«Бездомнаясобаканаулице – обычноеявлениепочтивовсехбольшихгородахРоссии»[a stray (homeless) dog on the street – an ordinary occurrence almost in all big Russian cities]. 

To me Russia is not best symbolized by «борщ» [borscht] or «Краснаяплощадь» [The Red Square] or «матрёшки» [‘matryoshki’; sets of nesting dolls] or «ушанки» [caps with earflaps] or «Гагарин» [Gagarin; first man in space], not even by «Достоевский» [Dostoevsky]; no matter how strange it might sound my Russia has the symbol of «бездомныесобаки» [pl. stray; homeless dogs]. Nobody who has been to Russia has made it out of here without encountering at least one of them somewhere. (Perhaps some visitors to Russia were lucky enough to escape such an encounter, for example, if you only visited Saint Petersburg or Moscow for a couple of days.) When people back home ask me if I’m not afraid of living so far away in such a ‘dangerous’ country as Russia, I have always answered them, and continue to do so, in one and the same way: “The only thing I fear here are Russian dogs.” During my years here I’ve seen many ugly things and been the victim on many unpleasant episodes, but by far the worst have involved not Russian people, but the hoards of stray dogs that are to be found everywhere in this large country. If it weren’t for the stray dogs, Russia would be a much better place to live in. If I didn’t have to calculate my running routs by where I’ve seen stray dogs lately, I would get a lot more running done, for example. Today I bought my weekly dose of Russian news in the form of the superb magazine «Русскийрепортёр» [Russian Reporter] and saw on the cover a heartbreaking picture of a homeless dog feeding her four puppies and the headlines: «Чтоделатьсбездомнымисобаками» [What to do with the stray dogs] and «Выброшенныеизжизни» [Thrown out of life]. This number [№ 7 (086) February 26^th – March 5^th 2009] of the magazine contains two stories focusing on this huge problem in Russia today: «Убитьнебольно» [It isn’t painful to kill] about a man who’s job it is to kill stray dogs, and «Собаки, улетающиеврай» [Dogs that fly up to paradise] about people who try to sterilize and take care of stray dogs. My opinion before reading the article mentioned last was that all stray dogs in Russia should be shot and not shown any mercy at all. This has to do with what I have seen with my own eyes – dogs attacking small children, old babushkas, terrible scars on the faces of friends from such attacks, and the lack of freedom of movement they create for all of us who are living here. In Russia, unfortunately, one cannot go wherever one might want to go. You must always be cautious, and throwing stones at dogs, as a French fellow student suggested once when we were being followed by a large group of dogs outside the Chinese market in Omsk, is impossible in larger cities because a) there are not many stones around and b) during the winter all stones are covered under heavy layers of snow. Living in Russia does make a person wiser. Russian life teaches you many things you might never have learned in other countries – how to run away from dogs, and that a woman should always walk on the pavement against traffic, never with it. Why? Because here it often happen that suspect cars stop to pick up young women, posing as taxis or just pretending to be asking for directions. Walking against traffic saves your life and should not be underestimated. This I didn’t know in Sweden. But that’s a whole other chapter in the book on the dangers of life in Russia. Let’s stick to stray dogs today.

This was my first encounter with a dog in Russia, outside an old factory in a suburb of Omsk back in February 2005. Back then I was young and naïve and didn’t know about the dogs. About fifteen minutes after this picture was taken a group of stray dogs chased me far into the woods and as I tried to get away from them I decided to run over the snow. Big mistake – the snow turned out to be about one meter above ground, wherefore I went right through it and got stuck. What saved me were a couple of rifle shots into the air from the guard of the factory nearby… Life lessons like that aren’t easy to come by and for that I’m thankful. 

The article begins with the following words:

«Растущие армии бездомных собак в российских городах вызывают вполне понятный страх у обывателя, который готов одобрить любые меры властей «по ограничению их численности». Но жестокость не решает проблемы – собаки снова и снова оказываются на улице из-за безответственности и безнаказанности бывших хозяев».

[The growing armies of stray dogs in Russian cities arouse an entirely understandable fear in the average person who’s ready to approve any kind of measurements from the authorities “on the limitation of their number”. But cruelty doesn’t solve the problems – dogs again and again keep turning up on the streets because of the irresponsibility and impunity of their former owners.]

The article first describes a public meeting in the streets of Moscow in favor of sterilization of stray dogs instead of shooting them. Only in Moscow and St. Petersburg is it against the law to shoot stray dogs. In other Russian towns it is still allowed and general practice. Then we meet Zhanna, a woman in Moscow who herself catches stray dogs and sterilizes them. She keeps a group of five dogs that she’s brought back to life after they were hit by cars, she has paid for their operations out of her own pocket. Her efforts in saving poor, defenseless animals from the brutality of human society is so touching that I even forgot how scared I am of those same ‘poor, defenseless animals’. The article continues with a visit to a clinic that sterilizes animals and then keeps them in a shelter. Usually the dogs are not fortunate when it comes to finding new owners, but are put to sleep after six months. I was very surprised to find out that many of the dogs are let back out again on to the streets after being sterilized, thus eliminating a future problem rather than the present. The description of the dogs in the shelter was so touching that I actually started to cry, something I had not expected, being as I was a stern believer in mercilessly killing of all stray dogs. The article ends with a visit to Holland, where the problem with stray dogs has been solved, and that Russia should learn from Holland. Of course, Russia could learn a lot from Holland, or from any other Western country where this problem has been eliminated. The article opened my eyes to something that I have previously not thought about – where do all of these stray dogs come from? Obviously most of them belonged to a human being at one point or other in their life. In Yekaterinburg, for example, I have seen stray Dalmatians running the streets. Pedigreed dogs are not cheap, but not always the people with enough money to buy such dogs make the best owners. Of course, as the article also points out, for the problem to be solved entirely the cause of it must be eliminated, or else we’ll just end up doing what we’re doing at the moment until eternity. There must be tighter restrictions when it comes to the owners. And there must be shelters set up for stray animals in all Russian towns, not only the ‘capitol’ ones, from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok. The problem with this, of course, is as always money. Money, money, and more money – who is going to pay for the shelters?

Here in Yekaterinburg they still shoot dogs. One of the first things you might notice in any given Russian town is that there are no stray cats on the streets. In Sweden, for example, there are many cats walking outside (called ‘outdoor cats’, always belonging to someone and sleeping indoors at night). In Russia the dogs eat the cats.

However, the situation is not all bad. Even though I’m scared to death of them, and become quite terrified whenever I come face to face with one on the street, always checking to see if there’s people near by to hear me scream and come to my rescue, Russian dogs have also inspired me. The first short story I ever wrote in Russian back in October 2005 was called «Белаясобака» [The White Dog]. It was inspired by a group of white stray dogs, all of them beautiful and full of pride and not the least dangerous in that aspect as they deemed it below them to even pay attention to humans. They lived in the area between my dormitory and the university, thus I passed by them every day at least a couple of times. Then one day a black truck came and shot them all. That made me feel safer, but also sad. Not to mention the fact that the novel about Russia that I’ve been writing ever since February 2006 went under the title of “Russian Dogs” all of its first six versions…