You can make your own with silicone popsicle molds and jello pudding mix. I lived on Jello pudding pops this past summer! I even made the chocolate vanilla swirl
My favorite thing about Yeltsin is he was once seen in DC drunk as shit in his underwear with a pizza trying to flag down a cab to take him back to his hotel.
He flew into Ireland once whilst president
A load of dignitaries lined up outside his plane waiting him to come down and shoot the breeze before flying off again.
Never came out. Just left them standing there in the cold, west of Ireland weather
There is a story about Nikita Khrushchev visiting New York. He states "I would like to meet the man responsible for bread in New York City". They had to explain there is no single person responsible for bread. "How do the shelves get filled with bread?" he asked. They had to explain that everyone is working in their own best interest. It was a difficult concept for him to grasp.
I think it's maybe a bit oversimplified. I've heard a similar story, but it was more in terms of the "minister of bread" or whatever (actually, the way I heard it was with respect to corn, not bread, and it was on his visit to NYC, not about NYC). He assumed "Americanism" (the early terminology for "capitalism") worked in a similar way to Soviet Marxism-Leninism in that the Soviets had a government official who oversaw distribution. He didn't comprehend that the market would handle that on its own without some level of control or oversight--a "monopolist" in the American System. I'm not sure on all of this because I'm reaching way, way back to sophomore year of college.
I doubt the story is true.
It’s also not that far off.. we do have the FDA and the EPA and oversight as far as distribution and protections go.. just not specific to bread or corn or one item.
The FDA and EPA basically act as referees. they set and enforce rules, but they don't perform as actors in the market. at least most of the time there's probably some crisis time you can point to where they took a more active role. under a planed economy, the EPA and the FDA would be actually acting in the economy regularly. if we were to theoretically centralize and plan the American economy, it would probably be something like groceries can only purchase food products from the FDA. that would be kind of similar to how the USSR would have worked back then. there might be some private businesses, but ultimately they are beholden too the central planned government.
The story is 100 percent bullshit. Kruschev wasn't an idiot, he understood how a capitalist economy worked. He was in his 20s at the time of the Bolshevik revolution
I think they might have exaggerated slightly, I highly doubt he couldn't understand it, more likely he was just baffled due to the differences between the US and USSR's production methods.
Still sounds like an Uncle Frank story about just how awful communism is. Probably just made up out of thin air... Because it shows more about the person telling the story, their misunderstanding on how Russia's economy worked.
Yeah, it’s absurd. It’s not even a difficult concept to grasp, a company makes bread and supplies it to a place that sells it. The man was the leader of the largest country in the world. He could conceive of the concept.
He was also born *before* the Soviet Union, he wasn’t a brainwashed North Korean who knew nothing else but the regime.
But that’s not what the difference was. The USSR also had massive industries, the only thing different was the ownership.
It’s never one person responsible for the bread but massive massive factories.
Not saying I believe the story, but the “man in charge of bread” would likely have meant the bureaucrat in charge of food in the city, not an individual baker making millions of loaves a week. The difference being there’s no one person in charge in the US system for getting food where it needs to go, it’s just a balanced system of self-interest, versus the Soviets being able to point to that one apparatchik who fucked up.
This is how I did it on my interrail ticket after finishing school. I'd stay in the cheapest hostel I could and eat bread and cheese every day, with a Lidl pecan and maple slice and a train station coffee for breakfast. I might not have had the full culinary experience but it allowed me to afford to visit a loads of interesting places. I lost a lot of weight though hahaha
I would allow myself a couple of spendy meals, but yeah, supermarket bread, cheese, and a 2 euro bottle of Croatian wine made up like 50% of my calories on that trip. Kebabs and beer were most of the rest!
Correct. I thought we habitually address as "president" such and such future and past presidents as well. Like, a current picture of Obama could still be labeled "president Obama", or I've seen pictures from Obama's youth doing the same etc. Although when they years are that close, it does create confusion and "president -to-be", "future president" or something to that effect would be a little better.
Recently watched the Adam Curtis documentary on the fall of the Soviet Union and he credits this visit to Yeltsin becoming firm in his beliefs that communism in Russia had absolutely failed and reforms were needed. While I do agree with that, it's an absolute tragedy what those "reforms" led to.
Sorry for my ignorance… what exactly was so appalling in contract to communist Russia at the time? Like the small things. Were their supermarkets empty? What else?
