When Gorbachev gave the go-ahead for the demolition of the Berlin Wall, one could, enchanted by the moment, think that all the other walls in Europe would soon fall as well. The Iron Curtain creaked as it lifted, and two worlds – the dull, almost black-and-white socialist one, and the colorful capitalist one – stared at each other in amazement. We knew you lived better, but we didn't realize how much better. You suspected things were bleaker on our side, but you didn't understand how we managed to cope with it.

This Wall of yours and ours, this Curtain of ours and yours – it would be more accurate to compare them to a dam that separated and held back millions of people on either side under different pressures. It was blown up – or perhaps it collapsed under the weight of the era (though in China, it was patched up and still stands) – and human streams surged towards each other, mingled, and after some time settled at a unified level, at an average mark.

What you had became accessible to us. What you knew, we learned. Freedom, which we had never had – not abstract freedom, but at least the freedom to live wherever we wanted, to do whatever we wanted, to sleep with whomever we wanted, to travel to you on vacation, or even to move permanently – was given to us, and we began to use and abuse this freedom.

The walls didn't completely disappear, but they were at least replaced by light metal fences – like those our police use to create enclosures where our opposition is allowed to hold rallies.

In the new "free" Russia, there was no ideology, and therefore no reason to continue rivalry and struggle with the West. The West was lenient with us – it didn't place military bases in the Moscow region, didn't demand disarmament or reparations, and sent humanitarian aid – I remember receiving packages of powdered milk at school for some reason. Why milk, specifically? Well, who cares, milk is milk, what's the difference, it's a symbol, not a product.

Our industry produced tanks and machine guns, yours produced televisions, VCRs, and computers, fashionable clothing and music, trendy movies, and finally, just a variety of food. We wanted to be like you, and finally, we were allowed to. City dwellers, intoxicated by consumer permissiveness, knelt before the Western Golden Calf.

We converted to your faith simply by consuming your goods, learning the names of your brands, discovering your writers, devouring your TV series. We finally ate what had been your privilege – our store shelves were piled high with your products. We communed with Bordeaux and croissants. We visited you and, dazed, squinting at the too-bright picture, examined your Barcelona, your Berlin, your London.

And then we drank our fill of your milk: we ate your products, watched your movies, and visited your capitals. And you got used to us: Russian speech on your streets no longer surprises you.

What surprises you now is something else – what suddenly happened to us? What happened between us? How did the admiration in our eyes turn to disdain, envy to a sense of superiority? Why, after learning from you how to be proper modern Western people, did we fail at it and decide to retreat back into our uncomfortable Eastern past?

Where does our relapse into imperialism come from, why do we wage wars in our former domains, why do we meddle in your politics, why do we repeatedly choose a strong hand to rule us, timidly cozying up to it – and then flinching when it is raised above us? What is gnawing at us? Why didn't we blend with you when our vessels began to communicate, why didn't the potential difference disappear, why are walls being built again where fences once stood? You ask yourselves – "Could it be our fault?" Did we misunderstand, overlook, overdo? Or are Russians simply not Europeans, never were, and never will be, and it was never worth hoping for?

You speak for yourselves, and I'll speak for us.

The whole point is that we have always looked up to you and always compared ourselves to you.

Russia is a country of catch-up development, and almost all its modernization leaps have been associated with new waves of borrowing from the West. But Europe always gave us technologies in a package with values, with ideology, with a way of life. Modernization led to cultural inoculations. It required the abandonment of traditions and ways of life. If you want to accelerate, first admit you're backward.

Abandon your values, acknowledge them as archaic, clumsy, meaningless. Question your history, your identity. Admit that your special path has once again led you to a dead end. If you want to be European, admit to yourself that you are a second-class person dreaming of becoming a first-class one. This conflict is where all attempts to modernize and Westernize Russia stumble.

And the only time we tried to teach you how to live, when Russia carried out a civilizing mission to Europe – I mean the communist revolution and the subsequent Europe-wide shift to the left – ended in our failure. You think that at the end of the Cold War, the benefits of your civilization were once again given to us for free – but for us, that war ended in our defeat. We have an inferiority complex – especially those to whom Soviet power promised to build a communist paradise on earth, paid for with the blood of fathers and grandfathers, by the end of the century. Promised right before its bankruptcy.

And our imperial nostalgia – normal human nostalgia for lost global greatness, from which Great Britain, France, and even Hungary still suffer – overlapped with our eternal inferiority complex, with the feeling of being second-class people in front of Europeans, a complex that only imperial pride could cure us of. Yes, we lived in filth, but our tanks stood from Vladivostok to Dresden, Warsaw, and Prague: we were the greatest (if judged by territory) of the surviving empires. In short, here's what happened to us: we traded pride for sausage, but when we had our fill of sausage, we remembered pride again. Nothing special, it's quite understandable. Anyone could be in our place, and the Germans have already been there.

And the complexes of the ordinary (post-)Soviet person coincided with the complexes of the post-Soviet elites – who came to the West to throw money around, and still didn't feel equal to the Western elites. The West took their money, sometimes feigning obsequiousness, but there was no sincere respect in the eyes of the takers. And when the Western elites figured out better what the Russian elites were – an inseparable blend of criminals, special services, and big business – they began to treat them with caution and even greater disdain, and cooperation with them was reduced to the level of cooperation with African dictators sitting on blood diamonds.

But you couldn't treat us like that. We all felt it. We are, by the way, sensitive. Why didn't the open world work, you ask? The Iron Curtain, though repaired and oiled, still hangs in the sky. We can still travel to you, and the Internet hasn't been completely shut off for us. It's obvious that the European model, the model of soft power, of a humane society, of enveloping economic influence – is much more effective than ours. Don't we see that it's better with you, that it's better to be with you than against you?

We do see it. That's the problem. In an open world, where citizens have the opportunity to compare everything with everything, where they always have to ask themselves why they live worse than their neighbor, the authorities have to find their own explanations and justifications.

We live worse, but we have our own special path, the television tells us. We are poorer, but we are proud. It's the bourgeois who punish us for taking Crimea. They are the ones who won't let us rise from our knees. Yes, we are waist-deep in filth, but look at the tanks rolling across Red Square.

And what about the World Cup, the curious European reader might ask? Isn't it a gesture of openness from the new Russia to the outside world?

Well, a gesture. Or, rather, a spasm. You should make use of it, by the way, come visit us, see how we live. Who knows when the next opportunity will arise.