Yet the hard question that hovers over Ukraine now that President Viktor Yanukovych has been abruptly deposed is just how representative those homo Sovieticus scrivener types I encountered that day in Yalta are of the country as a whole. A lot, I suspect.

Keep this in mind: However courageous and determined the protesters who occupied Kiev’s Maidan Square these past few months, the president they brought down had been freely elected just four years ago, in a vote international observers described as an “impressive display of democracy.”

Keep in mind, too, that however brutal and venal Mr. Yanukovych proved to be, he isn’t exactly outside the norm of Ukrainian politics.

“It was further part of the conspiracy,” alleged then-U.S. Attorney and future FBI Director Robert Mueller in a May 2000 indictment, “that [former Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo] Lazarenko received money by companies owned by Ukrianian [sic] business woman Yulia Tymoshenko . . . in exchange for which Lazarenko exercised his official authority in favor of Tymoshenko’s companies, and that Lazarenko failed to disclose to the people and government of Ukraine that he was receiving significant amounts of money from these companies.”