Archive of published stories (2009-2019) about the life of common people in RUssia by Polina Eremenko

Originally published in Snob Magazine, Jan 2017
https://snob.ru/selected/entry/119887/

What is it like – to die without a name in Russia? What is the final journey of unclaimed
bodies in Moscow like? What happens in the largest cemetery of unidentified bodies?
Forensic doctors, funeral attendants, policemen, who were met by the man who froze to death in the “M.O.C.K.B.A” [In Cyrillic alphabet Moscow is spelled МОСКВА] sculpture construction on Arbat Square during his final journey, share their thoughts in Polina Eremenko’s story for Snob magazine.

On October 28, 2016, at 10:50 a.m. passers-by found a stiffened body inside the two-meter letter “B” – one of the six letters of “М.О.С.К.В.А.” construction on Arbat square. The frozen man was wearing a black fur hat, two sweaters (red and white), a red T-shirt, one dark gray sock and one black shoe. He was missing 12 teeth. He did not have a name – his other homeless friends called him Sergey. In the documents of law enforcement agencies, he appears as corpse # 21449 and a sign with a ten-digit number awaits him in the largest cemetery of unidentified bodies in Russia. When the body of the homeless man was taken to the morgue, his acquaintances arranged a small commemoration right on the Arbat square near the word “M.O.C.K.B.A” with a bottle of cognac. There were only a few people: the newspaper lady, the lady selling socks, and a couple casual onlookers.

“He was young, decent. I could always ask him to guard my sock stand if I needed to get away”, says Elena, the lady selling socks. She says they were friends for 20 years and she knew him well. Sergey told her that he came to Moscow from Tajikistan in the late 1980-s. He got accepted to the Philosophy Faculty of the Moscow State University. He quit after a few years and started his own business – a small kiosk with random goods. He got married, settled in a house near the Arbat Square, and became a father. He got into a fight, served in prison and when he came out he didn’t have neither his wife nor his house anymore. While he was in jail, his wife managed to divorce him, marry a police officer and rewrite the house papers on her own name. At least, this is the legend that Sergey would tell. Law enforcement officials say they know one thing for sure about Sergey: he was never in jail. Sergey started living on Arbat square, on the donations of passers-by. Elena once suggested that Sergey take part in the TV show “I’m looking for you” [A popular public search service] to find his mother: rumor had it she had emigrated to Germany. But by then, according to Sergey’s story, his brother was serving a sentence in prison and he didn’t want his mother to find out how their lives were unfolding.

They say he was a good talker. During rush hour he could start a conversation with somebody stuck at a traffic light in an expensive car and end up with 1000 rubles [10 euros]. His acquaintances believed that he would make so much rubles thanks to his philosophical education, albeit incomplete. The more sober Sergey was, the more rubles he was able to make. In 20 years, Sergey left Arbat only twice. One time he moved to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior [Moscow’s largest cathedral] for half a year to make some money – he was sweeping the territory. The other time he left for a “Health camp”. “Health camps” were simple shelters for the homeless, but since no alcohol was served there, when they returned they looked healthier, thus the name. “When Sergey got back from the Health Camp, he looked much younger than before. His face got smoother. But in 4 days everything returned to normal. Because in health camps you’re not allowed to drink and in Arbat you’re allowed to do anything”. Sergey never went back to the “Health camp” – he didn’t like living by the rules.

The only person who made more money than Sergey on Arbat was a homeless blind man with a nickname “Blind man”. On Arbat everyone has nicknames – there was a limping man and his nickname was “Limping man”. People would call Sergey Krishna because for a year he hung out with the Hare Kryshnas. “The blind man also made the most rubles”, says the lady who sells apples on Arbat. She has been working here for 70 years – since she was 9 years old. “This is a very prestigious spot”, she says. The lady who sells apples says she can remember how she used to deliver milk from her own cow to important gentlemen nearby back when she was a little girl, but she can’t recall too much about Sergey. “I remember well how I helped my mother deliver milk in the 1950-s, but I can’t remember what I did yesterday”. She says she is content with her life and has little regrets. “My life is a good one. I don’t get discouraged easily. Sometimes when I’m walking, one of my feet clings to
the other, I trip and fall. Even then I don’t get discouraged. I fall, I get up, I walk on”.

