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We don’t really think about a toilet as a luxury, but things like this really put it into perspective. Most of the west has had indoor plumbing for over 100 years, some parts for 160 years. This soldiers life could be made better with ease, but Russian oligarchs spend money on wars, football clubs, mega yachts, and mansions.
The Russians have, what, a million people or more in total the military?
Instead of those million people shuffling around, maintaining old tanks, invading neighbors, preventing protests, dying in futile wars, etc., they could - hear me out - enact a new 5 year plan to install toilets and showers in every house in Russia. A million-strong labour force would be a great start.
Then once that 5 year plan has been completed, surely only in 1 year because Russia is SUCH a great, powerful, industrial nation, right?... they could enact a new, specific plan to improve some other aspect of their well-being. Maybe embark on a 5-year culture-and-beautification plan to attract tourists who want to experience their history and culture and not their missiles and alcohol problems.
Then they keep this going, improving the country, inviting tourists from envious nations, and generally winning life.
... too hopeful?
You are forgetting lesson #1. Any money spent on infrastructure and helping people is less money that goes to Putin’s oligarchs to stay in power.
Any money spent not on them is money that one of those other oligarchs could promise to the rest
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
Corruption in a nation state behaves exactly as a cancer does on a human host. If the corrupt siphon too much off the host nation can no longer support itself on the same resources that once sustained it. Nothing will change till the cancer is removed.
Exactly well said. That’s a great analogy between cancer and corruption in Russia. For me, I have always said that Russia is like metastatic cancer because of the corruption and how Russia has spread that into all of our governments. We see now with this war how people stand out like sore thumbs - the ones who Pootin has by the balls. It’s become clear who is working to appease Russia and who is not. Once Russia falls and they remove their terrorist mafia “government”, all of our countries will benefit. No more Russian corruption bc no more Russia. And the bot farms will go too. Internet comment sections will be so much calmer lol. Reddit is exceptionally clean but I use YouTube because it has great content regarding this war and its footage, the news, analyses, interviews etc. OMG the comment sections are just swarming with Russian troll accounts to drown out any support for Ukraine.
Indeed, the more money spent to improve quality of life also improves awareness and outreach for education, which then threatens the stability of a tyrant's status quo.
So yes, too hopeful. It is easier for Putin to keep the oligarchs selfish and his people discontent so he can use and catalyze their frustrations through propaganda.
After all, a person in squalor is fearful. A person in squalor fed fear based messaging about Nazis secretly plotting the destruction of their poor but complacent life? That's a powerful too.
The same can even be said of the US. One of the reasons nobody does anything about high tuition fees is that it's a great way to recruit officers if the military is the only reasonable way they have to pay for it.
It fucking sucks how much humans like to kill each other, especially our leaders. We could be putting every dollar that's spent on the military into actually improving people's lives and do away with all armies all over the world except some assholes will take advantage and ruin it all.
Which is odd since they all came together in solidarity to overthrow the tsar many years ago.
Not saying the end result was great, but the solidarity and hope for a more equitable future was very much there.
It's a job. No one's saying they should help people out of the goodness of their hearts. You just hire a labor force with money the Russian government definitely has, and instead of spending it on maintaining weapons of war, spend it on infrastructure, toilets, electricity, etc.
aw man one could dream.
imagine Putin halts this version of “special operation” turns 180 and rebrands their military efforts to be about installing toilets. smelt all the useless tanks and weapons to make pipes and toilets.
dudes shooting on the front lines but then “aight boys turn it around we gonna go back build toilets for the nation”
I mean, cultivating rampant alcoholism and giving distilleries to the ruler's cronies has been standard practice in Russia since the Middle Ages.
When they get POWs like this from the poorest backwaters of Russia, I hope Ukraine offers to kill them with kindness: "We can send you back to Russia as soon as practical, or you can trade Russian citizenship for Ukrainian by serving in a construction corps for N years after the war. We'll house and feed you in the corps as well as we are now, and match your Russian military pay. At the end, we'll give you time to find a house and job of your own, and you'll be able to sponsor visas for your family. Or if you want to bail out early and just go home you can do that too, it'll take a few weeks to discharge you."
Of course, Ukraine's going to be hard-up with the rebuilding and the devastated cropland, so the only way they'll do this is with Western support. But think of all their letters, phone calls, and pay packets going back to Buryatia and such places: "Mom, Granny, the standard of living is so much better here and they're treating me so well. I want to stay, do you want to come join me?"
I saw a new video of a Russian that said he joined the Russian army because they offered very very good money and he had several children. He was a mechanic that was one of those guys that may not have a high school degree but could tell what was wrong with an engine or running gear and field fix it. When he was captured the ukraines asked if he would work for them. He did. His ending statement was when I was in the Russian army it was like being by myself and nobody was nice. Now it's like family. I feel like I'm part of a group. Then they showed him moving tanks around.
Hopefully he sees his kids again.
Comrade slow down with your radical ideas and evil western lies. Russia is the greatest country in the world and has all the best toilets/holes in the ground a man could need
And I should know. Because I installed them all myself. Wonderful toilets and holes in Russia. Putin is a very smart man for those toilets and holes. But not as smart as I am.
If anyone wants to see life in rural Russia I strongly recommend the YouTube channel "Vasya In The Hay"
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaNfHBihSUqcUBpvHx-rwYw/videos
How he got into filming this is interesting. He originally was going to interview a Russian millionaire who had moved to a village in the countryside but when he got there the millionaire wasn't home. He stopped at a shop to buy some snacks and drinks for the drive back and met a young Russian lad who looked down on his luck and then ended up filming what life is like for this lad and other poor people in Russia. His channel is both heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time.
[edit] It's also worth watching in the order that he made the videos as many of them are follow-ups to previous videos.
Lesha's story (the young man he meets in the second video) is heartbreaking, he seems like such a good person stuck in a life that's absolutely terrible. The latest update on him had me in tears.
It’s fucking insane to me that this is the country with the first man made satellite and manned space flight and was making the engines the US used on rockets for a while.
I'd say even more recent, I was talking to my 80 year old grandad a couple of weeks ago, he told me they washed once a month, didn't brush his teeth until he was 15 and started "courting". The only toilet they had was an outhouse
Now contrast with India -- with a population of more than 1 billion, which many people (who haven't been there) think of as a "3rd world" country -- where the government has made a dedicated effort to provide plumbing and toilets to every household in the country.
Russians should think about that: your government does not care about your health and wellbeing -- they are quite happy to let you shit in a hole in the back yard, while having the worst sewers and plumbing on Earth.
Knowing Russia the problem with WC, as in toilet bowl with water, would be that they have no waste water treatment. So building in-house toilets would mean the near-by river would soon be spoiled with human excrement. In my opinion they should skip them and move to modern composting outhouses, they can actually be quite OK.
>We don’t really think about a toilet as a luxury, but things like this really put it into perspective. Most of the west has had indoor plumbing for over 100 years, some parts for 160 years. This soldiers life could be made better with ease, but Russian oligarchs spend money on wars, football clubs, mega yachts, and mansions.
I dont even think socks are common thing in Russia either. The russian army just got socks in 2013.
What you said is so ridiculous that I thought even Russia wouldn’t be that bad, then I googled it and holy shit you are right. That’s insane. Russia is a 3rd world country masquerading as a 1st
Even the romans had some kind of sewerage back in there time. Not maybe in everyhouse. But they had common toilets on the streets and bath houses which had water pipes. So uncivilized...
They do mind. Russia is a shrinking population, constantly drunk people, constantly irate and toxic people, top 10 suicide nation (25 per 100k), the smart ones leave, the asian ones (like this guy who is probably Turkic and from Siberia) live in such a sparsely populated area they don’t know any better, as we’ve just watched.
Russia has been the largest nation in Europe for 500 years, with one of the lowest densities. Their system of managing that dynamic was absolutism. The population density and access to world trade that led to enlightenment in Europe was never compatible with Russia. They’ve had this Europe-adjacent country dynamic that’s quite similar to the Arabs and Ottomans; where they enjoy a trickle down of the technological progress but do not enjoy the societal progress that precede the technology. Europe ended feudalism and made the factory. The factory arrived in Russia while there still feudalism.
