Outside of datcha villages (summer/weekend garden houses where people generally don't live full time), this is just total BS. Have you ever visited Russia?
Flush toilet requires your private house to be connected to a centralized communications OR to your personal water pumps.
#1 is not an option if you leave far away from a town.
#2 is not an option unless you can pay for it and its maintance.
I understand that this sound like a problem or some savagery but in reality this is not much different from the fact that most countries do not have centralized hot water or heating.
My summer house also does not have a flush toilet despite the fact that I can easily afford one. What's the problem?
Check this persons posts, they're 90% anti-Russian. No amount of factual or anecdotal information is going to change their attitude.
I've had the same shitty (pun intended) toilet argument on HN with other Russophobs and there's just no reaching these people seething with racial hate.
"Located less than 200 kilometers south of Moscow, the industrial city of Tula is home to around 549,992 people. And about a fifth of them have no access to centralized sewage systems."
From the first link in my previous comment.
Just bringing data to whether or not Russia is well equipped with flush toilets (or really more the point public sanitation).
From a public health standpoint, human waste reaching rivers tend not to be good.
"Untreated human sewage teems with salmonella, hepatitis, dysentery, cryptosporidium, and many other infectious diseases."
They're generally sanitary (when maintained) and are a whole septic system. And are attached to flush toilets.
That's massively different than raw sewage making it to streams and rivers.
However none of this really matters because the point is that many rural Russians lack access to water and proper sewage (apparently as laid out in the above previous links). So politely you're wrong. Have a good day.
>Located less than 200 kilometers south of Moscow, the industrial city of Tula is home to around 549,992 people. And about a fifth of them have no access to centralized sewage systems.
I am from South America, so my experience in Russia was a tourist. But really, This is basically bullshit. Soviet architectural heritage may be depressing sometimes, but one thing they took seriously is infrastructure.
I was there for the world cup, and after my country was out of the competition I traveled outside the cities hosting games including some very distant places. Agriculture in Russia is mostly an industrial affair just as in the West, with the usual John Deere dealerships dotting the margin of the roads along with some Chinese and Russian brands I've never heard of before, but that seems to be big there.
Of course, I stayed in the western portion of Russia, not even crossing the Urals. It is a gigantic country, and probably as you go east, probably things are more backward.
In general, the Russian experience, at least at the time of the world cup was basically the standard European experience for a traveler, things mostly work, the trains are absurdly better than American ones, on the same level as European trains, and at least in the big cities, you can get around speaking English. If you stay in an Airbnb and cook your meals, supermarkets had incredible variety at good prices.
Probably some things are worse or a lot worse now with the War Economy and sanctions, but on the other side, it is clear that Putin has been preparing for this for a long time, and export substitution has been going on for a long time.
The bottom line is that Russia is not like Elbonia from racist Scott Adams cartoons like so many people think.
