“A communist is someone who’s read Marx, an anti-communist is someone who’s understood it,” jokes one of the interviewees in Nobel prizewinner Svetlana Alexievich’s book Secondhand Time, which traces the impact of the breakup of the USSR on individual lives.

The same thought has run through my childhood and adult life in the former Soviet republic of Moldova. My grandparents were victims of Stalinist repression – my grandpa lost his father and three siblings in the state-engineered famine of 1946-47. My grandma was fired from her job as a teacher because she had buried her dead four-month-old daughter with a Christian cross. My parents had just finished university when the Soviet archives were opened up to the public during perestroika. When they learned that labour camps were originally Lenin’s idea and not Stalin’s, as they had been taught, my parents felt that they had lived a lie. Now they had the evidence that Lenin, too, had written cynically about hanging kulaks – or “rich” peasants, who sometimes needed only to own a cow or a few sheep to qualify as “enemies of the people”. Some of this explains why my parents’ generation can get behind social democracy (although they would argue you also need oil and wealth to make it happen). But socialism? That’s a no-go for them, they’ve had enough of that. “We know how easily lefty ideals can get abused, and degenerate into totalitarianism,” a family friend told me.

By contrast I am working on a historical novel about Soviet feminist idealists who cooperated with Stalin. And I’ve joined a Marx’s Capital reading club started off by leftwing friends and activists back home in Moldova. We’re all young enough not to have experienced Soviet communism first-hand. We associate leftism with Bernie Sanders rather than the gulags. We share lectures by the Marxist anthropologist David Harvey, and will happily post memes of Marx saying, “Oh shit, I forgot about human nature”, but are as opposed to authoritarianism and government corruption as our grandparents are. We are also more critical of western societies, and share concerns about working conditions, the power of big business, and access to social services and public spaces. The western-like left is growing among a small minority of young people in eastern Europe, via civic groups, art co-operatives, zines, independent publishers, online platforms, or tiny parties made up of academics. Their main criticism of contemporary eastern European societies is the rise of inequality. They have a point.

The creepiest communist heritage of them all, the Big Brother – to many westerners just a historical blip – is still very much alive

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, despite the fact that eastern European states have became wealthier, the poor in these states have become poorer and the rich richer. In the 1980s, the total earnings of the poorer half of east Europeans was equivalent to 25-35% of national income. Since the end of communism, this figure has dropped to 17% in some countries. The most unequal country in the region is Russia, where the richest 1% now earns 27% of national income – a dramatic increase from 3.5% before the fall of the iron curtain.

But if in the west the solutions to inequality proposed by the left are clearly viable, in eastern Europe it’s more complicated. I might vote Labour or Green in the UK, where I’ve lived for the past seven years, but in Moldova or Romania I’m a centrist. That’s because the greatest common enemy across the political spectrum in eastern Europe is government corruption. And while liberal centre-right pro-European parties lack answers on many things, on this they have just been more committed to the fight.

Former Romanian president Traian Băsescu’s centre-right coalition set up a national anti-corruption directorate that, for all its flaws, managed to imprison some of the most influential corrupt political figures and is considered a successful model for the region. In Moldova, the prime minister, Maia Sandu’s party for Action and Solidarity is the first party to have been fully transparent about the sources of its funding.

The leader of Romania’s Social Democratic party (PSD), Viorica Dancila, whose coalition government recently lost a confidence vote. Photograph: Robert Ghement/EPA

Outrageous levels of corruption combined with the communist inheritance mean politics in eastern Europe can’t easily be mapped on to the familiar left-to-right spectrum that explains voter behaviour in much of western Europe. It’s far messier than that. Leftist ideals and slogans carry the weight of totalitarianism but are also hijacked by populists to win elections by exploiting poor or elderly people. Nostalgic after their youth, voters on state pensions are often bought off with a pair of socks or a sack of flour, and a promise of more to come.

One of the most perverse of the so-called left-leaning parties in the region is Romania’s Social Democratic party (PSD), which led the governing coalition until this month and has dominated domestic politics since 1989. It has often prioritised big business over local communities, most notably in 2013 when it allowed the opening of a gold mine using cyanide at the ancient settlement Rosia Montana, generating mass protests. PSD stands accused of shocking nepotism in filling state institutions and boards, of trying to water down anti-corruption legislation and remove judges. A leading party figure was jailed earlier this year for corruption. No wonder Romanians have come to distrust state institutions.

It’s not just party politics that are messy. The social protection system itself is officially state-funded, but unofficially it’s semi-privatised. On paper, right across eastern Europe, we have preserved free (or almost free) healthcare, nursery, school and university education. But in reality, particularly in Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, Lithuania and Hungary, many people have to pay informally for these services. Patients are often expected to give a fat tip after a medical consultation, or, in the case of more expensive surgeries, to pay up front to have it performed in the first place, regardless of insurance cover. Parents, too, are widely expected to pay for extra classes, exams and “presents” for teachers.

The creepiest communist heritage of them all, Big Brother – to many westerners just a historical blip – is still very much alive. Romania spends more money on its intelligence services, the SRI, than Germany, Turkey or Canada. In 2017, in Moldova (population 3.5 million), the number of recorded phone calls by the secret services was more than three times that of the UK. The police often seem to defend corrupt politicians rather than citizens – another police state hangover. In 2018, Romanian police used teargas on a peaceful crowd demanding that government revoke plans for a law that would have allowed corrupt politicians to escape prison. Moldovan police cracked down hard last year when the country was rocked by anti-government rallies, many protesters carrying EU flags and chanting, “Down with the mafia!” Justice has never been served for the arrests, beatings, rapes and deaths that followed mass protests against vote rigging by Moldova’s Communist party in April 2009.

In many ways, the state is the problem in eastern Europe – large, corrupt, inefficient and oppressive – which explains why both centre-right reformists and the new, youth-led left groups emerging in civil society are looking for solutions outside it.

• Paula Erizanu is a Moldovan writer currently based in the UK