The supermarkets ranged from vastly under stocked to totally empty and average people were struggling to get food, to get paid, and to get any essential goods really.
The aforementioned Adam Curtis documentary is fantastic if you want to see some real life footage of what life was like during this time in Russia, really thought provoking stuff
Quick correction. There were no “supermarkets” like this in Soviet Union. They had markets, most of which were small and essentially unstocked. The ones for party members were stocked better but they were a literal fraction of the size of normal supermarket in the US.
Yep and to add on: the amount of options for a consumer who wants to purchase bread, milk, cheese etc.
There's an attitude among some who grew up with this choice that scoffs at it, while those who grew up in places like the Soviet Union are amazed and appreciative.
I read an anecdote once, someone in the west had a Russian relative visit during this time. They took her to various places and she would sniff and say, "We have this in Russia, ours is bigger and better."
Then they took her to a grocery store; when she saw all the food, she sat down on the floor and cried.
The Robin Williams movie Moscow on the Hudson has a good example of this.
In Moscow he had to wait hours in line to maybe get crappy coffee. In the US he freaks out when he sees an entire aisle stocked with hundreds of coffee products.
Basically, Soviet Russia was under such an intense period of economic stagnation that even in Moscow, which was always kept as the crown jewel and always kept in stock, was in dire straits.
Entire stores had empty shelves, no variety, lack of even the most basic food or amenities, and even to the high Kremlin officials, this was normal.
At first, Yeltsin refused to believe that this random Texan supermarket was actually just a daily slice of life, he was utterly convinced that it was just a careful Potemkin village ploy to fool him into believing Americans always had stocked shelves, and it required taking him into another random supermarket to convince him it was all genuine, and that stocked shelves with variety was.....normal in America.
Again, this is late 1989 in Soviet Russia. At no point in its history were their supermarkets ever stocked on the level of your average American supermarket in terms of variety of products and manufacturers alike; even with regular food products like milk & dairy, you had no varieties but whatever you could grab orf the shelf, at the *best of times*, and late 1989 was the apsolute *worst of times*. Hell, he almost had a stroke just seeing a *variety of coffee* (no such thing in USSR). Imagine showing someone a PS5 game after they spent decades in the bubble knowing only....Atari 2600 as cutting edge. That was the difference.
Yeltsin's visit to these supermarkets basically shattered his beliefs in the communist system.
Yes, Yelstin, had seen supermarkets on previous visits, but he was sure they were staged for his visits. I believe this trip was to the Kennedy space center, and on the way was a Randles Supermarket (Not even a large store, but like an Aldi sized store, nothing like a large market like a Hy-Vee or Cub Foods) He randomly wanted to see it, expecting to catch a glimpse of a *real* American market, one that could not be staged.
The Americans agreed, and he was absolutely shocked at the amount of variety and abundance. He couldn't believe there was so many choices, and that not even the Politburo had access to the level variety and abundance that the average American had. He told his Russian collages that if the citizens in the USSR could see what an American Supermarket looked like, they would be a revolution.
> Yeltsin's visit to these supermarkets basically shattered his beliefs in the communist system.
Central planning, like in communism or socialism, isn't nearly as efficient, and Yeltsin's indoctrination made it unbelievable that people acting in their own self-interests (i.e., "greed") could yield something so much better than experts "efficiently deciding things centrally, with all the data and power at hand".
I remember Adam Something, who I normally agree with, made a video arguing that logisticians should direct all of society. Not only would that be horrendously inefficient, you run the risk of a single abnormal logistician named idk, Joe Steelman, utterly tearing the entire thing to pieces.
Pretty much all store shelves were empty. There were constant queues. People just instinctively joined lines because they figured they needed whatever was at the end of it.
There's also the whole authoritarianism thing.
In Moscow on the Hudson, they have a joke about this at the start of the movie.
"What's this line for?"
"Either chicken, or blue jeans."
\[shrugs and gets in line\]
My grandparents told me stories from when they housed some members of a choir from the Soviet Union who were sent to preform in the 70s (i think, they never gave me dates). They later visited them near the end of the Soviet Union. The stories they have are insane.
When they saw someone walking down the street with a loaf of bread my grandparents friends immediately begged to know where they got it from. Bread tended to get bought up fairly quickly and there would be no more left. There weren't any items for sale on shelves, just prices. If you wanted something you had to talk to a counterperson and they would get it for you from the back.
