The collapse of the Soviet Empire heralded an age of openness in relations between the peoples once shrouded by – and those that dared peek behind – the Iron Curtain. The curtain would be raised; seeds of common fraternity would germinate on both sides; things would “warm up.” The Cold War had ended.

At the state level, Russia, under Boris Yeltsin, certainly took up the reins before he ran afoul of the nationalistic urges of his government. In Ukraine, first President Leonid Kravchuk tried extending the olive branch to the West before being toppled by the Eastern-facing Leonid Kuchma. Both states have swung between conciliation and, at times, open hostility to the Western world. Yet what can be gleaned of the openness amongst the population at large to other cultures? Does their world-view echo that of the politicians’? Have they yet to raise their own Iron Curtain?

The interested observer gets a clearer sense of peoples’ attitudes to foreigners in the provinces. The metropolises are often too caught up in the rat race to enable significant penetration of peoples’ thoughts. On a recent sojourn to Odesa, a glimpse of underlying feelings towards outsiders was observed. Foreigners are, at best, treated as exotic ornaments, decorations to spruce up the party; at worst, as if they had green skin and bulging, black eyes.

Making the acquaintance of our hosts for the weekend was an enlightening experience: apathy, stoicism, a remorselessly macabre sense of humor were among the more vividly apparent traits. Our welcoming tour around town turned up ready evidence of faith lost in the state. I heard the phrase: “Ukraine is the ass of the world.” Clearly, disillusion reigns.

Yet disillusion in the tenets and ideals preached by politicians is not in itself unique. Remember, it’s taken swaths of wasted young American lives, hordes of defaulted sub-prime mortgages, and a black man banging on the White House door to coax “average Joes” off their asses in sufficient numbers to furnish an election turnout of even 61 percent - the highest since John F. Kennedy in the “greatest democracy” in the world.

No, the disillusion observed in our Odesan hosts is nothing new. What is new – and, paradoxically, the “same old” – are the attitudes towards those that would turn up “on one’s own doorstep,” the humble out-of-towner.

Our evening was spent around the fire naturally supping the traditional tipple, vodka. As the night wore on, an increasingly apparent linguistic dichotomy emerged – Russian versus English, with Russian, understandably, dominating.

The efforts of an imperfect Russian speaker at ingratiation often result in amusing faux pas, but, on the whole, my words are understood. Hence, upon Russian becoming the evening’s predominant language, my attempts to speak it redoubled.

Herein lies the symptom: why were these friendly approaches so rebuffed? Why, upon addressing our hosts, were such advances met with surly, unjustified retorts of “Ya nie ponyal” (I don’t understand). To which it may be added that through my pique, I heard the culprits’ companion utter, “ty eto ponimaesh” (you do understand).

What, clearly, is not understood here are the reasons why some “inostranets” (foreigner) stands before our comrades daring to speak out of turn, daring to dig a little deeper, daring to bridge the cultural divide. If this phenomenon can be assumed to be widespread – as 70 years of soviet rule surely demonstrate – it is maintained that nearly two decades since its apparent demise, the Iron Curtain stands firmly in the minds of people here.

The mindset that the foreign is bad; the foreign is not our own and so, consequently, not to be welcomed is reminiscent of a policy which has, coinciding with the economic downturn, returned to the political foreground – that of protectionism.

Under socialism, the U.S.S.R.’s borders were, if not hermetically, certainly tightly sealed. One can’t help but wonder why the Soviet bloc and its offspring have so lagged behind the west economically. The statistics lay this bare: Ukraine, according to the World Bank, ranks 91st in terms of GDP per capita; Spain, a country of similar size yet historically more open to the wider world, 22nd.

The economist Adam Smith nearly 250 years ago made the link between a country’s wealth and it’s openness to the world. Free trade implies that outsiders are accepted, trusted and valued. That is not what’s happening today. The mental Iron Curtain lives on.