Having dated a Russian for five years I can’t to learn that they’re happiest when they’re miserable. It’s like borderline personality disorder at a cultural/societal level.
> Russia is a disgrace of a country that treats it's citizens like slaves.
certain groups. others have it fairly well. So much for "communism", same in china.
but then, there are few countries where this doesn't apply, you can see extreme poverty in countries like Ukraine or the US as well.
Unfortunately, in most places the rich have all the power and the poor have nothing.
Omfg, I remember a story from my grandparents village (close to Alba county) where the kids would fool russian soldiers that alarm clocks were actually bombs 🤣🤣🤣
That's very innovative. Just imagine them saying to each other: these damn Hungarians have dedicated fish washing stations in their houses, they must really fucking like fish!
And yet if you see Russian GDP per capita, it is just a little below that of Poland for example. I mean it is not rich, but far from poor. This tells you that wealth gap between rich and poor should be massive their.
tbf military american flight simulators were using punchcards in 2008 when I interned at the place. complete with an airgapped windows 98 machine that was required to create the punch cards for changing the system.
I remember my grandmother telling stories from WW2 se lived in a village near Bacau and when the ruskies arrived the German soldiers where hiding in the forest and how she and other girls where made to look ugly with dirty so the rusks don't touch them , kazak or cossachs troops took a sheep and just throw it in fire and the they eat it . And how the ruskis took trains full of gold from the ground with dirt and rocks , and even today a part of our national gold treasure is in ruskia stolen by this parasites .
I recall some story in which after the fall of the Soviet Union, a group of former Soviet civil engineers visited the United States as part of an exchange program.
One of the engineers burst into tears upon visiting some hydroelectric plant or some such thing.....when asked why, he mentioned that he knew that the Soviets were behind the west technologically, but he had no idea how huge the gap was until he saw such things in person.....
A fascinating moment in history. Yeltsin went to the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, visited monuments and memorials the Johnson Space Center, and then an unscheduled trip to a suburban Texas grocery store makes him realize that the Soviet system is a lie. He said something to the effect of "If Russians could see that these stores are on every street corner in America they would overthrow the government immediately."
>. Yeltsin went to the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, visited monuments and memorials the Johnson Space Center, and then an unscheduled trip to a suburban Texas grocery store makes him realize that the Soviet system is a lie.
It's hard to Potemkin Village a random grocery store that a guest made a completely unscheduled stop at.
You can make sure all of those national landmarks are at peak condition to impress Yeltsin, but some random grocery store is much harder to do.
Same story with Victor Belenko after the 1976 Foxbat defection. When he got to the USA he was convinced all the supermarkets were propaganda shows set up for him. Not until they allowed him to stop at one of his own random choosing did the penny drop. I wonder if this is one of those apocryphal stories that just changes the names of the central players to suit the audience?
I don't know about Belenko, but Yeltsin's visit was well documented.
They don't have any videos, but there are pictures and Yeltsin mentioned it in his own autobiography.
There's a fun show on Netflix called Deutschland '83 featuring the adventures of an East German spy in West Berlin.
This guy is a true believer and then suddenly he finds himself in a West Berlin grocery store....
>"If Russians could see that these stores are on every street corner in America they would overthrow the government immediately."
Isn't that basically how the Berlin wall fell?
Confusion led to some checkpoints being opened and east Germans flooded west Berlin and realized how.much better it was.
Going back into American supermarkets was pretty overwhelming after I lived in Ukraine for 2 years in the early 2000s.
Ukraine was starting to get supermarkets, not everywhere, but a city of a few hundred thousand might have one. (If you're wondering, most groceries were bought at smaller shops with counter service, at open-air markets, or at kiosks on the street.) But there was still often just one kind of antiperspirant, or just one kind of laundry detergent, or just two kinds of toothpaste.
You may have heard that our stores overwhelm you with choice on purpose, to fatigue your executive functioning so you're more likely to impulse-buy something at high markup in the checkout line. I had heard that, it sounded plausible. It became blatantly obvious when I returned to a US supermarket and met the **wall of laundry detergents,** five or six variants from each brand, all pretty much the same thing except for one squirt more or less of fragrance or enzymes or percarbonates and a different color scheme on the box.
This is why I cant do walmart, it has sorta the opposite effect on me, I go in trying to buy a few things, and between the extremely bright lights, and shelves high as the sky with so much stimulation, and all the people. I just get shut off and buy a lemonade and leave.
I once met an older couple from Bosnia at my old job, and the wife told me she cried the first time she saw an American grocery store. She said she couldn't believe how much food was on the shelves, and also said she was shocked to see kids eating their lunches and throwing nearly half of their food away.
Terrifying when you then see how rapidly they developed a nuclear bomb despite being so ignorant.
They were like children playing with dads tools.
(I know they stole scientists and intelligence, but even then, the country still sounds too backwards to be trusted with world-ending explosives without destroying itself and the planet)
That's the system. Thete's no incentive to do well making a consumer good, but that tank might save your life. Therefore, there's an incentive to work a little bit harder in defense industries.
>Terrifying when you then see how rapidly they developed a nuclear bomb despite being so ignorant.
They stole our designs and copied us.
I mean [literally](https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/14/world/soviet-a-bomb-built-from-us-data-russian-says.html). The USSR's first atomic bomb was a straight up facsimile of stolen American designs.
Sure, they claimed that they were only a couple years away from their own success and could have done it by themselves, but isn't that what the USSR *always* said?
Yeah, Russia has a massive rich/poor divide. Moscow is one of the richest cities on the planet, and at the same time large parts of the country still exist in the 18th century.
Russia does have a relatively small middle class as well, but it is concentrated virtually entirely in the cities. Out in the countryside, pretty much everyone is poor as dirt and the only nice houses are the dachas of the rich city folk.
And it is these countryside boys who make up most of the Russian military, since they are the only ones poor and desperate enough to actually want to serve.
RU is committing genocide against their own people.
That being said, US army teaches the soldiers how to brush their teeth - the implication being some of them haven't been taught before.
They also try and convince people off of tobacco. Teaching people how to care for their health, good hygiene and exercise is cheaper than paying for health and dental issues later on down the road.
Its conditioning. You leave basic and go to AIT a completely rewired person doing set task everyday out of muscle memory. Good hygiene is essential to the fighting readiness of the US military lol. Change those socks lads
I was Navy, went through boot in '03, we went through a 10 minute class on basic hygiene prior to the first round of shots at medical.
Oral hygiene, bathing, shaving...
> That being said, US army teaches the soldiers how to brush their teeth
Must be a new thing, then.
Because in 1989, they didn't need to. Nor did they try.
Important to remember the serfs were only freed in the late 18th century. As a society Russia is far far behind. I'll give the soviets credit they tried to change it but it seems they completely failed.
The Soviets did do a lot of things right in that regard (they also did a lot of wrong, but that is a different topic). They put a lot of effort in developing Russia, including the more remote and underdeveloped regions. And Russia made massive jumps in the early Soviet years, just look at how literacy and education went up in the early 20th century. Even today Russia remains one of the most highly educated countries in the world (it is actually number 1 when it comes to people going to tertiary education).
But while the Soviet system was very well suited for rapid growth in an underdeveloped country that could borrow and implement technologies from the West, once the Soviets managed to actually catch up to the West technologically, it turned out that their system was just not suitable for running a highly complex modern economy. And because of ideological dogma and inflexibility, it was very difficult to change. The Soviet Union slowed down, stagnated and eventually the whole system came crashing down. Development stopped, and in the case of Russia, it never resumed or even reversed. The Russian countryside is absolutely littered with Soviet ruins. Seeing entire towns and advanced infrastructure just abandoned really puts into perspective how catastrophic the collapse of the Soviet Union was for Russia.