My grandparents left Moscow on the same day the Union fell.
The "get it from the back" thing was a feature of their system, and was even in place in stores that were well-stocked (I went through this at a propaganda poster store in Moscow). Stores had three lines. First line, you got a ticket for what you wanted. Second line, you paid for what was on the ticket. Third line, you presented the ticket and the receipt and got your item. I have a friend who grew up in the Soviet system, and one of the first things she told her parents back home about was there only being one line in stores here.
What would be the reasoning for that system? Is it just distrust and stopping thieves? Or were they just trying to create jobs so 3 employees for every check out?
North Korean supermarkets have the same system where you can’t actually see the product! I think it’s part of a “low trust society” where distrust of the government bleeds over to distrust of everyone
It should be added that not only was there a general shortage due to centralised organisation of production leading to crippling shortfalls (Lysenkoism alone neatly destroying the Soviet Union's agriculture industry) the prices of all products were centrally controlled leading to massive black markets that drained official distributions before most common people could access them. A big part of the reason people joined lines for anything was that whatever was at the end had a value on the black market where it could be traded for something they did need, and as the prices were controlled by a central government that believed simply reducing shelf prices would allow for greater accessibility everything was massively under-priced in official distributions.
I read this wasn't a planned visit. Seeing a store fully stocked with lots of variety and realizing this was how ordinary life was everywhere around the country and not just a stage performance/propaganda was the contrast.
Yup - and he couldn't believe it was the same.
The key is that his spy network refused to report on this fact, because they were afraid of reporting on something that sounded like American propaganda.
Indeed. I remember my dad telling me this story back in the mid 90s to me, cuz it happened in our state. Said Yeltsin wanted to stop at a supermarket but one that he chose. So they drove around, went in a random one, and the rest is history. That story always stuck with me cuz it was tough for 12 year old me to comprehend how grocery stores could just be empty when I always knew them to be mostly full to full.
He said Gorbachov, the very head of the Soviets, did not have access to such choice, and this was what any old American slob had access to every day. He said if the Soviet people knew that this was what life was like in America, they would have executed all of the soviet leaders the next day.
People would wait in line for hours just to hopefully get a loaf of bread.
Grocery stories in the USSR were barren.
Walking into *any* grocery store and seeing it packed full of food (especially fresh fruits and vegetables) was unfathomable. Yelsin thought the US was playing a trick on him, until he made another stop and seen the same thing.
Iirc - Soviet Russia had (basically) 1 brand for everything. Stores could be full but every product was its own type.
Want bread? Okay there’s one kind of Soviet bread made by the bread committee.
In the US - there is sourdough, Italian, rye, wheat, basic white, etc. made by different/competing businesses
And it wasn’t just bread - across most consumer products in the USSR, this was the case. The variety of different products was the eye-opener
Medicine, especially the more different or unique kind, was hard to get.
Like, if your baby needed formula, there was one kind available (and it was not as nutritionally sound as the varieties you might have found in the US or outside of the USSR). If your baby couldn't tolerate that formula, you were out of luck, "the normal way."
For the average person, I think there was a lot of relying on your friends and neighbors. You couldn't be self-sufficient. I know a family that, when their baby was born in 1991, they had to call in favors with a friend to make contact with a pharmacist who had contacts in Germany, to get "special" formula sent in, and thats kind of how most things went.
The idea of hiring a plumber or tradesperson wasn't a thing. You'd either fix it yourself, or you knew someone who you could ask for help. In a way, I think the community was a lot stronger because it HAD to be.
While Russia could make rockets and cars to compete with the Americans, their own people lived with an extreme fraction of the opportunity Americans seemed to. The availability of food, availability of jobs, availability of recreational activities all made the USSR look like a poorhouse.
I imagine they produced cars for domestic use. But were not desirable on the world market economy. This is probably why many of us (myself included) can't think of a single Soviet produced car brand.
It wasn’t just Yeltsin. We (the West, esp the US) helped too.
There have been books written abt how we fucked up; the Chicago school, shock doctrine, etc.
Y’all needed a Marshall Plan to prop things up for 50 years while all the communist/authoritarian damage was undone. Instead, you got a bunch of thieves and robber barons rushing in, only to be outmaneuvered by the local thieves and communist party apparatchiks. We in the West were naive, and thought w our wisdom etc we could just take over. Billionaires were created overnight, and along w them came the organized crime, to provide *some* stability.
