THE AFTERMATH OF DESTRUCTION IN POST-SOVIET COUNTRIES
[This is an update of an article I wrote 4 years ago, in 2022, just after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The horrible insanity of human death and suffering there is beyond words.]
I've lived 22+ years in Central Europe during the communist era and in Russia during and after the collapse of the USSR, when my wife and I experienced ONE MILLION PERCENT HYPERINFLATION in Russia, people literally dying of heart attacks while waiting in long lines to exchange their "old Rubles" for "new Rubles" before the old Rubles expired and became worthless. We've seen people break down the doors of a grocery store when milk was being delivered in order to buy it before it's gone. I keep my ration card for tobacco and vodka (although I don't smoke or drink) as a reminder of that era. It looks like that era is about to return to Russia.
These days, all sorts of mostly ignorant people are spouting all sorts of conspiracy theories and self-blaming explanations for the war in Ukraine. After spending much of the past 65 years studying about, learning their languages and living at a subsistence level along with the masses in those countries, I think that I have a fairly good understanding of what is taking place there and why: The Loss of Internalized Morality.
In a Christian-based society, parents stay married tor life, teach their children basic virtues such as "be kind," "tell the truth, don't tell lies," "respect other people's property," etc. Even though parents might not personally believe in Christ, they have absorbed this from our culture. But increasingly, this is fading away even in our western post-Christian culture.
In the Soviet Union, however, such basic virtues were abandoned in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, so people felt they had to be ruthless, lie, and steal simply in order to survive. Even after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, people would show up late and leave early at their state-supplied jobs for less than a dollar per day so they could earn real money at their "real jobs," What we consider to be normal business practices such as a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, honoring one's contractual word, selling at a fair markup, paying taxes, etc. – these were thrown out the window when private business was declared to be "exploitation" – criminal activity.
The result of criminalizing business was that only criminals engaged in business: killing, stealing, practicing deceit, making enormous profit, and not paying taxes. Even since 1991's collapse Soviet Union when private business was legalized, the criminal mindset continues to dominate business and private ethics.
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