Somehow you have a different experience than I do. That is fine. But that is also the reason, why we need to rely on some sort of stats to give us a rough idea

Somehow you have a different experience than I do. That is fine. But that is also the reason, why we need to rely on some sort of stats to give us a rough idea of the situation. In one of the articles that I linked it was stated that: "Rosstat carried out the study involving 60,000 households in every Russian region between Sept. 15 and Sept. 29, 2018". So they took a "representative" sample. "Only 9 percent of Russia’s urban population reported lack of access to a sewage system." Maybe it was a survey, people self-reported? Whatever you think it was, think of this: Russia has 146 mil people. Let's be generous and say that only 5 percent do not have any indoor plumbing. That's 7 mil people. Lack of indoor plumbing is much more of an issue in rural area. There are 20+ 'republics', some of which (like Тыва or Бурятия) have rural population percentage of around 50%. So that's 100s of thousands of people without indoor plumbing in these republics. Mind you, we are very generous with our percentage values here... So, if we go back to the original statement by the parent comment: "many citizens of the “republics” have never seen indoor plumbing" Would you agree that the gist of it is true? I would even grant that some, maybe 10s of thousands in fact have never seen any indoor plumbing, if they never left their small village in the middle of nowhere to go to a hospital or some other place that has it. Russia is huge, it has a lot of people, it has a lot of 'republics', some are very rural, so it is not outrageous to state these things. BTW, the column that I interpreted as "indoor plumbing" in the Rosstat document that I linked was "водопроводом". To me it means plumbing... This is my last attempt at trying to explain how I see this point :) in any case, have a good one!