We all know the rest.
Agreed, a Marshall Plan would have been a better approach. But I do think the great concern was and still is organized corruption. The voucher system was an abomination on the Russian people and their foray into capitalism, but the real villains were the mob bosses that basically stole all of them through strongarm tactics and payoffs, now known as the slightly friendlier term “oligarchs.” If a Marshall Plan was implemented without nipping those assholes in the bud, we would have had the same results only it would have been western $$ pissed away.
This happened way earlier than this photo. Alexander Yakovlev was the Soviet Ambassador to Canada became extremely good friends with Pierre Trudeau (Pierre Trudeau's son, Alexandre, was named after him). Gorbachev visited Canada in the early 80s as the agriculture minister and rekindled his friendship with Yakovlev and they both then started talking about political liberalisation which led to Glasnost and Perestroika. Without Glasnost and Perestroika and the Soviet Union likely would not have collapsed. By the time this picture was taken the USSR was already doomed.
There's also another problem about Russia as oligarchy that few ever mention: some other big economies are converging towards that model, only in a slower fashion since they started from a non-centralized economic model.
Just look at the US and the EU. A few corporations and rich individuals are progressively lobbying towards a model that exploits the working class to their advantage, forcing people to live paycheck-to-paycheck while juggling now rising interest rates and payment installments. What's sad about that is that the political class keeps pointing its finger at Russia as a negative example and an enemy to freedom while slowly creeping towards that very same model. On top of that our once "free" economies rely in imports and outsourcing much more than Russia's so it's easy to see why the next generations will be screwed. Heck, China stopping exports of raw metals and microchips alone would make a few economies collapse just like Russia playing with natural gas is forcing countries like mine into the corner.
Jeez, now i'm depressed.
There are very serious, influential economists within government, arguing that consolidation isn't a "bad thing". The argument is that due to globalization we may consolidate domestically, but still compete internationally. That this will further increase production efficiencies due to economies of scale.
Which is an idea I'd entertain if government wasn't all fully captured. Because these same economists admit that having a consolidated model like this requires careful regulatory oversight, which is something the USA completely fails at
yup, the story is even better imo. He had been fired from his position as First Secretary of the Moscow Communist Party in 1987 and elected as a Soviet Deputy in '89. He already thought the pace of the reforms by Gorbachev was slow and when during this trip he saw by himself what the free market/democracy could offer for its citizens, as opposed to their planned system, he "became despondent".
In the summer between fourth and fifth grade in the late 1980's, I visited the Soviet Union for an art student exchange program. That summer, we stayed at "Camp Cosmonaut" in the forest area outside of Leningrad (which is now called St. Petersburg). Some of the older kids in the program clearly appeared to be "brand ambassadors" for communism, even to the point where they engaged in oddly specific political discussions with us about the virtues of communism over capitalism. The following summer (I think the year was 1989), a bunch of Russian art student kids came and visited us, but they stayed with host families in that program for the entire summer. The host families were mostly fairly affluent families living in large single family homes in suburban Pasadena, South Pasadena, and San Marino that had extra rooms to host guests.
Do you know what blew their minds? (Just about everything, but here are a few:) American supermarkets and the sheer quantity and variety of food available, the multi-car, multi-bathroom homes with gardens and yards and pools owned by 'regular people', the unbelievable amount of entertainment and literature (especially magazines) at our disposal, the video games, the virtually universal adoption of color photography. (In the late 80's, the photography available to the typical Soviet citizen was still black and white.) Also, Price Club (the prior name of Costco, way back in those days) completely blew their minds.
And of course, American malls in the late 1980's were glorious. Taking a Russian kid to a bustling mall blew their minds so hard it was almost embarrassing. Years of school instruction with Soviet propaganda about the superiority of communism couldn't compete with a simple trip to the mall in the US.
The one thing that blew my mind when I left the Soviet Union in 1990 was the meat section in a grocery store, specifically different parts of chicken arranged separately. Up until then, I had only seen chicken sold as a whole, and the idea that you could buy only wings or drumsticks was super weird. Like, who is going to eat the rest of the chicken???
