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Spring Shows the Ugly Side of Life

Date: 2006-04-04

Be prepared to ugly views if you go to Russia in the middle of spring. Or postpone your trip until May or summer if you want streets to look beautiful and romantic when you take a stroll with your fiancée.

Here is the article about the ugly side of Russian spring, written by Josefina Lundblad, a poet and a writer from Sweden, and a student at the Omsk Pedagogical University, which is located in Siberia.

The most longed-for season in Siberia is undoubtedly spring, yet when it comes it is far from a pretty sight. While a welcome relief after four cold, dark months, the Siberian spring reveals the ugly side of the Russian lifestyle.

Siberia is beautiful in the winter -- maybe only because much of it is hidden under deep, thick layers of snow. As the temperature

rises in March, the white glittery snow melts away, exposing that underneath it the snow is gray and even black closer to the ground. Everywhere, on the streets, in gardens, in parks, along river banks, trash keeps popping up. Billions of cigarette butts, millions of empty beer and vodka bottles, wine boxes, used packages, forgotten things that nobody would like to remember, all of them telling the tale of just what a long Russian winter is like.

I grew up in Sweden, and of course few countries can measure up to Sweden when it comes to environmental protection, but it is all I have for comparison. Certainly my home country was occasionally dirty and gloomy in early April, before nature came out in its full green force, but never before have I seen such a neglectful way of treating one's surroundings.

Outside small houses in the poorer suburbs here in Omsk, people create their own little dumps. This naturally helps feed the wild dogs that scare me and everyone else. If I happen to get a Russian to discuss the problem with me, they always reply in the same words: "Siberia is big." Yes, Siberia is very big. And probably clean in places where no man has yet built a town, but where people live, it is dirty and polluted. Nobody here has even tried recycling, and most regard it as a far-fetched dream.

The problem of course is as obvious to Russians as to foreigners. Their solution is to wait until late April, when the sun has warmed the earth and the streets have dried up, and then they come out on a Saturday to clean up their city. The day is appropriately called a subbotnik.

Last year, I picked up trash on the banks of the Irtysh outside my dormitory, and this year I will do the same.

After all of our efforts, on Sunday morning my Siberian town looked just like a childhood fantasy spring. It was almost impossible to think that all those bottles, cigarette butts, boxes, packages and general junk still existed, only relocated a little further away.

I would obviously prefer a more permanent solution and also a change in the Russian mentality, but perhaps it will come with time.

www.themoscowtimes.com



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