Why Russia Longs for the USSR More Than Ukraine Does

Reader el asks an important question:

If most of Russian people want USSR back than why don’t most Ukrainians want it back? It seems strange since Ukrainians also experience “uncertainty attendant on living in a democratic capitalist society.” Seems like some Russians and some Ukrainians would be for USSR, while f.e. business owners in both countries – against it.

First of all, of course, there are people in Ukraine who long for the return of the USSR. I have the great misfortune of knowing people like that. The difference with Russia, though, is that the nostalgic feelings concerning the Soviet Union are not nearly as strong or wide-spread in Ukraine as in Russia for the following reasons:

1. People in Ukraine and the rest of the FSU countries that were not Russia always were second-class citizens in the USSR and were very aware of that. They had to live the situation where their cultures were suppressed, their languages persecuted, and they were constantly lectured on how Russia was their big brother and far superior to them in every way. The standard of living in Russia was kept artificially higher by robbing the rest of the republics. My husband comes from a tiny town in the Greater Moscow area, and when we talk about our childhoods (we were born three weeks apart in the same year), I always find it curious that a much wider variety of food items and consumer goods was available to them. Basically, everything was taken away from us to feed them. This is a very common colonial situation, and as a result, the memories of the USSR that people have in countries other than Russia are more bleak.

2. When Obama says that US’s current confrontation with Russia is not ideological, he is wrong. As Masha Gessen points out in her recent article,

Finally, said Putin, it was time to resist this scourge of tolerance and diversity creeping in from the West. “We know that there are more and more people in the world who support our position on defending traditional values,” he asserted. Russia’s role is to “prevent movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.” In short, Putin intends to save the world from the West.

As it has been doing pretty much forever, Russia is rejecting what it sees as Western values. Russia and Ukraine are countries with very different histories. Unlike Russia, Ukraine never practiced the viciously anti-woman Domostroy, never forced women to cover their heads, never forced women to live in a separate part of the house, never introduced the practice of arranged sight-unseen marriages. The sexual revolution that started in Russia in the 1990s and that people still can’t fully process began in Ukraine about 100 years earlier. This is why there are so many famous female writers in the XIXth-century Ukraine and not a single female writer of note in Russia until after the 1917 revolution.

3. In what concerns democracy, Ukraine had a well-functioning democracy back in the XVIIth century while Russia is yet to have its first successful experiment with the democratic system of government. The mentality of the Russian people is, and always was, deeply monarchical. They worship and hate (simultaneously) any leader they get and see him as a good / bad tsar. They develop extremely emotional attachments (be they negative or positive) to that supreme ruler and can’t imagine not having one. This worldview ties in neatly with their profoundly patriarchal mindset.

4. And the final reason is that the people of Russia chose the USSR while we didn’t. They fought a Civil War over it and the pro-Soviet side won. Ukraine, in the meanwhile, had its own independent republic and was trying to go its own way. That way was strictly and obsessively democratic and extremely progressive.

The Russians are the ones who wanted the USSR, they organized it to work for their benefit, and now they want it back. I’d say they should have at it and knock themselves out if only they weren’t trying to bring anybody else into their madness by force.