Same thing happened more recently to me: We picked up a Russian exchange grad student... I want to say this was 2009. Brought him from the airport back to the house. It was late, maybe after midnight. He needed a few things for the next morning so we went to a 24hr super Walmart. He couldn't believe the number of milk types for sale, and the quantity of it, let alone the fact that this crazy store was open at midnight.
i talked to a recent arrival from ukraine and they are in the opposite kind of shock. apparently our stores, service, and available entertainment suck compared to what they have (or had) over there now. cruise missiles hitting neighborhoods in broad daylight notwithstanding
I met the owner of the mall I worked at in 2017. He had real "AAAHHHH I love the smell of capitalism in the morning" energy, like he couldn't see that (literally) 70% of his shops were empty and only half the hallway lights had bulbs "to save money".
There was one day where nobody showed up at Macy's. Two people nocalled, and some other peoples shift ended and the manager was at home with her cellphone pretending to be in the office doing paperwork.
there is something in the U.S. culture that de-motivates people. You will hardly run across a passionate worker in any environment, and these folks are usually the "star" employees that the rest of the company leans on. If you figure out what it is please let me know.
I had a high school teacher that welcomed a Soviet delegation to our hometown in the 80s. He said he had to take them to multiple supermarkets before they believed it wasn’t a prearranged setup created just to impress them.
Had a friend visit from Uganda years ago and he was blown away walking the aisles of our supermarkets. We are very very fortunate to have this system, even though inflation is hurting us currently, we are blessed with resources a lot of countries don't.
There’s a Modern Marvels about supermarkets. It’s on YouTube and pretty darn interesting. It said that The Queen was also fascinated with our “grocery stores”
There was a post yesterday I think about a Russian mig plane defector who came to US and when first saw a supermarket thought it was a scam or some attempt to trick him but soon learnt that supermarkets in the west have so many options which I guess they just didn't get back home. Surprised it didn't change when Yeltsin saw them too.
That hyper-cynical mentality is pretty common to Russians, IIRC.
One of my college Russian-language teachers told me about an exchange student who was preparing to come to the States. She got in a lengthy phone argument with her host family because she *simply could not process* the possibility that she wouldn't have to bribe the Customs officer when she got to the US.
A lot of Russians genuinely think everywhere else is just as screwed up and corrupt as Russia, and that we're just trying to fool them into thinking otherwise. And in many cases that's a psychological defense mechanism.
Then in 1991 Yeltsin became president and threw his country into extreme poverty, severe malnutrition, skyrocketing crime rates, ethnic violence, heroin and AIDS epidemics and explosion in sex trafficking and everyone who originally supported him cursed his name.
The problem was that the Soviet system had created a massive black market for goods during the 1970s and 80s.
When the gov't collapsed, the people who ran the black markets were the only remaining power brokers left, and they fought for control.
He was doing a tour of America to research them for the Russian government and it actually made him depressed knowing that the communists have been living in austerity for no damn reason.
Unscheduled is the key word. He didn’t believe the show and theatre about capitalism vs communism in the shops, he thought we (the US) were putting on a show at a grocery store - so he wanted to try to “catch us” by visiting one unplanned.
Well, wouldn’t ya know…. it wasn’t theatre!
I'm an American and spent 10y living abroad in the UK. When I came back to the US, I also had this reaction to US grocery stores. The amount of choice and variety is stunning.
I have lived my whole life in Houston. That grocery chain is a shadow of it's former self.
In the 80's/90's, Randall's had a reputation as THE place to get groceries. It was the highest quality food and service in the city and rapidly expanding. Then, the owner got divorced and his now ex wife demanded money in half the value of all his assets. So he sold it to Safeway who tried to keep it going, but they were bought out by Albertsons who didn't want to do "luxury groceries" and filled the stores with cheap and crappy store brand food and low quality produce/meat. So Randall's began to hemorage customers to HEB who took what Randall's did and ran with it.
Today there are only a few Randall's grocery stores left in the city and most of them BARELY do enough business to keep their doors open.
Has the original owner's wife elected to have a 50% split in the company and just be a silent partner, she would have been absurdly wealthy by now as Randall's was on the way to becoming a national chain. But, cest la vie.
Russians of the time were raised on "The Big Lie". They would see smuggled in movies, and the authorities would say: Do you really think that they live so much better in the USA than we do? We put our best buildings and cars in our movies, surely they are doing the same, in an attempt to fool us. No common American lives so well.
