Old Habits Die Hard

Litter Will Only Disappear When Russians Begin to Look at the World in a New Way

The history of the Russian nation has been difficult—so difficult that it has distorted the psyche of many generations. The main result of these historical difficulties is that the Russian people have become close to barbaric. It is senseless, merciless, and utterly unjustified. The most obvious example of this barbarism occurred during the October Revolution, when hoards of enraged peasants seized the houses of the wealthy and destroyed works of art.

Although this was barbarism in an extreme situation, it continued on an everyday level even after the revolution. A common sight in the Soviet era was destroyed public property: public telephones with the earpieces cut off; benches with their backs torn off.

The trash and dirt that Russians leave in their public spaces is just another logical extension of this barbarism. The use of building entrances as urinals or the drawing of graffiti on the walls of elevators seems unmotivated, but there is an explanation. For centuries, the poor Russian people were deprived of private property. People in pre-revolutionary Russia lived in complete poverty. Even after the revolution, people lived in ruin and hunger for a long time. As the years passed, the situation began to improve as a result of “the restoration of a national economy,” the “great construction projects,” “the fight for the harvest” and so on. But there was no private property.

In typical Soviet residential buildings, the apartments were clean and beautiful, but the courtyards and entryways were filthy since in the Soviet Union, tenants never paid for janitorial services for the courtyards and entrances. All these services were provided for out of the state budget and since it was someone else’s budget, it was someone else’s problem. Clean courtyards and entrances have now started to appear in Russia—now that tenants themselves pay for the cleaning.

However, even in these clean buildings there are still men who continue to throw cigarette butts in the clean hallways and in the cleared courtyards; these men can’t seem to let go of these long-standing habits. Of course their mothers did not teach them to throw their cigarettes wherever they liked, but these mothers could not teach their sons to throw their trash in proper locations—there weren’t any. It seems ridiculous, but along with the shortage of everything else in the Soviet Union, there was a shortage of trash cans. And when trash cans finally appeared, people kept their old habits and continued to carelessly throw trash on the ground.

The same explanation can be made for why people continue to use the courtyards and entrances of buildings as public urinals. In the Soviet Union, there were very few public toilets. Now we have toilets, but the old habit of doing your business in building entrances has remained.

Certainly the fact that people now have a greater sense of ownership has contributed to an improved situation in entrances and courtyards. But things could improve even more if there were fines for littering. I have occasionally seen signs threatening a fine for throwing trash in improper places, but I have never seen anyone actually fining someone for such behavior. And although there are huge fines in Europe for improperly disposing of cigarette butts, to my knowledge, in Russia, there is no such law on the books. This presents an interesting paradox: Russians are not allowed any political freedom, however, they are at absolute liberty to litter as they want. Perhaps this is actually a carefully considered tactic on the part of the authorities –people who don’t care are easier to manipulate.

It is interesting, incidentally, that our nearest neighbors, the Belarusians, live considerably cleaner lives. Some Russian citizens give credit for this to Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, but average Belarusians are offended by this assumption, pointing out that even during the Soviet era they had clean cities and villages. And this is true, but why was this the case? It is possible that Belarusians are cleaner because they are closer to the West and, therefore, to the mentality of private ownership. I really can see no other reason why people so much like the Russians would take such a different approach to their surroundings.

Russians only begin to understand something once it affects them directly. Russians only became interested in the environment when Transneft planned to lay a pipeline on the shores of Lake Baikal. People clearly understood that any accident, any break in the pipe, which was to be laid in two places directly on the bottom of the rivers that feed the lake—and the lake would be ruined, killing off both the fish and the tourism industry—the two things by which local people made their living. Protests against the pipeline aroused such fury that President Vladimir Putin personally backed a new route for this pipeline.

From this story, it is possible to at least envision a day when Russians will take their garbage problem seriously—the day when they literally begin to choke from the stink and physically sink in the sewage. Only when the garbage directly threatens their physical existence will Russians possibly learn to clean up after themselves.

Yelena Rykovtseva is a correspondant for Radio Free Europe/Radio Libertyy. This comment represents her own views and not those of Radio Liberty.