The “slav squat”, the story of a typically Soviet posture

When we think of Eastern Europe, often comes this image of a man, all dressed in Adidas, cigarette in mouth, squatting in a recognizable way among thousands: on the heels and the forearms on the knees . This posture is called the Russian squat, also known as the slav squatexplains the German newspaper The world, which devotes an article to this habit that the author observed during his travels “in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia”.

“It is often mistakenly believed that this squatting position is a legacy of peasants who toiled in the fields or of the unemployed who could not afford a folding chair and spent their days squatting”, writes the journalist. This posture originated in Soviet prisons.