Elena, the lady who sells socks, says Sergey liked his life. “It’s believed that all homeless people are unfortunate, that they are forced to live such a life. But not Sergey. He liked being a vagabond. The love for vagrancy is as strong a disease as alcoholism”.

When you take a close look at the “М”, “О”, “С”, “К”, “В”, “А” construction, it’s easy to see that «В» is the best letter for passing the night. “M” doesn’t have a floor, so it gets windy. “O” is good for gathering – 3 people can fit in it – but not for sleeping. “C” is too open. Nobody wants to sleep with everyone watching. In “K” you can only sleep standing, like a horse. “B” is perfect – a closed shape, enough privacy. Sometimes Galina, Sergey’s friend, would spend the night in “B” together
with Sergey. Some nights, they say, she would go to sleep in “A”. In the winter times you can meet Galina with a bottle at the Tsoy wall [Tsoy is a famous Russian singer from the Perestroyka times, his song “Changes” is a popular song in protest demonstrations. The Tsoy wall is a spot near the Arbat square where people with guitars gather to sing his songs]. Nobody knows how Sergey and Galina met, but the last months of his life they spent mostly together. Sergey called her his wife, the summer of 2016 they spent in the construction zone behind the building of the
Defense ministry and in the letter “B”. On the evening of October 27th Sergey came to the letter “B”. His leg was hurting from the cold temperature – he had gangrene from past frostbites. He covered himself with a blanket, fell asleep and died in his sleep.

Every year in Moscow alone – on the streets, in public transport and other public spaces – 1.500 of unidentified and so-called unclaimed bodies are found. An unclaimed body is one that was not collected from the morgue by relatives. What happens to the bodies afterwards is rarely spoken about. Workers of the morgues, law enforcement agencies and the bureau of accidents who deal with nameless bodies are considered by colleagues almost as members of the untouchable caste. Even tabloids don’t dig into such stories. With this said, according to the Ministry of
Internal Affairs, 120.000 Russians end up on the Wanted Missing People list every year, among them 4.500 muscovites, which means some of these 1500 unidentified bodies are being sought. But even after the identification procedure, about five to six hundred remain unidentified, who now have one road left – to the mass burial ground located at the 32nd kilometer away from Moscow.

The cause of death of these people, according to the law, becomes a state secret. Probably never in his life did Sergei receive as much attention as after his death.

His unidentified corpse, like Odysseus, sets off on a long journey of several years. On his way he meets the unsung servants of Moscow’s death: forensic doctors who have never been to flower shops, funeral directors who reflect on the anatomy of loneliness, and policemen who prefer the company of the dead.

When a human body is discovered on the streets of Moscow the first thing that needs to be done is to make sure the person is really dead. The police and ambulance arrive. The doctor bends over the body and examines it – the absence of a pulse is not enough to ascertain death. The best way to understand that a person has died is to find post-mortem changes on the body. Early changes are cadaveric spots, rigor mortis and drying out. Later changes are rotting and mummification. Even though the term “mummification” sounds like something from Ancient Egypt, it still happens today in Russia. Let’s say an elderly woman dies at home with an open window. The woman had no one except her cat. If the temperature is high and the air is dry, the woman will turn into a mummy in 6 months. But this scenario is not a common one: only 3-4 unclaimed bodies per year are found in houses.

So, the doctor declares death and together with the policeman proceeds to examine the body. A passer-by might get an impression that the doctor is just poking the corpse with his finger, but he is actually applying “dosed pressure” on the cadaveric spots. When a person dies, his blood circulation stops. The blood sinks down due to gravity and spots are formed. Applying “dosed pressure” means to press on the spot for three seconds and then see where the spot moves to. The spot’s behavior allows the doctor to determine the time and possible causes of death. For instance, if they are pink or brown, the dead person was poisoned. “Poison sounds like something from the Mozart times, but it actually happens all the time”, says Dmitry Pichugin, head of the Criminal Investigation Department 7th division. Pichugin’s department is in charge of searching for missing people and identifying the unidentified dead. His office has a gym wall, he addresses his visitors by the endearing forms of their names (instead of Polina, he calls me Polinochka as little Polina) and enjoys poking his timid assistant: “He’s not used to communicating with humans that are still alive”.

