Mentality 

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