Mamonovo, Russia: The wooden board outside the local government building in this town of 7,000 near the Baltic Sea - a place small enough that word travels fast and no one's business is exactly private - might just as well advertise a community festival or a schedule for trash collection.
In fact, it is a pillar of shame.
Posted on the yellow and green board recently were the names of 50 residents who had not paid their utility bills, some for years; nine residents with other debts; and a local fish cannery that allegedly dumped untreated wastewater into the environment.
Using a technique revived from Soviet times, schools, factories and other workplaces post the names and photographs of people caught out late or intoxicated, or engaging in other behaviour considered disgraceful, some Russian regions rely on shame to deter dereliction.
Psychological impact
"It has a good effect because the town is small and everybody knows each other," says Oleg Shlyk, the mayor of Mamonovo, whose office overlooks the shame board.
"And when you have your name on the board, no matter what your post or rank, there will be a psychological impact on you."
Public shaming is reminiscent of the Middle Ages, when criminals were put on display in village squares in stocks, their heads, arms and sometimes feet locked between two boards.
The methods are more sophisticated now, but the idea, that the prospect of being shamed before one's peers is a deterrent to shameful acts, is the same.
Unless the violator is shameless.
Bagrationovsk, a nearby small city in the Kaliningrad region, publishes in the local newspaper the names of people who haven't paid for their communal services.
And in the regional capital, a group of young political activists has begun surreptitiously snapping pictures of polluters and - if they refuse to pay a fine - posting them online.
A few camera-toting members of the mobile unit of the local chapter of Molodaya Gvardiya, the youth wing of the ruling United Russia party, recently caught two men illegally washing an Audi and a Mercedes near one of Kaliningrad's many lakes.
"Let him feel ashamed," Igor Shlykov, head of Kaliningrad's Molodaya Gvardiya, said of anyone breaking environmental laws. "It will be difficult for him to look into people's eyes."
The governor of the Ulyanovsk region, more than 500 miles east of Moscow, placed a virtual shame board on the government website last month, listing three employees who "committed breaches in the discharge of their duties."
Violations
Two of them, the site said, mishandled documents, and the third, the regional minister of construction, failed to get a project done on time.
The tactic has also been used in the private sector. About a year and a half ago, a nightclub in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, posted pictures on its website of violators of the club's rules.
The club's staff wasn't immune: Among the 14 people listed were two waiters who shortchanged customers and a bartender who under-filled drinks, according to the newspaper Novye Izvestiya.
Shlyk said the board has helped cut down on the number of offenders, but he offers only anecdotal evidence.
"At first, people were irritated and angry; they said they would go to court," he said, adding that no one has.
"Maybe a thing like this, at first you smile at it," he said. "But I know some cases where children saw their parents' names and they said, 'Dad, Mom, please pay the fine because my friends are teasing me'."
