Well, for the same reason that they don’t demolish old buildings until they fall down on their own, an inner voice whispered to me. A special TV would cost two thousand dollars. One like this barely costs a hundred. Surely it’s far simpler to change it once every year or so than invest money in technology that rapidly becomes obsolete?

I put the television back down, switched on the BBC, and stepped into the shower, realizing that, for all my lack of sophistication, I had managed to grasp an intriguing point that was very far from our Russian mentality. Back home there either wouldn’t be a TV in the bathroom or there would be an insanely expensive one, and the price of the room would rocket by fifty percent. We don’t like disposable items. We can still remember how to mend nylon tights, wash plastic bags, and go to fetch the milk in a can. We can find a multitude of uses for an empty yogurt carton—from growing seedlings to storing small change.

To some extent Russia has unexpectedly found itself marching in step with the countries of the West and their obsession with ecology, economizing resources and recycling. Not because the green movement is popular here, but because of this centuries-old habit of economizing.

Only, as often happens in Russia, we take everything to absurd extremes—in both directions: the same people who darn their tights also buy hugely expensive cars and domestic appliances . . .

I wonder if that’s a plus or a minus for us, I thought as I sluiced myself down under the shower head. Take this shower, for instance. The head’s not cheap, probably quite expensive, in fact, with its tiny little holes for the water and valve for sucking in air. Self-indulgence? Not exactly. A shower like this uses about half as much water as mine in Moscow does. But we’ve only just realized that water costs money—and a lot of it! No one really appreciates what they have in abundance, so we Russians have never really valued or cared for our forests, rivers, and natural environment—or even ourselves, basically. The attitude in that old one-liner “Shall we wash these children or have new ones?” is still around, only nowadays we Russians take care of the children . . . but not of ourselves. What has to happen to us before we understand that we have to take good care of everything we have, of every tree in our boundless forests, every little stream that isn’t even marked on the maps, every village with only five households, every soldier drafted into the army, every man in the street toiling under his dreary daily burden? What will it take to change us? Communism didn’t change us—it valued people in words, but even then not all of them, and only as cogwheels in a single, integrated mechanism. Democracy didn’t change us: on the contrary, it gave us all the freedom to hate each other. What is it that we want? Maybe, like the Jews thousands of years ago, only pain and death, to lose our state and be scattered throughout the world, despised and oppressed by other nations—maybe only that will allow the Russian nation to come to its senses and recover its unity. To unite, but not as it has united in the past—without counting the losses or acknowledging the cost of victory—but on some other level? All great peoples have to suffer catastrophes sooner or later, to pass through their own national holocausts: this is a lesson known by China, which was once dying of opium addiction and has been torn apart, and by Germany, which suffered defeat in two wars and the disgrace of Nazism. And it should also be remembered by Russia, which has suffered fratricidal revolutions and bloody wars . . .