The Devil Has To Have Access To You In Order To Tempt You...,

Central European states, whose political and economic systems had been completely destroyed, and which in any case were regarded as having been imposed by a foreign power, looked westwards for help, and much of their leadership saw western Europe as an inspiration. 

It is important to understand what that inspiration was for.

The fundamental contradiction of the Soviet system was that the nomenklatura had control over fantastic real wealth but did not have the official right to live better than the common worker. And in fact did not live better for a long time, and even later on it wasn’t enough — privileged people did gain access to luxury goods from the West in the last couple decades of the USSR, but there were limits to that (you had to keep appearances after all, as there were serious punishments for crossing certain lines even in the 1980s). They also could not pass that control over resources to their progeny, which was a huge problem on its own.

Once economic ties were established between East and West that contradiction became really glaring. Imagine being one of those Soviet officials signing the original gas and oil export deals — you go to the West, they wine you and dine you in various fancy mansions, drive you around in limousines, etc. the people you negotiate with are all very wealthy. And you negotiate with them as an equal, signing deals worth many billions. But then you go back to Moscow where, if you are lucky, you live in one of the Stalinkas (the nicer relatively roomy apartments built in the 1930s in more central areas of cities), and if you are not, you at best have a 2-bedroom dingy flat in a non-descript Khrushchyovka, quite possibly something even smaller.

That starts to gnaw on people over time and the question “why can’t I enjoy the same level of consumption as those people” begins to weigh on them. Even more so under the pressure from their wives and children, who are generally even more materialistically oriented. The argument “You can’t live in a mansion, drive a Ferrari and have a yacht in order for your fellow citizens to have free housing and healthcare and high-quality education” didn’t go well with these people, if it was ever considered.

So that is what the “inspiration” was for — the Western system provided both opportunity and ideological justification for uncontrolled looting. Pure greed ruled the day.

In effect the years 1989-1991 were the second phase of the neoliberal revolution — it started in the West in the 1970s, then a certain layers in the Soviet bureaucracy saw that and decided “Hey, that sounds good, we should do it here too”, and the rest is history. The 1980s were in a way a lot more similar on both sides of the curtain than people realize.

Now notice what the turning point was — it was once extensive direct contacts between East and West were established. The Devil has to have access to you in order to successfully tempt you. So separating as completely as possible from the West would not have been a bad idea back then, and it might still be beneficial now.

That realization is starting to slowly creep into the public subconscious, we will see how far it goes.