I agree with that lack of vision is hard on these countries, but I think lack of vision is the status quo of the current political landscape experience.
What these countries needed was political and ideological stability, some time to deal with the experienced trauma, and to find the value of basic human rights on their own. However time doesn’t stand still and as a reactionary movement to social media (which increased fragmentation), migrant crisis and Islam hysteria + LBGTQ going mainstream went the “traditions and the past” route. I don’t care if these issues are “real” or “make sense”, but ask around here and these are the 3 main ones everyone will point to when asked why we are where we are. And for the ex soviet block “traditions and the past” route can mean both voting for ex-communist and for the pro-fascist options. On some deeper level they are not that far apart for us (I live in one of the countries you mentioned here).
We can see that old democracies are struggling hard due to the same challenges, and the post-soviet block does not have the goodwill of its people to go through it. In general distrust, insecurities, and fear due to Russia is very strong here, people are still in many ways rigid and not very open to new ideas. There is this feeling while being surrounded by western ideas and media that we need a lot of catching up to do, but no one is interested in how someone else is hurt while being hurt themselves. Due to the fact that West is struggling just as hard a lot of people here don’t see the point in following in its footsteps, it just does not seem appealing or logical. That is where the lack of vision of the west fucks ex-soviet block as well. And we try the old “traditions route” because we don’t know anything better.