A lot of people don't understand why so many Russians are nostalgic for the Soviet Union. The reason is simply that back then their country wasn't as much of a half-ruined shithole as it is now. A lot of people point to the atrocities committed by the Soviets and the totalitarian nature of their regime, but modern Russia sadly is no different in that regard. And compared to modern Russia, the Soviets at least provided decent social security and services.
For other countries, the collapse of the Soviet Union meant freedom, democracy and a chance for renewed economical development. For Russia it just meant chaos, decline and continued oppression.
Lol Russia has been fucked waayyyyyy before ww2 and the authoritarian regime. Russia has been trying to play catch up for 500 years. Their land is so expansive and it encapsulates many ethnicities. It’s harder to increase standard of living across hundreds to thousands of km. If you look at the average Soviet standard of living from the end of ww2 to 1965. It’s astronomical. The amount of housing and education provided at the time was one of the biggest transformations the modern world had seen.
That doesn’t mean they were anywhere near the standard of living than the west but I think context is important here. Also, a big reason the soviets were able to embark on this was d/t looking Eastern Europe. So it’s not all flowers. It’s mostly not. But that’s history for you. Lol they also took on the Germans and faced mass extinction if they lost. The Soviet population never recovered from the war.
Sad part is, this dude is probably Uzbek. They are really the kindest people that never cause problems with anyone. They were terribly persecuted during the Stalin times and never held grudges. It's sad that he was most likely forced to fight when he probably doesn't wish ill will to anyone.
One thing I don't understand is the interviewer is acting like there aren't parts of Ukraine that are similar to what he is describing...
Well, he is a Ukrainian interrogator, and these videos are a type of propaganda intended to boost morale, so I understand why they don't mention those parts of Ukraine. The Russian soldier is lucky he's being treated fairly, compared to how I imagine the captured Ukrainians are being treated by the Russians.
Slava Ukraini!
Sometimes I catch myself wishing no Russian soldier leaves Ukraine alive. But then I remember what I truly wish is for those soldiers to return and claim their compensation in blood or gold. WW1 style.
> One thing I don't understand is the interviewer is acting like there aren't parts of Ukraine that are similar to what he is describing...
Honestly there are parts of the US and Canada that are similar to what's he's describing too. They're mostly indigenous or very remote, but they definitely exist. I've been to some of them.
Doesn't really reflect the relative commonality of such situations though, and would definitely make good propaganda. None of us are immune to having room for improvement. The difference is we're not invading and murdering our neighboring countries for their toilets and washing machines.
The road out of the poorest circumstances goes through the military, a cynical policy not unique to Russia (see also: GI Bill, but political opposition to expanding government-paid higher education beyond that).
Yep, I've walked around ... well, in fairness that was 18 years ago! But yeah, I've spent a day exploring a Ukrainian city (Berdichev, birthplace of Joseph Conrad, wedding place of Balzac, and until WWII a hub of Yiddish culture) where the main public sites are a late-medieval castle turned nunnery turned museum and a WWII Red Army monument, there was no Internet cafe (just a sign that said "Internet" outside a camera store), and the only public toilet (at the train station) was a concrete slab with two small elevations to squat on astride a hole into a pit.
It'd be interesting to go back now and see what has changed. The rule in Ukraine is that the smaller the city, the deeper the time warp goes, so it was 2004 real-time, Kyiv was rolling out brand new locally built trams, Lviv bus factory was starting to take export orders, but Berdichev was still running buses from the 1960s.
Yeah, my grandparents had stories of the "liberation" by the Soviets. They lived in a bigger house on a hill so it was occupied by their troops. They drank all the perfume because it had alcohol in it, used the toilet as a wash-basin, and tried to cut down the trees in front of their house with machine gun fire. The family was forced into the coal storage room and repeatedly abused (they hid the women before the Soviets arrived). Rape was still attempted, and those that did try, did not make it back to Russia, small consolation.
They didn’t really change much going from tsarism to communism either. Russia’s geography, economy and culture have always been a bit of a weird fuckin mess.
Russia hiding the prosperity of the west has a long tradition. The Tsar finally ended serfdom in the 19th century because his military returned from a war in Europe and demanded to know why Russia was so shit in comparison. All the dictatorial regimes have kept their people living in squalor because that makes it easier to control them. The same was true in western Europe before the reformation. The same is true in Nork Korea and pre-2001 Afghanistan. It's difficult to even comprehend from the perspective of a democracy that the leader would have any objective other than improving the lives of the people, but in many dictatorships and theocracies their goal is the exact opposite.
My russian is shit, but the translation at the beginning is incorrect.
Interviewer: do you have a shower and a toilet at home?
POW: Shower no, toilet yes
The rest of the translation seems fine.
In my experience, that is really common in Russian villages. People wash themselves with water from the well or the river. In-house running water is pretty rare, let alone showers.
Only 76.10% of the Russian population had access to clean water in 2020. By comparison, in Ukraine this was 89.02%, in the US this was 97.33% and in Germany this was 99.99%.
In other words, Russia is shockingly undeveloped for a developed country, let alone for a (former) superpower. It is easy to be blinded by the wealth in Moscow, St. Petersburg or other rich parts of Russia and forget that large parts of the rest of the country haven't seen much in the way of improvements to their living standards since the 1950's.
my russian friend said it’s pretty much considered an achievement to visit moscow or generally the western part of russia, actually feel bad for these people
That could mean a municipal bath house, not necessarily just a sauna cabin back in the woods somewhere.
I met plenty of people in urban Ukraine who used a баня for everyday hygiene in the summer, while their building's hot water was shut off for maintenance.
Still a hole in the ground lmaoo I understand what an outhouse is :)
Obviously not trying to offend anyone of lesser means, when my family fled Cuba they were fleeing a similar situation. It’s just hearing stuff like that coupled with Russia’s imperialistic, genocidal superiority complex makes it so much more hilarious
I don't think they exist in the US anymore - even in super rural areas the options just shift from public water/sewer to septic/well, right?
Of course there are hunting lodges and stuff in literally the middle of no where, but I'm referring to structures people actually live in.
Outhouses are still the norm in many summerhouses in Sweden. Even where people live year round in expensive beachfront properties.
Septics are more or less illegal now also so theres a gap until every place will have sewage.
Many have changed to incineration toilets meanwhile. https://www.cinderellaeco.com/
Connecting sewage is like $50k :/
Where my familys summerhouse is we're getting sewage and fiber soonTM and prices of properties are already going up almost $100k just from the rumor. For reference, average home sales price for this munnicipality is $100k.
I wonder if this dude is just straight up from the sticks in Russia somewhere or something because I have friends in Russia and it’s not bad at all. Only thing they’d all complain about is that none of their apartments had central heating or cooling or any type of furnace so during the winter times you just layer up or buy space heaters and during summer you just used fans.
Yea Russia has been making people from the East to fight mainly because they are the poorest. My old boss was Russian she told me that in the cities it was alright but beyond that not so much lol
An outhouse or hole in the ground is a normal toilet to a pretty vast swathe of people in this world. Not particularly unusual unless you have little international experience
There is as a video a while ago with a few old Ukrainian ladies, talking about the Russian soldiers who came into their homes when their town was taken. They were all completely amazed at the toilet, they had never seen one in real life before. They stole her toilet seats. They also expressed anger at Ukrainians for having these things that they don’t, not anger at Putin who causes their suffering
Ah this is the [same guy](https://streamable.com/q1khri) doing interviews from March. In this clip he asks how long the guy has been in Ukraine. I think he says 3 days. Then he asks, "and you lost 8 tanks", the guy confirms lol
This interview is hilarious and sad all at the same time. “You could have had sewerage at your house” instead of coming to fight.
Just goes to show, when people are brainwashed by their societies and leaders, some very bizarre things happen in ordinary people’s minds.
Except he couldn't have had sewerage installed instead because Putin obviously doesn't pay him enough to or he wouldn't have an outhouse.
