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

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

You see it all the time on X. Some blethering buffoon, usually anonymous, jabbing out a nonsensical and bullshit claim that should have been buried years ago: “But the Russians don’t even have toilets!”

It was doing the rounds again this week, stirred up by my article,“Is Russia’s Economy Smaller Than Italy’s? Let’s Do the Math.”

The bilge-water trope is meant to close the argument before it’s begun, as if flushable porcelain were the ultimate measure of global relevance. The reasoning, such as it is, runs like this: if some Russians use outhouses, then their country must be primitive, and therefore nothing it does can ever matter. It’s the same school of thought that labels it “Nigeria with snow” or “Upper Volta with rockets.”

This rubbish should have been flushed long ago, but since the u-bend of Twitter waffle keeps spitting it back up we should deal with it properly, despite how much as it stinks.

From Rosstat, Russia’s domestic statistics agency, we know that 91.8% of Russian residences have indoor toilets. That’s across a landmass that runs from the Baltic to the Bering Sea, Arctic tundra to the Caucasus ridge, through some of the most challenging environments on earth. It’s not Belgium, with its high population density and simple terrain.

Of these 77.1% are linked to central sewerage, 6.2% use septic tanks or the like, 13.7% run on piped cesspits and just 0.4% said they had no toilet at all. The results 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 and ranges from subtropical Sochi to Alaska’s twin brother in Chukotka. In Yakutia, where the mercury drops to –50°C every winter, laying sewer pipes is less civil engineering brilliance 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 and is more a matter of thermodynamics.

And then there are the deliberately spartan dachas and summer cabins, where urbanites escape the city to live a simpler life for a few days. 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 and its main proponent is a a 2019 piece from The Moscow Times (a Dutch-owned outlet, despite the name) that wouldn’t pass inspection in any working lavatory.

Meanwhile, 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. This is the same choice you’ll see all across rural Ireland, where many very rich people aren’t connected to centralised systems.

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.”

That’s just a meme standing in for a fact and the intellectual equivalent of saying: don’t analyse and don’t think but just laugh and walk away. The only honest answer to that is grow the hell up and accept that the world’s bigger and more complicated than your favourite piffling punchline.

Russia has toilets and 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.