Why Russians Don’t Smile 🇷🇺

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]People always joke that Russians never smile and honestly growing up in Russia smiling at strangers felt unusual to me too. Then when I was 20 I went to the US for the first time and I remember being completely shocked. People smiled everywhere on the street, in stores, at work, even random strangers smiled at me for no reason. At first I didn't understand it at all. I kept thinking, wait, do we know each other? Because where I grew up smiling usually meant something personal, not something automatic. But over time I actually started liking it and eventually I got used to smiling more too. Now the funny part is when I go back to Russia and smile at random people sometimes they look at me like I'm crazy.