Naine, I don't know about your background, but I would like to make a few observations so as to keep the historical aspects correct. I don't want this to grow too much off-topic, so here are a few short bullt-points
a. Yes, Russians and Czechs are different, mostly in that Czechs have been under Germanic influence for a prolonged period. The reason for the family structure lies indeed in agriculture, abut also in the availability of land and in the system of serfdom in Russia that didn't allow peasants to move out up until 1800s.
Don't take the results of social studies from the 90s Russia too literally. Russia was experiencing a violent post-Soviet social disintegration at that time and that reflected in the values. Also, if the studies were conducted in Moscow and St.Petersburg, then they would be skewed as these "city-states" are more "Western", than the rest of the country.
This leads to
b. Everyone somehow forgets that the most damaged nation after 70 years of communism was Russia. What you write at the beginning of point (b) very much applies to Russia too. Czechia made a comparatively peaceful transition, and even during the Soviet rule, Czechia had an inflow of capital and industrialisation from Soviet Union during the post-war reconstruction. I remember visiting Pague for the first time in 1986, when it at all became possible to travel abroad. I was blown away by how well-off Czechs were, at the riches of the "abroad". And I came from Moscow...
d. The prohibition of the Ukrainian language by Peter is a myth (and 1729 is the time of Peter II), fostered during the end of 1800s, beginning of 1900s. Some censorship did find place around 1860s, but it was by far not that restrictive.
http://vk.com/topic-1001828_22087206?offset=20By the way, there was no Ukraine back then - you had a Novorossia, Malorossia and Galicia regions. The first two spoke largely Russian or a very close dialect of it - Surzhik. The Galician dialect was more interspersed with German and Polish words, but still there was less difference with Russian than, say, between Trøndersk dialect and Oslo dialect of Norwegian.
Ukrainian anthem was written by Polish pani, thus the similarity. More info on this in the following article, but it's well outside the scope of this topic
https://futuristrendcast.wordpress.com/2014/11/05/free-earth-shift-report-2-the-falsified-history-of-ukraine-and-its-lessons/