One in four Russians don't have an indoor toilet.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

On twitter there's a YouTube video of a man who fell into the hole of his outhouse. After he went missing the authorities were called and they found the man dead with his excrement in the outhouse.. I thank God my grandparents left that place. BTW, it wasn't a farm. It was an apartment building in Murmansk.

[Kaleva]

1. I saw a destroyed UKR outhouse on a YouTube vid

An elderly women was describing the recent fighting near her home and there was a toilet seat laying on the ground amidst the wreakage of a small structure.

[Beakybird]

2. Can you imagine having to climb flights of stairs in the middle of the night to take a poop?

And outside?

[DemocratSinceBirth]

3. And then falling in the hole

That poor man's last hours must have been terrifying.

[Demovictory9]

4. I am assuming they have chamber pots to be dumped in the morning

[Crunchy Frog]

5. People here didn't believe it was true when I posted a video

of ladies in a liberated village talking about Russian soldiers who had never seen a modern toilet.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

6. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them still don't have a refrigerator.

I made a trip to the old Soviet Union in 1976, and in both Moscow and Leningrad I could see, on the balconies of high rise apartments, food stored outside. It was winter, so that made sense, but it certainly made me wonder about warmer weather.

[MineralMan]

7. This is what authoritarianism leads to.

This is why the far right needs to be defeated in the next election. GOTfuckingV!

[hunter]

10. When I was a kid our family lived a year without a refrigerator.

It's not impossible, or even especially difficult, otherwise mankind would not have survived before the invention of the refrigerator. It just requires a different sort of meal planning.

Of course when our last refrigerator died I couldn't convince my wife that we didn't need to buy a new one. I do most of the cooking in our house so it was no big deal to me. She allowed me to experiment with a tiny ultra-efficient refrigerator for about a month, but then with the holidays approaching and family visiting, she dragged me out to Lowe's one weekend to buy the typical king-sized U.S.A. refrigerator with the automatic ice maker and everything.

I'm not so bad as my great grandmother. Her two room cabin on the family homestead had no indoor plumbing and she didn't want it. Her grandson and his wife and kids lived in the big house. When he installed an electric well pump and indoor plumbing in the big house to please his wife my great grandma was certain it would be the family's ruin.

She still hadn't forgiven my great grandfather for signing onto rural electrification to power his damned radio.

I imagine rural Russia is much the same today and will probably be that way for a long time, no thanks to Putin's imperial ambitions.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

11. Without a refrigerator, how do you store leftovers in the summer?

Or keep milk cold, or other things that will spoil very quickly?

I understand making do when need be, but I'm glad for a refrigerator and the attached freezer. I just made a large amount of chicken soup, had a couple of bowl, and I'm cooling down twelve containers which will be labelled and frozen. Doing this allows me to eat quite cheaply. As I live alone, I appreciate the convenience of freezing up multiple portions of favorite meals.

[bluedigger]

14. Your great grandmother and my great grandfather would have got along well.

My grandfather and his brother bought him all the stuff to put in a modern bathroom in the house he built himself around 1900. When he died ten years later they found everything still boxed up in the barn. He had a perfectly good two-holer out there and no need for an upgrade.

[Treefrog]

8. Many Americans lack indoor plumbing too.

Many in large cities.

You’d be surprised.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

9. Where?

I'm in Los Angles. Los Angeles County is more populous than all but four states. Please point me to a residence without indoor plumbing. I want to drive past it though L A County is really big. Could there be one? I guess. But less than .000001%. I saw a special on The Delta where people had indoor plumbing but no sewerage or septic tanks. The waste went into a creek. That was bad enough.

[senseandsensibility]

13. Maybe he/she is talking about the homeless?

LA has plenty of those and so does the Bay Area, where I'm from. Although I'm proud to be an American, we don't have the answer to everything and our homeless are proof of that.

[Treefrog]

17. Google is your friend.

San Francisco and NYC were at the top of the
List.

Funny when people think they know more about other countries than their own.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

21. The topic was about indoor plumbing and the fact 1 in 4 Russians don't have access to it.

It wasn't about the homeless problem in America which is a shame. That being said there are 327, 000,000 Americans of which 552, 000 are homeless. That's close to 1 in 575, not 1 in 4. I got that information from my "friend" google. I can break down the number of homeless in San Francisco and New York if you desire.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

12. I'm going to guess that those "many Americans" are mostly living

off the grid. I've occasionally met someone who happily lives way out in the boondocks without the comforts of modern civilization, like electricity or indoor plumbing. If they're happy, then good for them. But indoor plumbing truly is one of the greatest inventions of all time.

[HipChick]

15. If you grew up in the UK, only 1 in 2 houses had indoor plumbing

In the 60's or 70's..

[DemocratSinceBirth]

16. That was fifty years ago.

They made the hard choice of spending money on their citizens inteaad of spending money on their military. It helps they are in a military alliance with some of the wealthiest nations in the world.

[rockfordfile]

19. Sounds like India

[dwayneb]

20. Hey! I grew up with an outhouse

We didn't get an indoor bathroom until I was 12 or so, grew up in Midwest USA in the 50's and 60's. Now we had a NICE outhouse if you can imagine that. Not as crude as you might think. Although when it was 10 below zero and you had to use it it was mighty, mighty frigid.