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BURNING FUTURE The tragedy of Moscow late November 2003 reveals substantial lack of safety in living conditions not only of students in Russia    | Karl-Heinz Kloppisch. Once again Russia is making the news. In the night of november 23rd a fire broke out in a student hostel at the Friendship of the Peoples’ University revealing the fatal living conditions of students in Russia and raising up the issue of safety standards and living quality in the Post-Soviet Union. At least 36 people of different national origins — including some Chinese, Ecuadorean and Vietnamese students — were killed in the incident that took place in the once so prestigious university in the southwest of Moscow (see also article LUMUMBA). For most of the affected students the incident does not come as a surpirse at all. Overcrowded facilities and lacking safety standards    The hostel is mainly used as a “quarantine facility for foreign students”, who just arrived in Russia and still have to undergo the medical checks before being admitted. While one new dormitory was constructed recently, the facility for newcomers built in the 1960s has been in a more than miserable condition in recent years. The list of lacking precaution measures does not seem to end: no fire warning systems, no fire extinguishers, no fire escapes, nor sufficient space for rescue services to get to the building. 270 foreign students mainly from developping countries lived in the four story building with only two emergency stairways. One of them was kept permanently shut, survivors told BBC online. “It was like a horrible nightmare,” said Abdallah Bong, a student from Chad. Dozens of fire engines that arrived at the place of the tragedy just one hour after the fire started could not reach the building because of parking cars which blocked the access.    Most of the killed students had just arrived in Moscow and only spoke little or no Russian at all. “As a result, they did not understand the chief of the hostel, as he was trying to wake them up” to leave the house and save their lives, Anastasia, a Russian student, told the BBC via email. Another remarkable fact, it was the first weekend for students in this hostel and they were celebrating the house-warming with a lot of alcohol. Regardless of communication problems and lack of soberness the main reason for the tragedy were “bad organisation and poor technical equipment”, Eduard Vorobyov, a deputy minister of for emergencies said. Since this was already the second fire this year (only in this building) it seems even more confusing that it took the rescue services more than an hour to get to the place of the fire. Nafafe Tengna, a student from Guinea, told AP that the “students had to do it all themselves, holding mattresses for those jumping out” and trying to help the half-naked survivors that suffered from broken limbs and backs, suffering frostbite and shock as they waited for the ambulances in sub-zero temperatures. Students came from all over the campus to “help straight away, immediately.”    Wether or not the catastrophy was caused by an electric short circuit, a gas cooker’s flame or an act of xenophobia — the fact is, that without students helping each other, not even the fire fighters will be able to save our lives.