Dmitriy Pichugin is always happy to talk about unclaimed bodies, but not too many people are interested in the subject: “The TV program “Wait for me” [Popular public search service in Russia] often sends us requests. We work a lot together. They ask to find someone in Moscow and quite often we manage to find who they were looking for. When we say we found a corpse, they lose interest. They don’t want corpses in their shows, their audience prefers stories with a happy end”. Pichugin is convinced his work is important: “This is a good cause we are busy with. Remains must rest in peace, it’s important to appear before God with a name. I think it is important for a person to know he won’t be buried under some random number, like this philosopher of yours. If we manage to find the relatives and they hold a funeral service for him – this is top success. If a suicider gets buried with a digit instead of a name that’s ok, but a normal human doesn’t deserve such a fate”.

According to Dmitriy Pichugin, Sergey could have been a “dromomaniac”. Dromomania is an uncontrollable urge to wander. Such people have neither a home, nor a destination. Dromomaniacs easily hop on the first bus they see and take off in an unknown direction. They don’t think about the consequences: saying goodbye to friends, family, jobs is easy. All they want is to wander. “Dromomania is not too common. 10 thousand people in Moscow go missing each year and perhaps a hundred of them are just dromomaniacs. But they all end up in the same spot – the Perepchinskoe cemetery“, says Pichugin.

Pichugin goes on about poisoning tales. “Once we found a man about 40 years old, neatly dressed and with no documents. After some time turns out he is missing in Belorussia. Turns out he was a businessman who came to Moscow on a trip for a couple of days, met a prostitute and she put some drugs in his drink. She just wanted him to pass out so she could rob him, but she overdid it and his heart stopped. When a corpse is found, the doctor checks the colors of the spots covering it. If they are not blue but pink, he informs the investigator and a histopathology is performed. The Belarusian’s results showed drugs and then it’s clear the person was killed, so we initiated a criminal case: “Murder””.

When the doctor checked the color of Sergey’s spots and confirmed they were blue it was clear a histopathology won’t be necessary. Together with the police officer they continued with the description of the corpse’s appearance and its postmortem pose. Everything is important: the direction of the feet and where the head is facing, whether or not the arms are crossed. Scratches were detected on the forehead, right shoulder and left knee. Then comes the description of the corpse bed – the surface on which it is resting. Forensic students are always taught a canonical example: if you turn over a decomposed corpse lying on the grass in the forest in summer and see green – not yellow – grass, this means someone recently laid the decomposing corpse there. In Sergey’s case, the corpse bed was also not too informative – just a letter “B” with a blanket inside.

After examining the body, the policeman proceeds with examining the pockets on the
clothes. If he finds a passport, the examination is over and the body is sent to a morgue. If there is no passport the body is categorized as unidentified and any detail or distinctive feature must be documented. The policeman checks what the corpse is wearing. The clothes are pushed aside, layer by layer, but not completely removed. Firstly, for ethical reasons. Secondly, because if they start undressing the body and then dressing it again they might lose important material evidence. There is a certain sequence when describing clothing – from top to bottom, from outside to inside. If clothes are worn inside out or, say, underwear are worn on top of the paints, this gives a clue to the investigator – the deceased may not have dressed himself or may have been intoxicated.

Sergey’s clothes in this sense did not raise any questions. He was placed in a plastic bag and taken to Forensic Morgue #10 and his verbal portrait was sent to the Accident Registration Bureau.

Accident Registration Bureau

The head of the Accident Registration Bureau, Denis Vatutin is tall and handsome. “We always ask the authors of the verbal portraits to simply write “boots” and not delve into styles. Sometimes the authors know a thing or two about men’s fashion, but that doesn’t mean that the relatives of the missing person or the other workers involved in the search do. The less confusion, the higher the chances are the body will be found”, says Vatutin. The Bureau’s task is to receive verbal portraits and register them in the system. This facilitates the search process. At this point the man from the letter “B” became Corpse 21449.

“With these shoes,” says Vatutin, “there is always the biggest headache. For example, an examination of the body could have been conducted late at night on a dark street and the investigator wrote: ‘Shoes are black.’ But the relatives distinctly remember that the missing person left home wearing dark brown shoes. And then our employees must engage in creative thinking and decide: can a black shoe actually be brown? We have a very creative job in our bureau”, says Vatutin.

