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I knew before I left that Vladivostok suffers from a seemingly permanent water shortage. But hearing about water rationing on the news is one thing, feeling it on your skin after not bathing for days on end is another. It was the dirt and sweat that got me thinking about how crucial a simple thing like running water is to human civilization.
Mankind in the 21st century takes a lot of things for granted -- even we Russians, who thanks to Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin and the like have nearly got a foothold in the so-called civilized world. When you get up and go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, you expect the toilet to flush. In the morning when you go to brush your teeth, you expect water to flow when you turn on the tap. Not to mention taking showers, doing laundry, etc.
Life is more complicated in Vladivostok. When I arrived, the Soviet-style floor monitor in my hotel informed me that the water would be turned on from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., but after that it would be shut off for two days. "Well all right," I thought naively to myself. "This isn't so bad after all. I'll make it to five without any trouble, and then we'll see."
My first challenge came when I went to the bathroom. It's standard practice in the city to "flush" by pouring water from a bucket into the toilet bowl. I then had to refill the bucket from a 50-liter Chinese-made tub. (As always, our neighbors profit from our misfortune.) The tub itself was filled once every two days, provided that water was available.
When 5 p.m. rolled around I was in heaven. My deluxe room had an electric water heater, so I could shower without any trouble. Well, almost. Even when the water was on, the pressure was so low that it changed my mind about dear old England, where I spent four years as a graduate student.
A friend of mine, now a British citizen, has christened his new homeland the "country of low water pressure." I used to agree with him. During my stay in Oxford I spent many long hours on my knees in the bath, alternately scalded and frozen by the water gurgling from the separate taps, trying to stick the two ends of a slippery rubber hose onto the taps so that I could bathe with the warm water that was supposed to flow out the other end. More often than not I would discover to my chagrin that there was not enough pressure to force the water all the way through the hose.
Britain has long been an integral part of the civilized world, yet the British people have only a vague notion of what a shower ought to be and no notion at all of how to combine hot and cold water. So the pessimists are probably right: Even full integration into the vanguard of mankind won't solve all our problems. I must admit I took some comfort from the thought that even Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip probably washed just as I did, though doubtless in a bathtub made of gold.
Such were my thoughts before I arrived in Vladivostok. Now that rubber hose in Oxford seems like a fire hose compared with the shower in the Moryak Hotel. I managed just fine, actually. I had learned in Britain to squeeze water from the shower drop by drop and to turn off the hot water while I soaped up so as not to empty the water heater -- tough lessons for someone who grew up in the communal wastefulness of mature socialism.
As I showered in relative comfort, I began to wonder how Vladivostok's other visitors managed to wash, such as the Chinese businessmen staying on my floor in rooms without water heaters. And what about the locals? There are plenty of apartment buildings located high on the city's many hills that aren't even hooked up to the water system. I decided to find out for myself the next day.
My conversations with the local residents brought home to me how the lack of running water alters the life of modern city dwellers. In buildings where the water comes on for two hours in the morning, from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m., people leave for work later than usual. After all, they only have two hours to fill every possible container they have with water, heat it up, bathe, etc. and fill all the containers again for the next day when there will be no water at all. The residents of other buildings have to leave work and rush home in the middle of the day.
But the thing that amazed me most was how calmly the people of Vladivostok bear their troubles. "You lay it on a bit thick there in Moscow," one professor told me. "Take me, for example. We had running water all day yesterday. Mind you, it was cold," he said, basking in the envious looks of his colleagues. The mayor and the governor have long blamed each other for Vladivostok's woes. But when I asked why the people of the city didn't just hunt both men down and beat them up or pelt them with rotten tomatoes until they actually got around to doing something to improve life in the city, I met with a passive acceptance. Some said the problems were so ingrained that they couldn't be fixed. Others argued that they had fought many times for many things, and life only got worse as a result.
On the flight back to Moscow, I sat thinking about a hot shower and the future of Russia. What more must be cut off before the long-suffering Russian people rise up and demand their basic rights? Heat (they already have in some places)? Electricity (ditto)? Or will we revere the current regime just as we revered Lenin and the Bolsheviks, Stalin and the terror, Yeltsin and voucher privatization, thankful that they haven't cut off the air we breathe?
You have to fight for what matters. The history of the "civilized world" is an ongoing battle of the people for their rights. When the water is turned off, the people must organize themselves, designate their own leaders and find a way to get what they need. Entreaties and supplications are not the way to freedom. Once we have water, electricity, gas and heat we can tackle more complex problems like the shortage of qualified teachers in our schools and nonpayment of wages. Beyond that we can strive for political freedom. When our "public servants" fail to perform their duties, we must get rid of them, as happened not long ago to former California Governor Gray Davis, who allowed massive blackouts.
So long as freedom is bequeathed from above, the regime will give us only as much as it sees fit. In this context, the bacchanalia of the State Duma elections makes perfect sense. We will not have running water until we begin to hold our elected officials to account. The water is shut off, next will be the electricity and then the heat. Before long we'll all be washing ourselves with snow in the yard. When we organize ourselves and demand our rights, a civil society will begin to take shape that enters into a dialogue with power rather than bowing and scraping before it.
Based on the evidence in Vladivostok, however, I don't think that will happen any time soon.
Alexander Lukin, associate professor of political science at MGIMO, contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.
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