Fighting Mankind's Worst Enemy

Some 450 years ago, just a few months after the 16-year-old Grand Prince Ivan IV (“The Terrible”) crowned himself tsar, a horrible fire leveled Moscow. Since that time, Moscow has burned to the ground 12 more times and large parts of it have been destroyed in over 100 instances. On the anniversary of the Great Fire of Moscow, Yelena Utenkova looks at why fires have had such a dramatic effect on Russian life and what is being done to stop them.

Nikolai Gogol said that, in Russia, there are two great disasters — roads and fools. Alexander Koryukhin, head of the information division of the Moscow Firefighters’ Association, argues that there is a third — fires.