ABSTRACT
Though the properties attributed to the Stalinist socio-psychological syndrome became most pronounced in Stalin's time, many o f these properties had already developed in tsarist times and are described in 19thcentury Russian literature.1 Six years after the independence o f Ukraine and the dissolution o f the Soviet empire it appears that this syndrome is very persistent and that Homo Sovieticus2 is still very much alive. Nevertheless, with transition to the market economy the circumstances in which Zaporizhzhya citizens lived changed fundamentally. Skills, values and coping strategies developed in earlier decades have proved vastly inadequate.
