Reader twicerandomly asks some very good questions. Here they are:
Why hasn’t Ukraine figured out democracy and capitalism?
We are all products of our past. People pass on their unresolved problems to their children and grandchildren who, in turn, pass them on to their own children. We do this both on the level of specific families and of entire societies. In the Soviet Union, everybody who was enterprising and hard-working, who produced, manufactured, created, generated ideas, learned, and burned with enthusiasm to make, create, earn, transform and achieve was slaughtered, tortured, starved to death, or, at the very best, sent to concentration camps.
After Stalin’s death, forced starvation, murder and concentration camps were over, but any kind of initiative, originality or productivity still made one a persecuted pariah and made life very hard. And this is how things were for generations. Human beings have a very developed capacity to adapt to their surroundings. If entrepreneurship and enthusiasm become dangerous, people will eradicate these qualities in themselves.
The only way you can overcome this kind of conditioning is by
1) discussing what happened. People need to talk about this, constantly, obsessively, repetitively, like the Spaniards are talking about the Civil War.
2) working specifically to heal the damage.
None of this was done in the FSU countries since 1991. And if you pretend that the trauma is not there, it will never begin to heal. If we talk about stages of grief, FSU countries are still sitting squarely in denial.
Does it make sense to bail out their economy with so much corruption?
I can’t answer this question. I haven’t been back to Ukraine for over 15 years. I’d need to go back and talk to people to be able to answer it. I want to believe that things are getting turned around, and when Ukrainian protesters in the Maidan started toppling statues of Lenin, that was, in my opinion, the central moment of the protests. If Ukrainians are making the connection between Lenin and Yanukovich’s corruption, that is huge.
Thank you, twicerandomly, for these great questions.
Clarissa's Blog 
This is one place where the historical differences between western and eastern Ukraine do count. Western Ukraine avoided the Holodomor and only came under Soviet rule in 1940 briefly and then again in 1945. This means that unlike the eastern part of the country that there were people alive from western Ukraine that remembered life before Sovietization when the USSR fell apart. In that sense western Ukraine was more like the Baltic States and Central Europe and less like the USSR in having people who remembered what life looked like before and could use that knowledge and skills to recreate a non-Soviet society.
LikeLike
This is what I really want to believe. I have never been to the West of Kiev, so I have no personal experiences. I’ve been to the Baltic states, though, and saw zero difference with the rest of the USSR. I have no idea if people recreated anything since then, but Vilnius was exactly like Kharkov or St. Petersburg in 1990.
LikeLike
Estonia which I visited in 1989, 2003, and 2005 was radically different than Kyrgyzstan where I lived from 2007-2010 (plus the summers of 2011, 2012, and 2013). Of course Estonia was always the least Sovietized territory annexed by Moscow and Kyrgyzstan remains to day one of the least de-Sovietized former republics in terms of byt (day to day life). But, Estonia even in 1989 felt like a Nordic state like Denmark and Kyrgyzstan even today seems like a reformed, but certainly not dismantled Soviet state.
LikeLike
I haven’t been to Estonia, so I can’t say. Maybe it is radically different from Lithuania and Latvia.
There is an Estonian person hanging around the blog, so maybe he will clarify. 🙂 🙂
LikeLike
Even Cuba that was only drawn into the Soviet orbit after 1960 and never experienced any actual repression was 100% Soviet by 1999. So I don’t know, it’s very difficult to escape this once you get into the orbit.
LikeLike
I have no CCCP experience but after my first time in Lithuania a few weeks ago it didn’t seem that different from Eastern Poland (or Western Poland pre-2000 or so).
Maybe a little more surly and unsmiling (and lots more smoking on the street) and sometimes a little more incompetence in the air but not a fundamentally different kind of place.
But it’s been in the EU for ten years so that probably makes a difference too (and I was in Kaunas one of the most Lithuanian, least Russian places apparently).
LikeLike
My Moscow aunt used to go to Estonia in the 70s. Loved it, was enchanted and energized and charmed, sent ecstatic letters, particularly about people being so nice and seeming so happy, comparatively speaking.
LikeLike
“but any kind of initiative, originality or productivity still made one a persecuted pariah and made life very hard”
This is also very like my university. (Which is not like a university in the US — doesn’t resemble the other US universities I have worked for, and I was interested to hear a colleague say the other day, going off to a conference in California, “I am off to the US!”)
Of course, this is also not in FSU but is in place where everyone has been persecuted, for different reasons, except the masters.
This is part of why I think the problem is not Marxism or Marxian inheritance per se, but some kind of authoritarianism/patriarchy/clientelism/corruption complex that exists in other spaces as well. I am not sure what the deep structure, if there is one such, could be.
LikeLike