Do Russians have toilets? Why that question tells us more about you than about them

A myth kept alive by poor reporting, propaganda, and the kind of journalism that wouldn’t pass inspection in any functioning bathroom.

You see it all the time on X. Some blue-check warrior, dusting off a bullshit claim that should have been buried years ago, no doubt grinning to themselves as they jab out: “Russia doesn’t even have toilets.”

It was doing the rounds again this weekend, stirred up by my Substack post, “Is Russia’s Economy Really Just Spain and Portugal? Let’s Do the Math.”

It’s the kind of smirk that’s meant to close the argument before it’s begun; as if flushable porcelain were the ultimate measure of geopolitical relevance. The reasoning, such as it is, runs like this: if some Russians use outhouses, then Russia must be primitive, and therefore nothing it does can matter.

It’s rubbish. Brittle, lazy rubbish that should have been flushed long ago. But since the u-bend of public discourse keeps spitting it back up, let’s deal with it properly.

Fresh from Rosstat, Russia’s own statistics agency, we now know that 91.8% of Russian residences have indoor toilets. More than nine in ten homes, across a landmass that runs from the Baltic to the Bering Sea, Arctic tundra to the Caucasus ridge.

Of these: 77.1% are linked to central sewerage; 6.2% use septic tanks or the like; 13.7% run on piped cesspits. Just 0.4% said they had no toilet at all.

These aren’t guesses pulled from a Reddit thread. They come from a door-to-door survey of 60,000 households, in every corner of the Russian Federation, in 2024.

So where does the myth come from? Partly from geography. Russia is vast. It holds some of the most remote, unforgiving terrain on earth. In Yakutia, where the mercury drops to –50°C, laying sewer pipes is less civil engineering and more lunacy. The same is true in the high villages of Dagestan, or the indigenous settlements clinging to the Arctic rim. There, the problem goes way beyond the budget; it’s a matter of thermodynamics.

And then there are the dachas; summer cabins, deliberately spartan, where urbanites escape the city to live a simpler life for a week or two. Plenty of Moscow professionals are content to use an outhouse for two weekends in July. That doesn’t make Russia a basket case any more than it makes the Finns barbarians for loving a cabin sauna.

Still, the trope survives. Its main proponent? A 2019 piece from The Moscow Times (a Dutch-owned outlet, despite the name) that wouldn’t pass inspection in any working bathroom.

Meanwhile, there’s been a shift. More Russians are leaving city flats for houses on the suburban edge. Many pick septic systems not out of necessity, but because they want the autonomy. The same choice you’ll see in plenty of rural Ireland.

We can have a serious debate about Russia; about its politics, its economy, its wars, or its future. But we can’t start that debate with: “They don’t even have toilets.”

It’s not just false. It’s cowardly. A smirk where a thought should be. A meme standing in for a fact. It’s the intellectual equivalent of saying: don’t analyse, don’t map, don’t think; just laugh and walk away.

The only honest answer to that is: grow up. The world’s bigger, stranger, and more complicated than your favourite punchline.

Russia has toilets. It has sewerage. It also has oil, wheat, reactors, satellites, aircraft, and yes; a hell of a lot of furiously cold villages.

If your best contribution to the conversation is an outhouse gag, then maybe your whole worldview belongs in one.