He is nameless and his grave gets no visitors, but corpse number 2108 in Perepechinskoye cemetery outside Moscow has a message for the world: Men in Russia are dying too easily.
The man, commemorated on a tiny metal plaque only by his ID number, sex, and date of burial, is one of 17,500 unidentified bodies discovered in Moscow over the last five years, often after lying whole winters in the snowdrifts where they died.
About two thirds are male and they all end up in Perepechinskoye in the shadow of a silver birch forest, down the road from a giant municipal rubbish tip.
"They are mostly drunks and poor immigrant workers from ex-Soviet countries who were killed in the winter weather," said Sergei, a cemetery official who would not give his last name, as grave-diggers shoveled frozen earth.
The approximately 3,000 unidentified bodies buried here each year are also the tip of a wider and potentially disastrous tendency in Russia.
In a study earlier this month, the World Bank said Russian men have "short, brutal lives" due to heart disease, alcoholism and traffic accidents and that the country faces an "alarming population decline."
Just 143 million people live in the world's biggest country, down at least six million from 1992 and falling every day, in large part because average male life expectancy is only 58 years -- 16 years less than in western Europe.
At the same time, fertility rates have plummeted from 2.0 to 1.3 children per woman since the collapse of the Soviet Union and last year there were more abortions than births. Their life expectancy is 72 -- better than for men, but still low by Western standards.
Throw in an HIV/AIDS pandemic and a mortality rate for traffic accidents almost double that in big Western countries and the statistics portray a country heading toward disaster.
Explanations for men's short lifespans include the stress of existence for many in the wake of the Soviet collapse, an inefficient, poorly equipped health service, and above all a centuries-old love affair with heavy drinking.
Alexander Nemtsov, a leading researcher with the health ministry, says that alcohol is linked to 30 percent of all deaths in Russia. Alcohol poisoning alone kills about 40,000 people a year, he says, compared to a few hundred in the US.
"Vodka is our national misfortune," Viktor, an ambulance driver at Moscow's First City Hospital, said on a recent Friday evening, as a steady trickle of men with bloodied faces stumbled into the emergency ward.
When the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, tried to keep Russians from the bottle in the 1980s by restricting alcohol production, they turned to "homemade spirits, aftershave, solvents and perfumes," Viktor said.
"I have a lot of friends who had OK jobs, then lost everything through drink. They drank everything they earned," he said.
Nursing a beer bottle in sub-zero temperatures outside the Prospekt Mir metro station, graphic artist Sergei Ivanov, 33, said that the stress of having to adapt to capitalism was the real killer.
"In Soviet days, you got paid and you knew that tomorrow you'd get the same amount of money. Now you are forced to run around and have no idea whether you'll be fired the next day," he said.
Sociologist Alexei Levinson at the Levada pollsters says that disrespect for human life has penetrated male society, encouraging ever more destructive behavior -- mostly among the poor and uneducated, but also "among generals and many others."
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