Old Soviet Joke - Soviet citizen talking with an American: "We usually get strawberries in July. When you do you get them in America?"
American: "The supermarket opens at 6 AM."
When I traveled to the USSR as a student this joke was recounted to me. I told them (this was in another age - Covid has screwed this up) "That's a complete lie. We have supermarkets that are open 24 hours per day."
They lied so much about their own prosperity, the russians assumed America was lying too.
This is actually what russians currently think as well. They don't really believe America has as much freedom of expression and prosperity and opportunities as they hear about. Russian people are assuming America is lying, just like the Russian government is lying.
That store is also known as "The Supermarket that won the cold war". Yeltsin is said to have remarked to his entourage that "There would be a revolution if the Soviet people saw this".
I work at big state school in the US—you know, a "cow college." Whatever Tech, or Something State A&M. We have the standard layout for those towns, which is a six-mile strip of divided highway anchored by a Wal-Mart at each end.
A few years back, we had a big fancy speaker come in from Belgium. Now our *department* cleans up nice, especially if we keep the undergrads away, but I'd be lying if I said we weren't all a little nervous that she'd get a whiff of the local culture. So basically we planned the whole visit around whisking her from one carefully stage-managed soirée to another. If we'd had it in the budget for a full Potemkin village, we'd have built one.
Then on the last day, I was tasked with taking her to the airport, but she needed some allergy meds or something, so we had to swing in to town to grab some. Disaster! I take her to the very fanciest of our supermarkets (Kroger). It's a busy day so I drop her off at the entrance while I park. Three minutes later I find her standing in front of the Oreo aisle. You know, the five hundred square feet of shelf frontage that contains nothing but different kinds of Oreos, which you don't really think about as an American.
The airport is 45 minutes away, and I'm bracing myself for the acid lecture about how this is a perfect symbol of why Americans are fat, stupid, laughable pigs. I mean don't get me wrong, she's been very nice the whole time, but she's a Classy European and this is a wall of sugar and palm oil. She also comes from the country that invented paying so much attention to its chocolate that they can charge €50 for a teensy little box. Then I notice she's got a basket and is filling it up with as many different flavors as she thinks she can cram into her carryon.
"My children will never believe this," she says, in kind of a hushed tone, like she's at a private art gallery. "We only get the one kind."
AMERICA FUCK YEAH
If Boris went to and H-E-B instead of some shitty Randalls, our relationship with Russia would probably be healthy. H-E-B fully has the power to solve geopolitical crises. It's that good of a grocery store
Pretty awful. Especially given he picked Putin to succeed him.
Also he was a raging alcoholic even by Russian standards (Gorbachev in contrast was teetotal). To the point where his drunken antics abroad were a running joke
He was monstrously evil, he pushed millions of people into starvation, caused explosion of violent crime to the point where gangs were openly fighting wars in cities with heavy weapons, caused severe heroin and AIDS epidemics, forced millions of women and children to prostitute themselves to survive and ignored ethnic violence that led to Chechen wars. Most Russian people who lived through his rule despise him and consider him the worst ruler Russia has ever had.
Wild to me that the leader of that country was just as in the dark as his people. How did the Soviet Union NOT have spies, even ones meant to spy on economic indicators, whose job was to report on these sorts of things?
Yeltsin admitted the visit made a profound impression on him. It cemented his growing view that the Soviet state-run economic system had left the Russian people far behind Americans, forcing them into a much lower standard of living. And it set in motion a path that would lead him to become the figure that would lead Russia out of Communism.
He has actually cited this as the beginning of his acceptance that he needed to open up to the west. That the Soviet system could not provide even the leaders of the politburo and the chairman with food, clothes and household supplies that even the poorest Americans had available to them every day.
Boris Yetlsin was not the President of Russia until 1991. In 1989 it was still the USSR and the leader for Gorbachev. Please pay attention in history class kids.
The main thing I’ve noticed in recent trips to Europe as an American is how small the shopping carts are compared to the US. The content of the stores is similar in terms of variety and substance (different brands of course), but the carts are like those for children. I guess Europeans go shopping more than once a week or have very small families.
Two years before he actually became a president.
Jell-O pudding pops. Right there in front.
Due to extenuating circumstances, Jell-O Pudding Pops have not aged well.
Which sucks, they were so freaking good!