Every two to three hours, the bureau receives a message from the “corpse wagon,” as they are called within the bureau itself. The message contains fresh information about all bodies found in the metro, at train stations, and on the streets. If the person had documents on them, then only brief accompanying information is sent to the Bureau: the full name of the deceased and the presumed cause of death. If there are no documents, then a description of the appearance is added, and then three photos are taken at the morgue — a frontal view and two profiles.

In the file of the body # 21449, it is written that he appeared to be 50–60 years old. He had a scar on his nose, and the shape of the nose itself was described as “concave.” He was 175–180 cm tall, with a round face, dark-brown curly hair with gray bits and dark-brown mustache and beard. His eyes were light-gray, and his ears were protruding. In the photograph, victim # 21449 looks like one of those guys you pass by on your way to work through Arbat. Someone who, if they were to ask for a cigarette, would first give you a compliment — to add grace to the situation.

Denis Vatutin has been working at the Bureau since 2003. His first job was to scan photos of unidentified bodies and place them in the database. “This might sound like some big words, but what attracted me to the job is that I actually felt like I could help people. I like matching those who are searching with those who are lost. It’s good when people are found. Of course, it’s sad that they are found dead, but uncertainty is much worse. If it so happens that a person no longer exists, not knowing that is wrong. You can hide it from your children, from someone else. But why hide this from yourself? To avoid feeling guilty?”

Frequent visitors to the Bureau are elderly women looking for their sons. “A couple of years ago a woman came searching for her son, Arkady. Maybe I’m being mean, but it seemed like she was enjoying the search process, she didn’t strike me as someone hit by grief. She kept coming, looking at the pictures of various bodies, studying moles, and scars. Then she would say “No, no, this isn’t my Arkasha’”. Several years later the woman appeared with her son who was wearing a flower print shirt: “Here is my Arkasha, I found him, he was in a monastery”.

Files are kept at the bureau for two years, then they are destroyed. “Two years is enough. If someone is interested in finding their relative, they will not wait five years, right? If they come after five years, then it is most likely about property disputes, not about family feelings. Officially, they are relatives, but in fact they are strangers,” says Vatutin. “At first, when you see a non-living person, you feel uneasy. But when you look at them every day, your psyche finds protection. Because if I felt paralyzed each time I saw a corpse, how could I do my job?” Denis set himself some rules: don’t let the stories get too close to your heart, otherwise you will become an uncontrollable ball of emotions. A professional here is the one who maintains a cool head – this is the only way to help people. But don’t cross the fine line and become callous. “Callousness is when a person has disappeared, but you don’t care. That’s
why I tell my employees everyday: A citizen comes to us with grief, it is unacceptable to show your bad mood, even if something happened to your husband or someone screwed you over, the citizen has nothing to do with it.” The main rule in this work, says Vatutin, is not to think about corpses when you come home: “I come home, eat and go to bed.”

Morgue and flowers

While the living are looking for the dead, the dead lie in the morgue. By law, an unidentified body is kept in the morgue for seven days, but in reality it stays there for two weeks, in case the police need to do further investigation – for example, to remove soil from under the fingernails. In morgue # 10 on 2nd Botkinsky Proezd, corpse # 21449 lay in the refrigerator for two weeks, with a temperature in the cell of +2 – +4. Almost like being in a flower shop.

The head of the Bureau of Forensic Medicine in Moscow, Evgeny Kildushov, has never been to a flower shop, but he knows a thing or two about loneliness. “Loneliness is when there is no one to pick you up from the morgue,” says Kildushov, smiling. He takes a bite of his marshmallow. Evgeniy has been working in the bureau since 1989, he has gone all the way from an orderly to the head of the bureau and goes to work with pleasure. Loneliness has many shades, says Kildushov. Sometimes a man had a name, a surname, an apartment – you can trace his entire life – but no one comes to collect him. Sometimes relatives come over, identify the corpse, but refuse to bury him. Sometimes no one comes at all.

There are many shades, but the same path awaits all these corpses – a burial plot for
unclaimed corpses at the Perepechinsky cemetery. It happens that someone ends up in this group for a couple of days by mistake: they died at the football stadium and forgot their passport at home. But people like this don’t stay here for long. “Good family men don’t stay here for more than a day, they get collected quickly”.