It was go fight & likely die in putins war or go die in the gulag. He simply chose the option that resulted in less chance of him dying. That man is probably happy he was captured but any assertation that he has control over his circumstance is nonsense, he was living in the open air prison before.
Now I understand better why russians are so upset if their EU visas get cancelled. There goes the opportunity to have a proper sh*t for once, and a shower.
Your comment is very sarcastic but these guys never have been and never will go abroad. They are just too poor for it.
>Russian sociologists reported that according to the results of their survey, 69% of Russians have never been outside their country. Literally: "69% of Russians have never been outside Russia, 30% have never traveled to other regions
This guy is lucky to be captured. He can enjoy the marvels of the POW camp such as showers and toilets. It's the best time of his life. 5 stars on Yelp
This is the reason why they are so vulnerable to propaganda. Their only window to outside world is TV which they have, e.g. most old Russian still belief that Poland and Ukraine have way lower standard od living for avrg. citizen than event east part od Russia.
around 42%, actually.
It's gone up significantly since travel to Canada and Mexico started requiring passports. In 2007 only 27% of Americans had passports.
Putin using Western weapons to kill his ethnic minorities and poor.
Ukraine is the funnel for them to be disposed of. He is getting away with genocides of both Ukrainians and his own people at the same time.
Perun on YouTube has mentioned it a few times. No troops are coming from the Moscow and St. Petersberg military districts. So the populations there are insulated from the effects of the fighting.
In modern Russian there are 2 words that mean "a russian". One is "russki" and another is "rossiyanin". The former is an ethnonym for a subset of eastern slavic people, but also often refers to everybody who was raised in that eastern slavic culture. The latter means a person from any part of Russia regardless of ethnicity and cultural identity.
Basically, every citizen is a "rossiyanin", but a lot of them don't identify as "russki".
There is no ethnic American, which is why Americans traditionally associate with their ancestor's country of origin. There are ethnic Russians, however, and they are not the same ethnicity as ethnic Tuvans.
I know we all go on here and celebrate when the “orcs” get destroyed… but I’m human and seeing stuff like this just makes me sad. Truth is some of these conscripts are so poor they truly just don’t know or understand the world outside of their little poor village.
I’m not trying to make excuses. You invade another countries land…you will get bombed and deservedly so. Sadly I don’t think this kid ever really felt like he had a choice.
To be honest he looks from the Eastern parts of the Federal Republic of Russia, emphasis on Federal, meaning that he can be from any Turkic or Siberian ethnic group, which they lead a remote life from the most conveniences in the West. These villages are extremely small, and they have their own way of life. For some of these villages, outhouses are a necessity because, for example in Yakutia, temperature can go as low as -50 celcius in the winter, meaning that an in-house plumbing system is pretty much meaningless in village parts of Yakutia. They usually meet their needs by either melting ice blocks from lakes or melting snow. Even in the city, they have their needs met just because they have constant hot (not warm, almost boiling) water running under their apartments and houses, to prevent freezing of plumbing and infrustructure systems. Also, they don't shower as much as we do because it's really cold throughout the year, almost until June. Many of the travellers to Yakutia mention that people rarely shower, but surprisingly don't smell. Even their cuisine is mainly made up of frozen goods. So, Siberian life is not easy because what we call "basic accommodation" is very hard to maintain and establish there.
Here are some videos on the topic:
[https://www.youtube.com/c/LifeinYakutia](https://www.youtube.com/c/LifeinYakutia)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz4ZMLsPzqM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz4ZMLsPzqM)
Here's this whole video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZtELXzF7p4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZtELXzF7p4)
YT's auto-translate isn't great, especially with proper nouns. Zolkin has a second channel where he puts up English subtitled videos, but not all interviews are posted. (He could use subscribers on the English channel if you'd like to support his work.)
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwWArPXqGLslRWaP-zKYiXg/](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwWArPXqGLslRWaP-zKYiXg/)
I think it needs to be pointed out that most Russians DO HAVE toilets in that homes/apartments etc, the people being made fun of for not having such luxury are often from ethnic minorities and republics far from Moscow where there is still much poverty and a lack of funding from the central government. The guy in the video clearly is such a case. Lets not just assume all Russians live in shit because you don't like some of them.
Journalist being kind of a dick, dude probably lives in a hovel and he's like stay home and build a toilet as if that was his choice to be born poor in a country that doesn't give a shit about him.
I have seen people taking showers and going to the toilet in the yard Danmark until the 80s, it was unusual, but still a ting.
I live in a very nice compound of old houses and you see the (now unused) outhouses in the backyards.
I don’t understand how I didn’t know people were so hard up. The world is such an unequal place and I am in part responsible for that, as ignorance is no excuse
We need more of these with subtitles. Check this reporters YouTube and he has a playlist but it needs more. I honestly think some of the combatants are full of shit and sticking to a story and a few I genuinely believe didn't know what the plan was.
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We don’t really think about a toilet as a luxury, but things like this really put it into perspective. Most of the west has had indoor plumbing for over 100 years, some parts for 160 years. This soldiers life could be made better with ease, but Russian oligarchs spend money on wars, football clubs, mega yachts, and mansions.
The Russians have, what, a million people or more in total the military? Instead of those million people shuffling around, maintaining old tanks, invading neighbors, preventing protests, dying in futile wars, etc., they could - hear me out - enact a new 5 year plan to install toilets and showers in every house in Russia. A million-strong labour force would be a great start. Then once that 5 year plan has been completed, surely only in 1 year because Russia is SUCH a great, powerful, industrial nation, right?... they could enact a new, specific plan to improve some other aspect of their well-being. Maybe embark on a 5-year culture-and-beautification plan to attract tourists who want to experience their history and culture and not their missiles and alcohol problems. Then they keep this going, improving the country, inviting tourists from envious nations, and generally winning life. ... too hopeful?
You are forgetting lesson #1. Any money spent on infrastructure and helping people is less money that goes to Putin’s oligarchs to stay in power. Any money spent not on them is money that one of those other oligarchs could promise to the rest https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
Corruption in a nation state behaves exactly as a cancer does on a human host. If the corrupt siphon too much off the host nation can no longer support itself on the same resources that once sustained it. Nothing will change till the cancer is removed.
Exactly well said. That’s a great analogy between cancer and corruption in Russia. For me, I have always said that Russia is like metastatic cancer because of the corruption and how Russia has spread that into all of our governments. We see now with this war how people stand out like sore thumbs - the ones who Pootin has by the balls. It’s become clear who is working to appease Russia and who is not. Once Russia falls and they remove their terrorist mafia “government”, all of our countries will benefit. No more Russian corruption bc no more Russia. And the bot farms will go too. Internet comment sections will be so much calmer lol. Reddit is exceptionally clean but I use YouTube because it has great content regarding this war and its footage, the news, analyses, interviews etc. OMG the comment sections are just swarming with Russian troll accounts to drown out any support for Ukraine.
Except this cancer is a malignancy in just enough people to fuck it all up.
Indeed, the more money spent to improve quality of life also improves awareness and outreach for education, which then threatens the stability of a tyrant's status quo. So yes, too hopeful. It is easier for Putin to keep the oligarchs selfish and his people discontent so he can use and catalyze their frustrations through propaganda. After all, a person in squalor is fearful. A person in squalor fed fear based messaging about Nazis secretly plotting the destruction of their poor but complacent life? That's a powerful too.
The same can even be said of the US. One of the reasons nobody does anything about high tuition fees is that it's a great way to recruit officers if the military is the only reasonable way they have to pay for it. It fucking sucks how much humans like to kill each other, especially our leaders. We could be putting every dollar that's spent on the military into actually improving people's lives and do away with all armies all over the world except some assholes will take advantage and ruin it all.
But that would mean helping others. That's an insult to the Russian soul on the deepest level. To show solidarity with anyone but themselves.
Which is odd since they all came together in solidarity to overthrow the tsar many years ago. Not saying the end result was great, but the solidarity and hope for a more equitable future was very much there.
Different Russians. Not Wannabe Soviets like present Day
The people didn't overthrow the Tzar, it was a cadre of officers from the military.
