RUSSIA: Murder doesn't always make the news in Russia but this is understandable in a country with one of the highest rates of violent death, reports Dan McLaughlin
Moscow winters are cold, of course, but beat your neighbour to death for his jacket? That's what one 20-year-old did this week, according to Russian news agencies, attacking the man in the doorway to the building where they lived, stealing his coat and leaving him for dead.
The victim staggered to his bedroom, where his mother found his body the next morning.
It's not the kind of story which makes the news in Russia, but then few murders do, when there are more than 30,000 of them a year.
In comparison, about 700 occur annually in Britain.
One case which caused a slight ripple was that of Yevgeny Usanov, a resident of the southern town of Saratov, who was sentenced last week to 12 years in jail. The court heard that he had stabbed his victim though the heart, wrapped the body in bay leaves and then fed it through a meat grinder.
"These culinary preparations were done with one aim - to eat the victim," prosecutor Natalya Rubanova declared.
Two days later Usanov boiled the remains of the man, who had been his friend until a drunken argument.
Probably the most surprising element of these cases, for Russians at least, is that the perpetrators seem to have been caught. The police here are better known for their incompetence, corruption and brutality than for their ability to bring the right people to justice.
Moscow's police chief, Gen-Lt Vladimir Pronin, claimed yesterday that an "independent sociological survey" had found a marked improvement in the public's opinion of the city's policemen, RIA news agency reported.
Perhaps, but Pronin's case was not helped this month by another murder investigation, in which two policemen were detained over the contract killing of a young software designer and military website editor, Vladimir Sukhmolin.
The Izvestia newspaper said the policemen, from a town outside Moscow, told investigators they had been paid $1,150 to kill Sukhmolin. He was beaten to death with baseball bats.
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the plummeting real value of wages, many policemen augment their meagre salaries with bribes and part-time security work, often with criminal organisations. However, as Russia's crime figures show, they have plenty of police work to keep them busy.
Last October, the World Health Organisation said a person was more likely to die a violent death - through murder or suicide - in Russia than in any other country except El Salvador and Colombia.
The Interior Ministry said 34,000 people had been murdered in 2001, a statistic which only covered those declared dead at the scene, not anyone who died later from injuries sustained in an attack or whose cause of death was never determined, not to mention the thousands of Russians who simply disappear each year.
President Vladimir Putin would rather the world focused on his achievements - falling unemployment, a stable rate of inflation and rising industrial production, foreign investment and average real income, according to the State Statistics Committee's review of 2002.
Nevertheless, despite the continuing hardship of most Russians' lives or the misery of the continuing war in Chechnya, most people still support Putin: the All-Russian Public Opinion Centre said last November that he enjoyed an approval rating of some 83 per cent.
This was despite crumbling infrastructure which has left 27,000 people across Russia shivering in temperatures below minus 30, as decrepit Soviet-era heating systems finally gave up the ghost; hospitals and schools have been blighted by broken pipes and lack of fuel.
For Russia's homeless, the winter has been even tougher. Moscow and St Petersburg have suffered their coldest spells for more than a decade and, in the capital, almost 300 street-sleepers have perished.
Wages, prices and the cost of your Western-style cappuccino or "biznis lanch" are steadily rising in Russia. Life still feels cheap, though, and the arrival of a new year seems to have changed little.
In a village 100 miles east of Moscow on the night of January 6th - the eve of Russian Orthodox Christmas - six elderly Russians were stabbed to death, including a disabled man and 92-year-old woman. The police said the six may have been killed for their pension money, but they couldn't be sure.