Moscow Cold
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"There's one sure way to tell when it's really cold on the streets of Moscow. It's when even the most macho Russian men admit defeat and lower the earflaps of their fur hats, and they've been doing it in droves this winter."

Weather Notebook commentator Andy Bowers is National Public Radio's Moscow correspondent.

"Muscovites are very proud of their ability to cope with one of Europe's harshest climates. But this unusually cold winter even has some of the heartiest Russians complaining. It started snowing in September and it got worse from there. Mid-December brought record lows. Apartment building walls cracked and Moscow's growing homeless population faced an even tougher time than usual. When the Spring thaw comes, police can expect to find a lot of what they morbidly call 'snow drops.' People who have frozen to death on the streets but whose corpses have remained covered by the snow. Another winter hazard is blocks of ice falling from high rise apartments, which kill several people every year. As temperatures rise after a deep frost, you can often see grumpy janitors perched precariously on rooftops scraping off the ice before it can fall on its own. Many Russians deal with the cold by consuming huge amounts of vodka. Russian circuses and zoos even let their elephants drink buckets of vodka to keep their spirits up. But a spokeswoman for the Moscow zoo said recently on television that their elephants prefer gin and tonics. Of course harsh winters helped the Russians defeat both Napoleon and Hitler. In fact, Winston Churchill once remarked that a country where they eat ice cream on the street in winter can never be defeated. Even today, Moscow's new Baskin Robbins stores do a booming business all winter long. I'm Andy Bowers in Moscow."

The Weather Notebook is engineered by Sean Doucette at West Side Studios in North Conway, NH. Our show is underwritten by Subaru, the beauty of all wheel drive with major support coming from the National Science Foundation.