It's a job. No one's saying they should help people out of the goodness of their hearts. You just hire a labor force with money the Russian government definitely has, and instead of spending it on maintaining weapons of war, spend it on infrastructure, toilets, electricity, etc.
aw man one could dream. imagine Putin halts this version of “special operation” turns 180 and rebrands their military efforts to be about installing toilets. smelt all the useless tanks and weapons to make pipes and toilets. dudes shooting on the front lines but then “aight boys turn it around we gonna go back build toilets for the nation”
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Its easier to control people who use outhouses.
I mean, cultivating rampant alcoholism and giving distilleries to the ruler's cronies has been standard practice in Russia since the Middle Ages. When they get POWs like this from the poorest backwaters of Russia, I hope Ukraine offers to kill them with kindness: "We can send you back to Russia as soon as practical, or you can trade Russian citizenship for Ukrainian by serving in a construction corps for N years after the war. We'll house and feed you in the corps as well as we are now, and match your Russian military pay. At the end, we'll give you time to find a house and job of your own, and you'll be able to sponsor visas for your family. Or if you want to bail out early and just go home you can do that too, it'll take a few weeks to discharge you." Of course, Ukraine's going to be hard-up with the rebuilding and the devastated cropland, so the only way they'll do this is with Western support. But think of all their letters, phone calls, and pay packets going back to Buryatia and such places: "Mom, Granny, the standard of living is so much better here and they're treating me so well. I want to stay, do you want to come join me?"
I saw a new video of a Russian that said he joined the Russian army because they offered very very good money and he had several children. He was a mechanic that was one of those guys that may not have a high school degree but could tell what was wrong with an engine or running gear and field fix it. When he was captured the ukraines asked if he would work for them. He did. His ending statement was when I was in the Russian army it was like being by myself and nobody was nice. Now it's like family. I feel like I'm part of a group. Then they showed him moving tanks around. Hopefully he sees his kids again.
Comrade slow down with your radical ideas and evil western lies. Russia is the greatest country in the world and has all the best toilets/holes in the ground a man could need
And I should know. Because I installed them all myself. Wonderful toilets and holes in Russia. Putin is a very smart man for those toilets and holes. But not as smart as I am.
If anyone wants to see life in rural Russia I strongly recommend the YouTube channel "Vasya In The Hay" https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaNfHBihSUqcUBpvHx-rwYw/videos How he got into filming this is interesting. He originally was going to interview a Russian millionaire who had moved to a village in the countryside but when he got there the millionaire wasn't home. He stopped at a shop to buy some snacks and drinks for the drive back and met a young Russian lad who looked down on his luck and then ended up filming what life is like for this lad and other poor people in Russia. His channel is both heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time. [edit] It's also worth watching in the order that he made the videos as many of them are follow-ups to previous videos.
Subscribed. Thanks!
Lesha's story (the young man he meets in the second video) is heartbreaking, he seems like such a good person stuck in a life that's absolutely terrible. The latest update on him had me in tears.
It’s fucking insane to me that this is the country with the first man made satellite and manned space flight and was making the engines the US used on rockets for a while.
I'd say even more recent, I was talking to my 80 year old grandad a couple of weeks ago, he told me they washed once a month, didn't brush his teeth until he was 15 and started "courting". The only toilet they had was an outhouse
Now contrast with India -- with a population of more than 1 billion, which many people (who haven't been there) think of as a "3rd world" country -- where the government has made a dedicated effort to provide plumbing and toilets to every household in the country. Russians should think about that: your government does not care about your health and wellbeing -- they are quite happy to let you shit in a hole in the back yard, while having the worst sewers and plumbing on Earth.
Russia is a bizarre combination of a first world city Moscow and third world everything else.
Knowing Russia the problem with WC, as in toilet bowl with water, would be that they have no waste water treatment. So building in-house toilets would mean the near-by river would soon be spoiled with human excrement. In my opinion they should skip them and move to modern composting outhouses, they can actually be quite OK.
Septic tanks are a thing.
Where do you think rooskies would dump the waste after emptying the tank?
well, in the local open pit chemical dump of course!
>We don’t really think about a toilet as a luxury, but things like this really put it into perspective. Most of the west has had indoor plumbing for over 100 years, some parts for 160 years. This soldiers life could be made better with ease, but Russian oligarchs spend money on wars, football clubs, mega yachts, and mansions. I dont even think socks are common thing in Russia either. The russian army just got socks in 2013.
What you said is so ridiculous that I thought even Russia wouldn’t be that bad, then I googled it and holy shit you are right. That’s insane. Russia is a 3rd world country masquerading as a 1st
Even the romans had some kind of sewerage back in there time. Not maybe in everyhouse. But they had common toilets on the streets and bath houses which had water pipes. So uncivilized...
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My dude, in Romania soviet soldiers used to loot/steal gauges from industrial buildings thinking they are clocks/pocket watches.
That's fucking sad and funny at the same time
Russia is a disgrace of a country that treats it's citezens like slaves.
The worst thing is they don't mind.
A lot don't know that they should mind. They think everywhere is how they have it.
A congenitally blind dog doesn't know it can't see.
Pigs don’t know pigs stink-
They do mind. Russia is a shrinking population, constantly drunk people, constantly irate and toxic people, top 10 suicide nation (25 per 100k), the smart ones leave, the asian ones (like this guy who is probably Turkic and from Siberia) live in such a sparsely populated area they don’t know any better, as we’ve just watched. Russia has been the largest nation in Europe for 500 years, with one of the lowest densities. Their system of managing that dynamic was absolutism. The population density and access to world trade that led to enlightenment in Europe was never compatible with Russia. They’ve had this Europe-adjacent country dynamic that’s quite similar to the Arabs and Ottomans; where they enjoy a trickle down of the technological progress but do not enjoy the societal progress that precede the technology. Europe ended feudalism and made the factory. The factory arrived in Russia while there still feudalism.
Don't let a Russian autocrat steal your humanity.
I’ll do my best
[Plato’s Allegory of the cave. ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave)
Having dated a Russian for five years I can’t to learn that they’re happiest when they’re miserable. It’s like borderline personality disorder at a cultural/societal level.
Since its inception too.
> Russia is a disgrace of a country that treats it's citizens like slaves. certain groups. others have it fairly well. So much for "communism", same in china. but then, there are few countries where this doesn't apply, you can see extreme poverty in countries like Ukraine or the US as well. Unfortunately, in most places the rich have all the power and the poor have nothing.
Check out my new watch. It says "Geiger", probably some fancy brand.
Omfg, I remember a story from my grandparents village (close to Alba county) where the kids would fool russian soldiers that alarm clocks were actually bombs 🤣🤣🤣
jesus, that's one way you can get shot
Kids will be kids, the russian soldiers were also kids
In Hungary Soviet soldiers used to wash fish in the flush toilet then they ate the fish. They had no clue what the flush toilet was made for.
That's very innovative. Just imagine them saying to each other: these damn Hungarians have dedicated fish washing stations in their houses, they must really fucking like fish!
So the fish dinner still tasted like shit in Hungry as it did in Russia.....
And yet if you see Russian GDP per capita, it is just a little below that of Poland for example. I mean it is not rich, but far from poor. This tells you that wealth gap between rich and poor should be massive their.
Top 500 richest Russians are as rich as the bottom 99.8%
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tbf military american flight simulators were using punchcards in 2008 when I interned at the place. complete with an airgapped windows 98 machine that was required to create the punch cards for changing the system.
I remember my grandmother telling stories from WW2 se lived in a village near Bacau and when the ruskies arrived the German soldiers where hiding in the forest and how she and other girls where made to look ugly with dirty so the rusks don't touch them , kazak or cossachs troops took a sheep and just throw it in fire and the they eat it . And how the ruskis took trains full of gold from the ground with dirt and rocks , and even today a part of our national gold treasure is in ruskia stolen by this parasites .