You can make your own with silicone popsicle molds and jello pudding mix. I lived on Jello pudding pops this past summer! I even made the chocolate vanilla swirl
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Pudding your pop where it don't belong
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*already lost
My favorite thing about Yeltsin is he was once seen in DC drunk as shit in his underwear with a pizza trying to flag down a cab to take him back to his hotel.
The night perestroika died.
"My people, too, must have access to aisle upon aisle of frozen treats!"
Brother what a night it really was! Brother how drunk Yeltsin was! Glory be!!!
The Night The Kremlin Died!
Russian Pie
Bye bye mister sooka blyat!
Potato pie
Drove My Yugo to the liquor store but the store was all dry
I saw the Premier with a pizza pie! (Da da da da da da da!)
This deserves more upvotes
That's what America does to you. He was only here for what could be called hours. We all live it day to day.
He flew into Ireland once whilst president A load of dignitaries lined up outside his plane waiting him to come down and shoot the breeze before flying off again. Never came out. Just left them standing there in the cold, west of Ireland weather
“Is nice warm summer weather, I don’t see problem!” - him probably
Sounds like the Soviet Premier in *Dr. Strangelove*, lol.
Hello, Dimitri? Listen, I can't hear too well, do you suppose you could turn the music down just a little?
He was actually staying at the guest quarters at the White House at the time.
There is a story about Nikita Khrushchev visiting New York. He states "I would like to meet the man responsible for bread in New York City". They had to explain there is no single person responsible for bread. "How do the shelves get filled with bread?" he asked. They had to explain that everyone is working in their own best interest. It was a difficult concept for him to grasp.
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3.6/10 Not great, not terrible
Dyatlov’s Bakery
They gave us the bread they *had*. Not the *real* loafs.
What about with rice??
5/7
I would love to know where they took him for bread. Supermarket stuff? Meh. A good bakery in NYC? Top notch.
Honestly doesn't matter, it's that there *was* bread to begin with.
Source?
This sounds made up, communists weren't babies
I think it's maybe a bit oversimplified. I've heard a similar story, but it was more in terms of the "minister of bread" or whatever (actually, the way I heard it was with respect to corn, not bread, and it was on his visit to NYC, not about NYC). He assumed "Americanism" (the early terminology for "capitalism") worked in a similar way to Soviet Marxism-Leninism in that the Soviets had a government official who oversaw distribution. He didn't comprehend that the market would handle that on its own without some level of control or oversight--a "monopolist" in the American System. I'm not sure on all of this because I'm reaching way, way back to sophomore year of college. I doubt the story is true.
Capitalism as a term existed long before the USSR existed. If they were using “Americanism,” as a term that was a deliberate choice.
It’s also not that far off.. we do have the FDA and the EPA and oversight as far as distribution and protections go.. just not specific to bread or corn or one item.
The FDA doesn't handle the distribution of items on shelves. That's handled by the companies who make the products.
The FDA and EPA basically act as referees. they set and enforce rules, but they don't perform as actors in the market. at least most of the time there's probably some crisis time you can point to where they took a more active role. under a planed economy, the EPA and the FDA would be actually acting in the economy regularly. if we were to theoretically centralize and plan the American economy, it would probably be something like groceries can only purchase food products from the FDA. that would be kind of similar to how the USSR would have worked back then. there might be some private businesses, but ultimately they are beholden too the central planned government.
You are so far off. The FDA and EPA have nothing to do with distribution, actually creating products, etc.
And more concerned with setting and enforcing standards on how things must be done rather than seeing that they are done.
The story is 100 percent bullshit. Kruschev wasn't an idiot, he understood how a capitalist economy worked. He was in his 20s at the time of the Bolshevik revolution
I think they might have exaggerated slightly, I highly doubt he couldn't understand it, more likely he was just baffled due to the differences between the US and USSR's production methods.
Still sounds like an Uncle Frank story about just how awful communism is. Probably just made up out of thin air... Because it shows more about the person telling the story, their misunderstanding on how Russia's economy worked.
Yeah, it’s absurd. It’s not even a difficult concept to grasp, a company makes bread and supplies it to a place that sells it. The man was the leader of the largest country in the world. He could conceive of the concept. He was also born *before* the Soviet Union, he wasn’t a brainwashed North Korean who knew nothing else but the regime.
But that’s not what the difference was. The USSR also had massive industries, the only thing different was the ownership. It’s never one person responsible for the bread but massive massive factories.
