Some East European mentality explained.

I decided to make this a separate post, because the whole story is so long that you might not want to read it all. And I sum it up at the beginning of the next post.

so there we go.

Some characteristics of East Europeans.

Let  me try to explain something to you. Something that, for a Westerner, is not very nice. You might skip it if you have a queasy stomach or are easily impressionable.

See, in most of Eastern European societies – I am not sure if that is how it was before communism, as I was born after communists came to power – and what influence on this type of behavior communism had – but the truth is. 

East European societies are horribly judgmental. Judgmentalism is not frowned upon, it’s part of life, you live with it. I know it sounds omgwtf to  a westerner, but that is the truth. It did soften just a tad in the last couple of decades (but that, again, depends on the country) due to the increasing influence of the West, but, generally speaking, it’s still there. 

Fat people will be openly laughed at on the street, people with infirmities (be them physical or mental) will be treated as if they weren’t worth it, even people who have an incurable disease may be considered third rate human beings. 

Most of the time the elderly are disrespected (if they are not your own) in a “grandpa, move out of the way, you’re a goner anyway, the grave is calling you, scoot”. It can be really really hurtful and bad, as in “haha, you idiot, your dad has cancer, is he bald yet? Did he throw up his breakfast for you to eat it?” and stuff like this.

Well, at least kids wearing spectacles aren’t that badly teased and bullied anymore, since Harry Potter launched the eyeglasses fad. I wish that was up when I was in school.

That is the society I grew up in. I was always the tiniest in my class, wearing eyeglasses, people always tried to make fun of me and bully me when I was a child, I learned early in life that a bonk over the head with your wooden penbox (or whatever is handy, yanno, backpack, chair, etc) stops bullying, even if it might land you in detention for a couple hours and your parents might be called to school to discuss with the principal. 
It made it so even now, when I remember my homeland, after the heartache that the thought of the mountains, the Black Sea, the beautiful places and memories and all that, it's so easy to stop feeling regrets or sadness: all I have to do is to think of the stink of the garbage chutes in the apartment buildings or the hundreds of times a day you'd hear the slang words for genitalia, all over the place - street, restaurants, public transportation, etc.

But let me not digress.

Of course, all this behavior also depended on the class (society-wise) you belonged to. During communism time society was differentiated in four distinct classes – the peasants (dirt-rakers), the workers (machine oil under the fingernails), the intelligentsia (teachers, professors, doctors, architects, etc, usually University or Post-grads) and of course, the high-rank Communists. And somewhere in between also there were the Gypsies as well. Yes, that's the truth - not a matter of racism or anything. History has shown exactly the facts.

During those times, you were appreciated if you were either part of the last two classes, or if you were a “smartie” (I am not even sure how I could translate how people like this were called), that is, you had a lot of acquaintances in “high places” (read – people who had relatives abroad who would send them Western stuff,  people who had access to the high-ranked commie stores, grocery store managers, butchers, customs agents, etc – in a word, when you had access to Western stuff, from American cigarettes and jeans and real coffee – yes that was quite a luxury).

But generally speaking, the judgmentalism and cruelty were encountered more in the “middle class”, the workers. The extremes – the peasants, close to the old traditions, and the educated people, were less prone to manifest those behaviors.

You can imagine that once communism fell, that didn’t mean that everything was wiped off, and people and mentalities changed overnight. That is the hardest thing to change.

The social strata changed once the capitalism came in. Now you were appreciated only if you had money. How you made those money, it didn’t matter – actually, if you managed to make them by swindling, cheating, stealing, failing to pay taxes, smuggling, black market, you name it, you were to be admired for being a “smart one” who always manages to make a good life for themselves, no matter if they ruin other peoples’ lives in the process.

I explained all this so you can get an idea of the mentality of that area of the world. Of course, it wasn’t the same in ALL the countries of the communist block. It seems that the higher the proximity to and influence of Mother Russia, the more paroxistical the behavior, the farther away and closer to Western Europe, the less it was manifested. As a general idea, countries like East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Poland, were less affected by this mentality and behavior, while countries like Russia (of course), the USSR member countries (Ukraine, Bessarabia/Moldova, etc), Romania, Bulgaria, were more affected.

How do I know this? Well, because for one, I went to the University of Bucharest, and was a student of the Filology (Foreign Languages and Literatures) Faculty, and we had quite a bunch of exchange students – one of the very few occasions when Romanians could actually have contact with foreigners – and I also worked for a while for the European Center for Higher Education of Unesco, right when the International Convention on Recognition of Studies, Diplomas and Degrees was being worked on, so I had a lot of material to study there too – and contact with many people from those countries. So I was able to get enough information to get a fairly (I hope) objective conclusion. as the people I came in contact with were from all over the place.

Now, don't understand from all this that everybody in or from an East European country will be like this. As I said, it depends a lot on the social strata they've been raised in, and - I don't know - character make-up of a person, if you want? I was blessed to grow up and then later in life be surrounded mostly by people who did NOT have this behavior and mentality - well as I got into adulthood of course I could choose who I wanted in my circle of friends. So even if I had to live in the society that was mostly driven by it, it doesn't mean that everything was horrible. But I wanted to be more explicit about this aspect, without making the next blog post even longer than it was.