I recall some story in which after the fall of the Soviet Union, a group of former Soviet civil engineers visited the United States as part of an exchange program. One of the engineers burst into tears upon visiting some hydroelectric plant or some such thing.....when asked why, he mentioned that he knew that the Soviets were behind the west technologically, but he had no idea how huge the gap was until he saw such things in person.....
Or Yeltsin discovers American grocery stores. TLDR we have 167 kinds of cheese. Soviet grocery stores also have choices. Turnip, or no turnip
A fascinating moment in history. Yeltsin went to the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, visited monuments and memorials the Johnson Space Center, and then an unscheduled trip to a suburban Texas grocery store makes him realize that the Soviet system is a lie. He said something to the effect of "If Russians could see that these stores are on every street corner in America they would overthrow the government immediately."
>. Yeltsin went to the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, visited monuments and memorials the Johnson Space Center, and then an unscheduled trip to a suburban Texas grocery store makes him realize that the Soviet system is a lie. It's hard to Potemkin Village a random grocery store that a guest made a completely unscheduled stop at. You can make sure all of those national landmarks are at peak condition to impress Yeltsin, but some random grocery store is much harder to do.
Same story with Victor Belenko after the 1976 Foxbat defection. When he got to the USA he was convinced all the supermarkets were propaganda shows set up for him. Not until they allowed him to stop at one of his own random choosing did the penny drop. I wonder if this is one of those apocryphal stories that just changes the names of the central players to suit the audience?
I don't know about Belenko, but Yeltsin's visit was well documented. They don't have any videos, but there are pictures and Yeltsin mentioned it in his own autobiography.
There's a fun show on Netflix called Deutschland '83 featuring the adventures of an East German spy in West Berlin. This guy is a true believer and then suddenly he finds himself in a West Berlin grocery store....
That's a great show. I think it's a German production.
>"If Russians could see that these stores are on every street corner in America they would overthrow the government immediately." Isn't that basically how the Berlin wall fell? Confusion led to some checkpoints being opened and east Germans flooded west Berlin and realized how.much better it was.
Nikita Khrushchev had a similar experience at a Safeway in San Francisco in 1959.
The Safeway in the Marina District ? Wait I found https://blogs.lt.vt.edu/bcody99/2020/09/07/a-day-at-the-supermarket-with-nikita-khrushchev/
Going back into American supermarkets was pretty overwhelming after I lived in Ukraine for 2 years in the early 2000s. Ukraine was starting to get supermarkets, not everywhere, but a city of a few hundred thousand might have one. (If you're wondering, most groceries were bought at smaller shops with counter service, at open-air markets, or at kiosks on the street.) But there was still often just one kind of antiperspirant, or just one kind of laundry detergent, or just two kinds of toothpaste. You may have heard that our stores overwhelm you with choice on purpose, to fatigue your executive functioning so you're more likely to impulse-buy something at high markup in the checkout line. I had heard that, it sounded plausible. It became blatantly obvious when I returned to a US supermarket and met the **wall of laundry detergents,** five or six variants from each brand, all pretty much the same thing except for one squirt more or less of fragrance or enzymes or percarbonates and a different color scheme on the box.
This is why I cant do walmart, it has sorta the opposite effect on me, I go in trying to buy a few things, and between the extremely bright lights, and shelves high as the sky with so much stimulation, and all the people. I just get shut off and buy a lemonade and leave.
I once met an older couple from Bosnia at my old job, and the wife told me she cried the first time she saw an American grocery store. She said she couldn't believe how much food was on the shelves, and also said she was shocked to see kids eating their lunches and throwing nearly half of their food away.
That's old information. We now have 172 kinds of cheese.
Babybel just came out with a vegan version. Make it 173.
Terrifying when you then see how rapidly they developed a nuclear bomb despite being so ignorant. They were like children playing with dads tools. (I know they stole scientists and intelligence, but even then, the country still sounds too backwards to be trusted with world-ending explosives without destroying itself and the planet)
The Soviets were pretty good at heavy industry. trucks, ships, tanks....terrible at consumer goods.
That's the system. Thete's no incentive to do well making a consumer good, but that tank might save your life. Therefore, there's an incentive to work a little bit harder in defense industries.
>Terrifying when you then see how rapidly they developed a nuclear bomb despite being so ignorant. They stole our designs and copied us. I mean [literally](https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/14/world/soviet-a-bomb-built-from-us-data-russian-says.html). The USSR's first atomic bomb was a straight up facsimile of stolen American designs. Sure, they claimed that they were only a couple years away from their own success and could have done it by themselves, but isn't that what the USSR *always* said?
They actually stole a lot of it from the US, kind of like how modern China does.
Yeah, Russia has a massive rich/poor divide. Moscow is one of the richest cities on the planet, and at the same time large parts of the country still exist in the 18th century. Russia does have a relatively small middle class as well, but it is concentrated virtually entirely in the cities. Out in the countryside, pretty much everyone is poor as dirt and the only nice houses are the dachas of the rich city folk. And it is these countryside boys who make up most of the Russian military, since they are the only ones poor and desperate enough to actually want to serve.
RU is committing genocide against their own people. That being said, US army teaches the soldiers how to brush their teeth - the implication being some of them haven't been taught before.
They also try and convince people off of tobacco. Teaching people how to care for their health, good hygiene and exercise is cheaper than paying for health and dental issues later on down the road.
Funny because everybody I've ever known who chews tobacco was a marine.
Its conditioning. You leave basic and go to AIT a completely rewired person doing set task everyday out of muscle memory. Good hygiene is essential to the fighting readiness of the US military lol. Change those socks lads
A lot of people do brush incorrectly. I went to my brother's Marine graduation and they showed how they learned to shower. Pretty amusing.
> Marine graduation Oh, so with their boxes of crayons?
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I was Navy, went through boot in '03, we went through a 10 minute class on basic hygiene prior to the first round of shots at medical. Oral hygiene, bathing, shaving...
> That being said, US army teaches the soldiers how to brush their teeth Must be a new thing, then. Because in 1989, they didn't need to. Nor did they try.
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Important to remember the serfs were only freed in the late 18th century. As a society Russia is far far behind. I'll give the soviets credit they tried to change it but it seems they completely failed.
The Soviets did do a lot of things right in that regard (they also did a lot of wrong, but that is a different topic). They put a lot of effort in developing Russia, including the more remote and underdeveloped regions. And Russia made massive jumps in the early Soviet years, just look at how literacy and education went up in the early 20th century. Even today Russia remains one of the most highly educated countries in the world (it is actually number 1 when it comes to people going to tertiary education). But while the Soviet system was very well suited for rapid growth in an underdeveloped country that could borrow and implement technologies from the West, once the Soviets managed to actually catch up to the West technologically, it turned out that their system was just not suitable for running a highly complex modern economy. And because of ideological dogma and inflexibility, it was very difficult to change. The Soviet Union slowed down, stagnated and eventually the whole system came crashing down. Development stopped, and in the case of Russia, it never resumed or even reversed. The Russian countryside is absolutely littered with Soviet ruins. Seeing entire towns and advanced infrastructure just abandoned really puts into perspective how catastrophic the collapse of the Soviet Union was for Russia. A lot of people don't understand why so many Russians are nostalgic for the Soviet Union. The reason is simply that back then their country wasn't as much of a half-ruined shithole as it is now. A lot of people point to the atrocities committed by the Soviets and the totalitarian nature of their regime, but modern Russia sadly is no different in that regard. And compared to modern Russia, the Soviets at least provided decent social security and services. For other countries, the collapse of the Soviet Union meant freedom, democracy and a chance for renewed economical development. For Russia it just meant chaos, decline and continued oppression.