When relatives come to identify the dead, they are carefully rolled out of the
refrigerator—Kildyushov emphasizes the word “carefully”—to their relatives. For two weeks in the morgue, corpse # 21449 underwent procedures. Forensic doctors selected materials for DNA analysis – blood, tissue, hair. These materials will be useful if relatives come for identification procedures. DNA comes handy when the corpse is rotten, but even if it’s in order, relatives still can have difficulties identifying the body. The relative’s brain, according to experts, gives the command not to believe in the death of a loved one. When the police insists on a 100% match, but the relative denies it, a DNA test is ordered. But no one came for corpse # 21449.

The police officers collected his finger prints, but the dactyloscopy showed no results, Sergey’s identity wasn’t established. “If your philosopher ever served a prison sentence, for instance, then we would be able to identify him by his fingerprints”, says the head of the Criminal Investigation Department 7th division Dmitry Pichugin. “They’ve been fingerprinting in prison since the 1950s. Many homeless people like making up stories that they were imprisoned in order to gain authority. Like teenagers.” Pichugin dreams that fingerprinting will become mandatory for everyone who receives a Russian passport – this, he says, would make his job of identifying individuals so much easier.

So, after two weeks, Sergei moved from the category of unidentified corpses to unclaimed.

The morgues aren’t rubber, says Pichugin [Rephrasing a Russian saying “Moscow is not rubber”, meaning there is not enough space for everyone who wishes to move to the capital to do so]. Sergei’s body was supposed to be sent straight to the Perepechinskoye cemetery, but since the case was not yet closed, he was taken to the Lianozovskoye corpse storage facility instead. There a body can lie for up to a year. Now that a person from the letter “B” is officially “unclaimed”, the state bears all expenses. When the time comes, undertakers will come to the corpse storage facility to collect him, put him in a wooden coffin, nail the lid and take him to the cemetery. It will be the cheapest coffin – sometimes upholstered with fabric, and sometimes without fabric at all – depending on who won the state tender for coffins for unclaimed bodies that year. Sergei’s final journey will cost the state 16,000 rubles [160 euros].

The end

It is quiet on a huge field covered with snow. The snow is white, almost sterile. Snowplows don’t get here, almost no one gets here at all. There is no one around, only a dead bird on the path, dog tracks and fresh holes in the ground. When the snow melts, sloppy graves will emerge from underneath, looking like a mass grave hastily dug up after a grandiose battle. The Perepechinskoye cemetery is one of the largest cemeteries in the Moscow region. It is located not far from Sheremetyevo Airport. The cemetery was opened in 1999, there are two sectors for the burial of Muslims, a sector is allocated for military personnel and nine sectors are reserved for unidentified and unclaimed corpses. The remaining 70 sectors are for ordinary people. Funeral workers call the sector for the unclaimed and unidentified the
“anonymous sector,” but this seems not right to Denis Vatutin from the Accident Registration Bureau: “Calling the sector anonymous sounds like we are talking about anonymous alcoholics, this is wrong.”

Sergey’s path through the cemetery will look like this. At the entrance he will be greeted by a banner “You cannot learn to love the living if you do not know how to preserve the memory of the dead – Rokossovsky.” [Rokossovsky was one of the prominent Red Army commanders of World War II]. A cemetery employee stands next to the banner and speaks into his walkie talkie: “Car crashed into the fence, area 63, needs fixing.” Next to the cemetery administration stands a chapel. Next to the chapel is a large banner with instructions on how to properly pray for the dead. A man in an Adidas tracksuit sticks on a fresh price tag: “Promotion! 62,370 rubles, “Hebei Black” tombstone + flowers as a gift” on a monument. Sergey will be driven along a long road, to the very edge of the cemetery, where there are no streetlights. A jeep is parked next to a banner asking to respect the deceased and not park cars on lawns and near graves. Sergei will drive past crosses – wooden, cast iron, painted, cracked, varnished. He will drive past monuments that look like they were taken from a museum of monumental art – covered with poems, flowers, guitars and the image of Jesus Christ. On one tombstone, the deceased is depicted in full body, and his cufflinks, watch and ring are gold plated. On another tombstone you can see a 2 meter image of a woman in a light green evening dress. On the third tombstone, a couple is hugging, on the fourth, the wife smiles at her husband, and he looks into the distance. Sergey will drive past a grave from which someone’s laughter can be heard, past a grave that was recently visited by someone loving – on it lies a huge armful of daisies. The farther you go, the fewer people there are. An inconspicuous elderly woman passes by with a shovel behind her back. The crows caw. Two women pass by and the older woman tells the younger one: “I broke my knee, although I fell on my back, imagine that” And then it’s quiet again. And then a woman in a white beret starts to cry at a grave.

