VILNIUS, Lithuania — “I was stuck at home for too long, had to go for a ride,” a friend from Moscow shouted into his phone several weeks ago, trying to outyell the noise around him on a trip, it turned out, to St. Petersburg. “We’re going to hit a bar here and get some drinks, will call.” He then disappeared from the video chat, in which I could see people behind him, walking along a familiar St. Petersburg street.

I get very different dispatches from friends who live in a small town in Italy. There they stay home and tell me about relentless police raids against wanderers in the streets. A friend in Berlin says it is OK to go out, but not to gather in groups of more than two.

The coronavirus pandemic caught me in Vilnius, Lithuania, a city where the streets are deserted, the bars are dead, and all flights have stopped. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine seeing in a European democracy a police-enforced order that limits personal freedoms contrasted by scenes of boisterous social merriment in Moscow, my normally order-obsessed and state-controlled hometown.

As I write this, Russia is catching up. Still, the inversion between East and West of attitudes toward individual freedoms during the Covid-19 disaster is startling. There is certainly no shortage of police in Moscow. But the Kremlin has been late in introducing consistent quarantine measures, because it is undecided. It evokes the confusion now engulfing the United States, where President Trump’s late and muddled start has contributed to disaster. President Vladimir Putin did no planning for a coronavirus coming in from abroad. Now it has interfered with his politics — which in his view should always take precedence over everything else. As a result, his country will face a far more destructive outcome than might have been avoided had he started earlier.