MOSCOW: A new year for Russia maybe, but as always there is the same old cycle of dangers with its inevitable crop of fatalities.

As macabre as it sounds, every season in this country has its own distinct manner in which unfortunate locals meet their end.

Rescuers, doctors and police will calmly incorporate this grim timetable into their working lives over the next twelve months — only western observers will try to rationalise the inexorable pattern.

And it’s not simply the apocalyptic four horsemen of binge drinking, mad driving, work injuries and army service. These take their toll all year long and have played their part in reducing the average Russian male’s life expectancy to 58.

No sooner do the New Year hangovers abate in January do the most bitter frosts set in. The phenomenon of the freezing victims reaches its peak and each day police find new frozen bodies on the streets.

Often these poor souls are homeless, but their fate is also shared by people who drink too much and fall asleep outdoors before they get home.

The spate of freezing deaths begins in October and lasts until the weather eases around April. Last winter 399 people perished this way in the capital. This year the tally is already more than 200.

As the days get longer and warmer, Russian men make a few last forays for their favourite meditative pastime, ice fishing, spending hours crouching over holes they cut in iced-up rivers and bays. As the ice melts, floes tend to break off and carry the anglers away. From the Gulf of Finland to the Sea of Okhotsk, hundreds drift out to sea. Most get lucky and are picked up by the coastguard, but not all.

“It is like a natural catastrophe,” a spokesman for the St. Petersburg rescue services complained last year.

Come spring, the Grim Reaper fares well in the forests. Woe betide the hunter or rambler who runs into a hungry bear emerging from hibernation.—dpa