Everybody was shoving, but Vasily Mandazhe held his ground.
"They won't let us in," he shouted. "When are they going to let us in?"
The names of Mandazhe's sons, Sergei and Ivan, were on a list of the wounded taped to the hospital door. But that was all the information anybody was going to get about the victims of a bombing in the Moscow subway on Friday morning, in which officials said at least 39 people died and 130 were wounded.
Family members were pushing desperately against a metal turnstile at the entrance to the Sklifasovsky Hospital, where most of the scores of wounded were being treated.
"No one's going to let you in, and that's it," said a man in a gray uniform standing guard at the turnstile.
"There's been an explosion in the Metro, do you understand?" the guard said. "They're busy. Busy. They don't need you in there."
A woman in the crowd seemed near tears. "What if you just take me by the hand and lead me in?" she pleaded.
The guard barely looked at her. "I don't want your hand," he said.
Added to the horror of the bombing was the anguish of the victim's relatives, desperate for information in a country where government officials have little regard for the families of disaster victims.
After the Kursk submarine sank in Aug. 2000 with 118 sailors aboard, it took the government days to even admit the seriousness of the accident.
After a terrorist hostage-taking in a theater in Oct. 2002 in which 129 people died, family members beseeched hospitals for days for word about whether their relatives were alive or dead.
The glasnost -- or openness -- that Mikhail Gorbachev brought to the Soviet Union two decades ago does not run deep. There is little sense here of a public right to know.
Reporters and family members were rebuffed repeatedly on Friday by police officers, ambulance drivers, doctors, government officials and hospital administrators.
"We put up a list," said Aleksandr Yermolov, director of the hospital, at a news conference in the hospital's big, empty lobby. "They'll read it, and then they can come to us. We have the names."
As he spoke, Mandazhe and a cluster of other relatives were almost within earshot, just beyond the turnstile, arguing with the only representatives the hospital made available -- the security guards.
Mandazhe gave up. He and his sister and niece stumbled through the snow and ice to a back entrance to the hospital, holding on to one another for balance.
There, a guard in a gray uniform was holding a metal door open just a crack, allowing people to plead with him for a moment before he sent them on their way.
"Come back Sunday," he told the Mandazhe family, in what seemed to be emerging as the official word.
As the guard watched the Mandazhe family walk away, someone asked him why he was being so rude to the desperate relatives.
"Well, we're fed up," he said. "Do you know how many people have been coming? `Please, please!' Everyone wants something. Ahh, the tragedy. They're driving me crazy."
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