An old friend of mine left Ukraine and now lives in the United States.
He moved two years ago. He did it not because he wanted to, but because
his relatives asked him. His wife and three grown children flew overseas
first. The head of the family (a very decent man) stayed behind and resisted
several more years. He could not bring himself to part with his native
Kyiv, the Dnipro, the apartment which had cost him so many wracked nerves
during long years on the waiting list, and his friends. Moreover, he did
not know English and knew he never would.
However, the strongest factor holding Petro back was of an ideological
nature. Strange as it may seem, he had preserved a childishly naive belief
in communism. One of his maxims was that a capitalist society exists under
dog-eat-dog laws and money is the only value, meaning there can be no morals
or just laws. What he feared most was the prospect of being caught in the
net of capitalist exploitation when he would have to "wash dishes for the
bloody bourgeoisie." Hard as he tried to stay, in the end he had to leave.
Petro's only consolation was that he was leaving not the Soviet Union (which
he regarded as something like heaven on earth), but an entirely different
order (disorder would be more like it) which he resolutely refused to recognize
and put up with.
His first letters from America showed the man was totally confused and
he would end every letter with something like, "If only you knew how everything
is strange and alien here, how much I want to return home!" In the meantime,
the US immigration machine ground on. Petro received his papers, cards,
an apartment, a free course in English, and packages of free food. He bought
himself an old car, paying token money (something he had dreamt of all
his life). To help his children he found a job. Once a well-known Kyiv
physician, he now worked as a coatroom attendant in a large beauty parlor.
His daily take-home money by far exceeded his monthly pension in Ukraine
(and his earlier pay as a chief hospital physician).
Petro wrote that he had two big problems. The first was total aloofness
from everything happening around him. ("Financial crisis, assassination
of the President, even deluge - it's all the same and has nothing to do
with me!") This was something he found very hard living with. And the second
one was complete information vacuum. Petro could not read newspapers, did
not understand what was being said on television or in street crowds. The
tempestuous sparkling information stream raced past him, leaving him confused
and perturbed.
This summer Petro came for a visit. The first couple of days he walked
around Kyiv with teary eyes, remembering his student years, cherishing
every word he heard in his mother tongue, reading newspapers through the
night. Shortly, however, his mood underwent radical change. He started
talking about how a normal man could not live in today's Ukraine and should
do everything he could to get out and across the ocean, that a decent man
should not force himself to live in such squalor. The amazing thing was
that it never entered his gray head that his beloved Communist Party and
he himself (he had been a member for 40 years) were directly involved in
what had come to pass, a life that a Human Being cannot and should not
live.
Two weeks had hardly passed when Petro started packing to "go home,"
although he had a visa for three months. Like the Biblical Esau, except
of his own free will, the man changed his mother tongue, his native land,
and his country for the American mess of pottage, an America to which he
was utterly indifferent.
But Petro's main paradox lies elsewhere. The two years he spent in the
United States did not alter his ideology one bit. He was still his old
devout CPSU self. Was it schizophrenia or typical communist mentality?
Be it as it may, the man calmly accepted all the US social benefits and
resolutely opposed the Western lifestyle. It was though his brain worked
in two dimensions. He would tell proudly about how well they treated him
at the beauty parlor (they would give him a lift home after work, invite
for lunch, and lend him money if he was in need). So what about its dog-eat-dog
laws? He would reply, "Now don't you generalize." In other words, what
he saw had nothing to do with what he believed. When asked about how US
pensioners fared, he would deliver a lecture on how America "has robbed
every nation clean and sucked us dry (sic), so it might as well take good
care of us now." His were convictions existing in a vacuum, above and over
all logic and his own experience. Something like a powerful hypnosis which
Petro and many other fellow countrymen are unable to shake off. My granny
used to say of such people: "You can break a stick over his head, and he
will keep on talking the same rubbish."
Of course, the old immigrant's views are of interest only to his relatives
and friends. They will not harm anyone. It is quite another thing that
certain of our leading politicians in government and Parliament are in
the same state of paranoia. Can any therapy cure them of their postcommunist
trance?
By Klara GUDZYK, The Day