“People working in the funeral service industry have overcome the fear of death,” says Artem Ekimov, head of the Ritual State Budgetary Institution, the main and only organization in Moscow that buries people. Ekimov is a young, curly-haired dreamer who loves to talk about poetry, God and meaning: “In our society, death is associated with grief, tears, enormous suffering. Few people focus on the fact that death is a natural process, just like birth. The body is just a shell. Each of us has a piece of God inside that goes to heaven. For the person in the coffin, death is not the end. People who cry at the coffin, cry not for the deceased, but for themselves.”

The last section that the car with Sergey’s coffin will pass is the Muslim sector. It’s all black granite monuments with crescent moons. This is where the streetlights end and the footprints disappear in the snow. The closer to the graves of unclaimed corpses, the purer the snow. Silence is broken only by planes taking off one after another from the Sheremetyevo airport. And the noise of a saw. And the crunch of snow under the feet. Graves for unclaimed bodies are dug along a high concrete fence. There are iron sheets with the inscriptions: U.M. or U.W. (unclaimed man or unclaimed woman). Sometimes you see a surname: Arkhipova or Monaco – these are identified but unclaimed bodies. Here people are not divided into nationalities – people lie from all over the post-Soviet bloc: Belarusians, Ukrainians, Tajiks, Uzbeks. To read the inscriptions, you need to carefully tiptoe between the graves: there are no paths for visitors, because there are no visitors.

“All these unclaimed bodies are human islands. Is this sad? What is loneliness? A homeless person can be free like no one else. There was wonderful news in Volgograd – a homeless person entered a basement flooded with boiling water and began to swim there, as if in a pool. And at some point, apparently out of pleasure, he began to scream. Residents, thinking he was going to boil himself to death, called the police. And when the police came for him, he told them: “I’m fine, I’ve been swimming here for a week. I’m a long-distance sailor, I feel good!”. What I am saying is: a person may seem lost to society, but he himself is free. The philosopher in the letter “B” can be seen as an unfortunate human, but we don’t know what was inside him,” says Artem Ekimov.

Sometimes you can spot a cross on a burial plot – these are installed by relatives who came to visit their unclaimed deceased relative, but do not have the money to pick him up. Exhumation according to the price list is 18,750 rubles [187,5 euros] ] in winter and 14,380 [143,8 euros] in summer. “One extreme is exaggerated suffering over a completed life. The other extreme is when a body identified by relatives remains unclaimed”, says Ekimov.

“How do we bury them? Nothing special. We dig a hole, put the coffin there and that’s it. If relatives are found later, a funeral service can be held in absentia,” said one of the cemetery employees. Five people were buried today, three more holes were dug in advance for later. It’s half past four in the evening. The sun is setting.

The life of a person from the letter “B” is scheduled for six years in advance. According to the rules of the Perepechinskoe cemetery, which he still needs to get to, he can spend only five years there. This gives relatives a chance to apply for exhumation and take the body, if again, relatives are found and the identity of the deceased is established. If this does not happen, Sergey will be dug up and taken to a new address – to the Nikolo-Arkhangelskoye cemetery. There, in the cremation oven, he will burn for 90 minutes until two liters of ashes remain. The container with the ashes will sit on the shelf for unclaimed ashes for a year. It won’t take up much space: two liters of ashes is like a bottle of Coca-Cola at a dinner a group of friends will share. This year is the last, truly last chance for his relatives to pick him up. Most likely, no one will come for him.

Then his remains will be placed in the common grave of unclaimed ashes on the territory of the Nikolo-Arkhangelskoye cemetery. Artem Ekimov says that he is now developing a design for the stele and is racking his brains over the epitaph: “I still don’t understand what to write. Something meaningful, obviously, something about loneliness. ‘You were lonely, but now you’re not lonely’? It’s just that I still can’t understand for myself what loneliness is. Is it a good thing? Evil? What is it? Maybe we should announce a creative writing competition for an epitaph?” Perhaps Ekimov will find the right words in five years, when the journey of the man frozen to death in the two-meter letter “B” of the Moscow structure comes to an end.