Comment by aristofun

Russian here.

The fact is that russian life is really miserable (just imagine living for 100 years in hardcore totalitarian communism, still in progress with different labels).

There’s really not that many reasons to smile while you grow up & live in Russia.

And you don’t even have a strong quality spiritual platform (like some asian countries) or good climate (like some aftican countries) to compensate.

You don’t waste your attention span on smiling etc - you’re busy surviving and fighting for the best spot in pyramid.

If you smile too much — it could even cause jealousy and you win more enemies or people might consider your positive attitude a sign of softness and take advantage of you.

It’s also suspicious to see someone smiling a lot - its harder to read his underlying subtle motivations & values.

And russians don’t have much time to make friends - the sooner and better you identify like minded people the easier for you as a group to survive.

That’s why russian tend to smile only in a close group of friends or when something really funny is going on.