To the Rescue

"It was the longest I've had," grunts Ilya Lyubimsky, 42, as he takes off his blood-soaked coveralls back at his rescue unit base, a dilapidated two-story shack squeezed in behind brand-new buildings on Mosfilmovskaya Street in Moscow's posh Embassy quarter. On this summer day, he has spent more than one-and-a-half hours extracting a corpulent middle-aged man from the wreck of what had been his car. The rescuers could not use a torch to cut the metal lest they hurt the man, whose legs were wedged in; they had to unbend the jagged pieces by hand. For Lyubimsky, who didn't even learn...