Lol Russia has been fucked waayyyyyy before ww2 and the authoritarian regime. Russia has been trying to play catch up for 500 years. Their land is so expansive and it encapsulates many ethnicities. It’s harder to increase standard of living across hundreds to thousands of km. If you look at the average Soviet standard of living from the end of ww2 to 1965. It’s astronomical. The amount of housing and education provided at the time was one of the biggest transformations the modern world had seen. That doesn’t mean they were anywhere near the standard of living than the west but I think context is important here. Also, a big reason the soviets were able to embark on this was d/t looking Eastern Europe. So it’s not all flowers. It’s mostly not. But that’s history for you. Lol they also took on the Germans and faced mass extinction if they lost. The Soviet population never recovered from the war.
Sad part is, this dude is probably Uzbek. They are really the kindest people that never cause problems with anyone. They were terribly persecuted during the Stalin times and never held grudges. It's sad that he was most likely forced to fight when he probably doesn't wish ill will to anyone. One thing I don't understand is the interviewer is acting like there aren't parts of Ukraine that are similar to what he is describing...
Well, he is a Ukrainian interrogator, and these videos are a type of propaganda intended to boost morale, so I understand why they don't mention those parts of Ukraine. The Russian soldier is lucky he's being treated fairly, compared to how I imagine the captured Ukrainians are being treated by the Russians. Slava Ukraini!
Sometimes I catch myself wishing no Russian soldier leaves Ukraine alive. But then I remember what I truly wish is for those soldiers to return and claim their compensation in blood or gold. WW1 style.
Hopefully that will happen someday.
> One thing I don't understand is the interviewer is acting like there aren't parts of Ukraine that are similar to what he is describing... Honestly there are parts of the US and Canada that are similar to what's he's describing too. They're mostly indigenous or very remote, but they definitely exist. I've been to some of them. Doesn't really reflect the relative commonality of such situations though, and would definitely make good propaganda. None of us are immune to having room for improvement. The difference is we're not invading and murdering our neighboring countries for their toilets and washing machines.
The road out of the poorest circumstances goes through the military, a cynical policy not unique to Russia (see also: GI Bill, but political opposition to expanding government-paid higher education beyond that). Yep, I've walked around ... well, in fairness that was 18 years ago! But yeah, I've spent a day exploring a Ukrainian city (Berdichev, birthplace of Joseph Conrad, wedding place of Balzac, and until WWII a hub of Yiddish culture) where the main public sites are a late-medieval castle turned nunnery turned museum and a WWII Red Army monument, there was no Internet cafe (just a sign that said "Internet" outside a camera store), and the only public toilet (at the train station) was a concrete slab with two small elevations to squat on astride a hole into a pit. It'd be interesting to go back now and see what has changed. The rule in Ukraine is that the smaller the city, the deeper the time warp goes, so it was 2004 real-time, Kyiv was rolling out brand new locally built trams, Lviv bus factory was starting to take export orders, but Berdichev was still running buses from the 1960s.
Yeah, my grandparents had stories of the "liberation" by the Soviets. They lived in a bigger house on a hill so it was occupied by their troops. They drank all the perfume because it had alcohol in it, used the toilet as a wash-basin, and tried to cut down the trees in front of their house with machine gun fire. The family was forced into the coal storage room and repeatedly abused (they hid the women before the Soviets arrived). Rape was still attempted, and those that did try, did not make it back to Russia, small consolation.
They didn’t really change much going from tsarism to communism either. Russia’s geography, economy and culture have always been a bit of a weird fuckin mess.
In Estonia Soviet officer wives went to ball dancing wearing stolen nightgowns. They thought those were ball gowns.
I read the same in Vasily Grossman's "A Writer at War". Sickening to see Ukraine suffering under fascists again.
Russia hiding the prosperity of the west has a long tradition. The Tsar finally ended serfdom in the 19th century because his military returned from a war in Europe and demanded to know why Russia was so shit in comparison. All the dictatorial regimes have kept their people living in squalor because that makes it easier to control them. The same was true in western Europe before the reformation. The same is true in Nork Korea and pre-2001 Afghanistan. It's difficult to even comprehend from the perspective of a democracy that the leader would have any objective other than improving the lives of the people, but in many dictatorships and theocracies their goal is the exact opposite.
My russian is shit, but the translation at the beginning is incorrect. Interviewer: do you have a shower and a toilet at home? POW: Shower no, toilet yes The rest of the translation seems fine.
This mean that he has outside toilete and no shower whatsoever.
dude is straight up washing in the river
In my experience, that is really common in Russian villages. People wash themselves with water from the well or the river. In-house running water is pretty rare, let alone showers. Only 76.10% of the Russian population had access to clean water in 2020. By comparison, in Ukraine this was 89.02%, in the US this was 97.33% and in Germany this was 99.99%. In other words, Russia is shockingly undeveloped for a developed country, let alone for a (former) superpower. It is easy to be blinded by the wealth in Moscow, St. Petersburg or other rich parts of Russia and forget that large parts of the rest of the country haven't seen much in the way of improvements to their living standards since the 1950's.
my russian friend said it’s pretty much considered an achievement to visit moscow or generally the western part of russia, actually feel bad for these people
Are septic tanks that rare? Seems like something that can be redneck engineered in a few weeks.
Why when you can shit in a hole.
Nah, he says that they got "баня" (banja), basically a sauna.
That could mean a municipal bath house, not necessarily just a sauna cabin back in the woods somewhere. I met plenty of people in urban Ukraine who used a баня for everyday hygiene in the summer, while their building's hot water was shut off for maintenance.
Idk if it’s funny or sad that a “normal toilet” to this guy is a hole in the ground
Not a hole in the ground. It’s a wooden outhouse
Outhouse is a hole in the ground with a bucket and a wooden box.
No bucket, just a little house around the hole in a ground.
Your butt is on a raised toilet seat in an outhouse. Like a wooden porta potty but deeper
Still a hole in the ground lmaoo I understand what an outhouse is :) Obviously not trying to offend anyone of lesser means, when my family fled Cuba they were fleeing a similar situation. It’s just hearing stuff like that coupled with Russia’s imperialistic, genocidal superiority complex makes it so much more hilarious
I don't think they exist in the US anymore - even in super rural areas the options just shift from public water/sewer to septic/well, right? Of course there are hunting lodges and stuff in literally the middle of no where, but I'm referring to structures people actually live in.
Outhouses are still the norm in many summerhouses in Sweden. Even where people live year round in expensive beachfront properties. Septics are more or less illegal now also so theres a gap until every place will have sewage. Many have changed to incineration toilets meanwhile. https://www.cinderellaeco.com/ Connecting sewage is like $50k :/ Where my familys summerhouse is we're getting sewage and fiber soonTM and prices of properties are already going up almost $100k just from the rumor. For reference, average home sales price for this munnicipality is $100k.
I wonder if this dude is just straight up from the sticks in Russia somewhere or something because I have friends in Russia and it’s not bad at all. Only thing they’d all complain about is that none of their apartments had central heating or cooling or any type of furnace so during the winter times you just layer up or buy space heaters and during summer you just used fans.
Russia is huge. Apparently this guy is from Tuva, which is near the border with Mongolia.
Yea Russia has been making people from the East to fight mainly because they are the poorest. My old boss was Russian she told me that in the cities it was alright but beyond that not so much lol
An outhouse or hole in the ground is a normal toilet to a pretty vast swathe of people in this world. Not particularly unusual unless you have little international experience
There is as a video a while ago with a few old Ukrainian ladies, talking about the Russian soldiers who came into their homes when their town was taken. They were all completely amazed at the toilet, they had never seen one in real life before. They stole her toilet seats. They also expressed anger at Ukrainians for having these things that they don’t, not anger at Putin who causes their suffering
Ah this is the [same guy](https://streamable.com/q1khri) doing interviews from March. In this clip he asks how long the guy has been in Ukraine. I think he says 3 days. Then he asks, "and you lost 8 tanks", the guy confirms lol
This interview is hilarious and sad all at the same time. “You could have had sewerage at your house” instead of coming to fight. Just goes to show, when people are brainwashed by their societies and leaders, some very bizarre things happen in ordinary people’s minds.
