. Every other cover story for Newsweek or Time is devoted to health issues – how to avoid cancer, how to avoid heart disease, how to avoid pain and death.

Life in the West has become so civilized and sanitized that, the English writer JG Ballard argues, we actually crave the occasional kick of ultra-violence, watched from a safe distance, just to make ourselves feel alive. So we watch these sick TV programmes where cars smash into each other on the highway in pornographic slow-motion, or where black men grapple with cops for our middle-class gratification. Thank God for the black ghettos, for gangster rap and Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, otherwise white collar America would literally die of boredom.

Could that even be why westerners go abroad to less developed countries, because they want to feel more alive, to feel closer to all the things that western civilization has successfully hidden?

My godfather, a hearty man from Sussex, has just started a new job as a solicitor in Baghdad. His marriage recently failed, he tried a job working at Rugby public school, but that bored him rigid. So he moved to Iraq, and suddenly he’s happy as Larry, writing emails to the folks back home replaying the tension of the Green Zone and the bloodshed of the Red Zone for our horror and amazement. Is this a new phenomenon – failed state tourism? Could this even be why I am in Russia?

Anyway, enough about me, let’s get back to death in Russia. I don’t think it’s just poorer people whose lives are cheaper in Russia. Just the glimpse of Russian lives I’ve got through my housemate, Masha, tells me otherwise.

Masha has a friend called Sergei. He’s a strange fellow, a drunk and a semi-criminal, and I can’t say I like him. Anyway, he was down at his dacha the other month, with some friends, his wife – a teacher – and his son. They were having a typical Russian party – a big bottle of flat beer, some vodka, some dodgy sweet wine, maybe some vobla, a few slices of dry cheese. They’ve been sitting there for hours, getting progressively drunker and more sentimental. The boy gets a bit bored, wanders into the dacha. Something goes wrong with the electricity, and a fire starts. The house, like most houses in Russia, doesn’t have a smoke alarm. Somehow or other, the boy doesn’t run outside, he hides under a table instead, and he dies of smoke poisoning.

And then a friend of Masha’s, this bright 22-year-old called Fyodor, who was in a band and was beginning to get famous, fell off a balcony last week. No one’s sure if he committed suicide or just got drunk and fell off.

So there you go. Life, like every other natural resource, is cheap in Russia. Cheap and easily wasted. Why is it, in a city where you constantly pass vicious car crashes, that no one wears seat-belts in cars? Why, in a city with some of the worst electric wiring in the world, does no one have smoke alarms? How can we get the ministry of economic development to encourage more efficiency in Russians’ use of their lives? Should we raise the tariffs?

It’s not a totally facetious question. Because absolutely tied to this disregard for life, one’s own and other people’s, is Russia’s demographic crisis, with the population falling by 1 million each year. Many analysts point to this crisis as one of the great threats facing the country.

What genuinely interests me is, has life always been this cheap in Russia? Has its value fallen since the fall of the Soviet Union, in correlation with the general instability of life?

This theory makes sense, and maybe it’s true. Will the value of life rise, then, in line with the price of Urals crude?

I wonder if, on the contrary, the cheapness of life isn’t something peculiarly and perennially Russian. It’s an attitude of –‘To hell with the future. Let’s drink now! Better the grand emotional gesture now than some over-careful, Germanic planning for the future.’ Living for the moment, going on a zapoi, not caring too much about death or suffering, is the Russian mentality. Living prudently and moderately, worrying too much about the future, about one’s health, that’s German, that’s American – that’s foreign.

If I’m right, and that is a perennial Russian mentality rather than some specific post-Soviet emotion, then this disregard for life, and the accompanying demographic crisis, will be hard to stop.

Julian Evans is a British freelance journalist based in Moscow. The article is written specially for "Eurasian Home".

September 21, 2005