“Does Patriotism in Russia stop shortly after America?”

“Does Patriotism in Russia stop shortly after America?”

A very interesting event over the weekend made me ask this question. As you may know on my way to full “russification” we purchased a Dacha which is situated close to a lake and forest.

For leisure purposes it’s a great location and we are enjoying to spend time on the the lake. What is making this great experience less attractive is the “illegal” fishermen’s rubbish which is piling up everywhere. The kids and myself therefore started clearing up the rubbish. As we don’t have a car we are carrying our big black plastic bag on the bicycle.

This weekend during another try to clean the place, we noticed that the people coming back from their fishing were making jokes about us and rather than offering to maybe transport back the big rubbish bag as they are travelling by car, they actually threw their left overs 50 meters after the place that we were cleaning.

This reminded me of my neighbor on the Dacha who was carrying big blue bags on his motorbike to the forest (where our kids are playing together) and coming back without any bag even though he does travel to Dacha by car and not Elektrichka like we were. When I asked my colleagues in the office how/if to react to this - offering 3 options - they were only laughing and recommended not to do anything to maintain the Russian-German Dacha friendship. The options I came up were: print a picture of his rubbish and pin as a poster to his door, talk to his wife instead or organize central rubbish cleaning in our Russian derevnje…

Is there something which I still don’t understand?

Michael

Mario Fluegge

Operations Maghreb at DACHSER

9 年

Micha, this is an example on issues making people frustrated. But it's by no way a 'typical' Russian issue. I have seen and see similar behavior in Germany some times. Carelessness and laziness are probably the drivers here. On the other side, the waste disposal systems in the Moscow Region are leaving some deal to be desired. Public waste dump containers have been removed the recent years, or are placed at wrong and hidden spots and/or their number has been reduced. This, I think, is the root cause for the mess. It there would be enough and conveniently placed spots to dump your rubbish, most people (not all) would go there. Take Moscow it self as the positive example. So it seems to be up to the Moscow Region politicians to deal with the issue by creating a sufficient infrastructure, and support the mind change with campaign's.

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Such a shame!

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Kirill Kurenkov, MBA, PhD

Helping Russian Commercial Aircrafts Fly By Means of Finance

9 年

It is disgusting and it is a big problem and a big shame, I guess. And people will change as soon as they know they will pay considerable fines for illegal dumping, with no exceptions, like it happens in Western Europe. Interesting thing is that this kind of behavior was not so common before the 1990s. And I think that's good, Michael, your raising this point.

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