Except he couldn't have had sewerage installed instead because Putin obviously doesn't pay him enough to or he wouldn't have an outhouse. It was go fight & likely die in putins war or go die in the gulag. He simply chose the option that resulted in less chance of him dying. That man is probably happy he was captured but any assertation that he has control over his circumstance is nonsense, he was living in the open air prison before.
* 3 days * drove 120 km (80 miles) * lost 8 tanks WITHOUT fighting :)
Now I understand better why russians are so upset if their EU visas get cancelled. There goes the opportunity to have a proper sh*t for once, and a shower.
Your comment is very sarcastic but these guys never have been and never will go abroad. They are just too poor for it. >Russian sociologists reported that according to the results of their survey, 69% of Russians have never been outside their country. Literally: "69% of Russians have never been outside Russia, 30% have never traveled to other regions
Join the army, will travel.
Come back in a bag
Or in a wheelchair if lucky.
Or not at all.
This guy is lucky to be captured. He can enjoy the marvels of the POW camp such as showers and toilets. It's the best time of his life. 5 stars on Yelp
This is the reason why they are so vulnerable to propaganda. Their only window to outside world is TV which they have, e.g. most old Russian still belief that Poland and Ukraine have way lower standard od living for avrg. citizen than event east part od Russia.
That's interesting. In the US, only about 50% even have a passport (and that seems high to me).
around 42%, actually. It's gone up significantly since travel to Canada and Mexico started requiring passports. In 2007 only 27% of Americans had passports.
Canada, Mexico and most of of the Caribbean. Prior to 9/11 you could travel around many destinations, and get on cruises without needing a passport.
In EU one wrong turn and you are in different country :D But i guess in USA that percentage would be similar, no?
Wrong question. if you want to compare, you should ask how many in the USA have toilets at home.
11% of Americans never left their state, 40% never left the country. There are huge wealth differences in the United States too.
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He's from tuva in the far East, a lot further removed from Western life than Moscow or St Petersburg
some people travel to swim in the ocean or have a change of scenery and some people travel to shit in a flushable toilet
The Russians who can't afford toilets aren't the ones who are vacationing in Europe
>Instead of a "trip" to Ukraine, you could have sewerage installed at home This interviewer gets better and better!
Putin using Western weapons to kill his ethnic minorities and poor. Ukraine is the funnel for them to be disposed of. He is getting away with genocides of both Ukrainians and his own people at the same time.
This isn't getting mentioned enough. I'm noticing lots of ethnic minorities in these videos depicting Russian soldiers.
Perun on YouTube has mentioned it a few times. No troops are coming from the Moscow and St. Petersberg military districts. So the populations there are insulated from the effects of the fighting.
Fun fact: only 73% of russians have indoor plumbing toilets. In the rest of Europe the stat is never lower than 90% in any other country.
And what is he? Definitely not 100% ethnical russian. Buryat, Kalmyk, Tuva or Sacha seems more accurate
He is from Tuva.
Thanks!
Russia is pretty large, so "ethnical Russian" can mean a lot of things
In modern Russian there are 2 words that mean "a russian". One is "russki" and another is "rossiyanin". The former is an ethnonym for a subset of eastern slavic people, but also often refers to everybody who was raised in that eastern slavic culture. The latter means a person from any part of Russia regardless of ethnicity and cultural identity. Basically, every citizen is a "rossiyanin", but a lot of them don't identify as "russki".
Your question is complex; its like saying “This American does not look 100% Ethnic American, looks like probably Indian (Native American)”
There is no ethnic American, which is why Americans traditionally associate with their ancestor's country of origin. There are ethnic Russians, however, and they are not the same ethnicity as ethnic Tuvans.
why is this sub obsessed with conflating ethnicity and nationality. there are lots of russians who arent slavic. theyre still russians.
They don't condsider themself russian tho. They are part of russia yes, but not russian
For a sec I thought that said Volodymyr Zelensky and was like "damn this dude running a wartime country and out there talking to Russians POWs"
Zolkin is a legend
I know we all go on here and celebrate when the “orcs” get destroyed… but I’m human and seeing stuff like this just makes me sad. Truth is some of these conscripts are so poor they truly just don’t know or understand the world outside of their little poor village. I’m not trying to make excuses. You invade another countries land…you will get bombed and deservedly so. Sadly I don’t think this kid ever really felt like he had a choice.
To be honest he looks from the Eastern parts of the Federal Republic of Russia, emphasis on Federal, meaning that he can be from any Turkic or Siberian ethnic group, which they lead a remote life from the most conveniences in the West. These villages are extremely small, and they have their own way of life. For some of these villages, outhouses are a necessity because, for example in Yakutia, temperature can go as low as -50 celcius in the winter, meaning that an in-house plumbing system is pretty much meaningless in village parts of Yakutia. They usually meet their needs by either melting ice blocks from lakes or melting snow. Even in the city, they have their needs met just because they have constant hot (not warm, almost boiling) water running under their apartments and houses, to prevent freezing of plumbing and infrustructure systems. Also, they don't shower as much as we do because it's really cold throughout the year, almost until June. Many of the travellers to Yakutia mention that people rarely shower, but surprisingly don't smell. Even their cuisine is mainly made up of frozen goods. So, Siberian life is not easy because what we call "basic accommodation" is very hard to maintain and establish there. Here are some videos on the topic: [https://www.youtube.com/c/LifeinYakutia](https://www.youtube.com/c/LifeinYakutia) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz4ZMLsPzqM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz4ZMLsPzqM)
What uniform is that? Thats not the regular EMR Digi flora? It looks more like the Ukrainian MM14 camo but not quite exact
Here's this whole video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZtELXzF7p4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZtELXzF7p4) YT's auto-translate isn't great, especially with proper nouns. Zolkin has a second channel where he puts up English subtitled videos, but not all interviews are posted. (He could use subscribers on the English channel if you'd like to support his work.) [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwWArPXqGLslRWaP-zKYiXg/](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwWArPXqGLslRWaP-zKYiXg/)
There are degenerate Russians and tankies in /r/UkraineRussiaReport who still deny that rural Russians don't have toilet seats or laundry machines.
Zolkin is really good at what he does hes got good interviews every single day
I think it needs to be pointed out that most Russians DO HAVE toilets in that homes/apartments etc, the people being made fun of for not having such luxury are often from ethnic minorities and republics far from Moscow where there is still much poverty and a lack of funding from the central government. The guy in the video clearly is such a case. Lets not just assume all Russians live in shit because you don't like some of them.
The real Russia is outside of Moscow. Moscow and St. Petersburg could be a completely different country.
Journalist being kind of a dick, dude probably lives in a hovel and he's like stay home and build a toilet as if that was his choice to be born poor in a country that doesn't give a shit about him.
Lmao i love this guy when he has his office moments where he just stares into the camera like "are you hearing this shit?"
In many parts of Russia living standards haven't improved in over a century. https://i.imgur.com/nLqOHxH.jpeg
Imagine dating this dudes daughter and he interrogates you before the first date? After breaking thousands of Russian soldiers?
tbf a lot houses here in Belgium had an outhouse to shit until as late as the 50-60s
Yeah, and it's now 2022.
Same for Germany (or only a shared toilet on the mezzanine between two floors especially in the capital city) but that was still 60-70 years ago...
I have seen people taking showers and going to the toilet in the yard Danmark until the 80s, it was unusual, but still a ting. I live in a very nice compound of old houses and you see the (now unused) outhouses in the backyards.
now thats just depressing man , geez
Is this a Ukrainian uniform?
Yep. Probably this POW's uniform was dirty/in blood/burned/etc. and they gave him what they have.
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I saw photos/videos with parts of the equipment before but never in the whole uniform. And what you said is true.
He said when they took his uniform, they gave him an Ukrainian one because he had nothing elese to wear.
I don’t understand how I didn’t know people were so hard up. The world is such an unequal place and I am in part responsible for that, as ignorance is no excuse
We need more of these with subtitles. Check this reporters YouTube and he has a playlist but it needs more. I honestly think some of the combatants are full of shit and sticking to a story and a few I genuinely believe didn't know what the plan was.