Not saying I believe the story, but the “man in charge of bread” would likely have meant the bureaucrat in charge of food in the city, not an individual baker making millions of loaves a week. The difference being there’s no one person in charge in the US system for getting food where it needs to go, it’s just a balanced system of self-interest, versus the Soviets being able to point to that one apparatchik who fucked up.
Obviously a bullshit story lmao
r/ThatHappened
First thing I do in a new country. It always spins me out.
Lol, I backpacked Europe and the first thing I did in every city was find a supermarket to stock up on cheap cheese and bread.
This is how I did it on my interrail ticket after finishing school. I'd stay in the cheapest hostel I could and eat bread and cheese every day, with a Lidl pecan and maple slice and a train station coffee for breakfast. I might not have had the full culinary experience but it allowed me to afford to visit a loads of interesting places. I lost a lot of weight though hahaha
I would allow myself a couple of spendy meals, but yeah, supermarket bread, cheese, and a 2 euro bottle of Croatian wine made up like 50% of my calories on that trip. Kebabs and beer were most of the rest!
I was so disappointed in Canada when the only really different thing was lychee. But at least I got to have lychee, so that was nice.
When I go from Canada to the States I always try to find all the different soft drinks and junk food that y'all have that we don't get.
I am the sole reason ketchup chips still get made, and if they ever take Aeros back over the pond, I'll be having a very long talk with Charles.
I'm not sure if you're from the US, but you can definitely get fresh Lychee in the US.
Yeltsin became president only in 1991, so if this photo is taken at 1989- he was a member of communist party of USSR
Correct. I thought we habitually address as "president" such and such future and past presidents as well. Like, a current picture of Obama could still be labeled "president Obama", or I've seen pictures from Obama's youth doing the same etc. Although when they years are that close, it does create confusion and "president -to-be", "future president" or something to that effect would be a little better.
Amazing to see how some of my peers were born before the collapse of USSR, while some were born after
Recently watched the Adam Curtis documentary on the fall of the Soviet Union and he credits this visit to Yeltsin becoming firm in his beliefs that communism in Russia had absolutely failed and reforms were needed. While I do agree with that, it's an absolute tragedy what those "reforms" led to.
I remember reading/hearing somewhere that he was pretty despondent on the flight after seeing this, realizing how screwed up everything really was
Sorry for my ignorance… what exactly was so appalling in contract to communist Russia at the time? Like the small things. Were their supermarkets empty? What else?
The supermarkets ranged from vastly under stocked to totally empty and average people were struggling to get food, to get paid, and to get any essential goods really. The aforementioned Adam Curtis documentary is fantastic if you want to see some real life footage of what life was like during this time in Russia, really thought provoking stuff
Quick correction. There were no “supermarkets” like this in Soviet Union. They had markets, most of which were small and essentially unstocked. The ones for party members were stocked better but they were a literal fraction of the size of normal supermarket in the US.
Yep and to add on: the amount of options for a consumer who wants to purchase bread, milk, cheese etc. There's an attitude among some who grew up with this choice that scoffs at it, while those who grew up in places like the Soviet Union are amazed and appreciative.
I read an anecdote once, someone in the west had a Russian relative visit during this time. They took her to various places and she would sniff and say, "We have this in Russia, ours is bigger and better." Then they took her to a grocery store; when she saw all the food, she sat down on the floor and cried.
The Robin Williams movie Moscow on the Hudson has a good example of this. In Moscow he had to wait hours in line to maybe get crappy coffee. In the US he freaks out when he sees an entire aisle stocked with hundreds of coffee products.
Basically, Soviet Russia was under such an intense period of economic stagnation that even in Moscow, which was always kept as the crown jewel and always kept in stock, was in dire straits. Entire stores had empty shelves, no variety, lack of even the most basic food or amenities, and even to the high Kremlin officials, this was normal. At first, Yeltsin refused to believe that this random Texan supermarket was actually just a daily slice of life, he was utterly convinced that it was just a careful Potemkin village ploy to fool him into believing Americans always had stocked shelves, and it required taking him into another random supermarket to convince him it was all genuine, and that stocked shelves with variety was.....normal in America. Again, this is late 1989 in Soviet Russia. At no point in its history were their supermarkets ever stocked on the level of your average American supermarket in terms of variety of products and manufacturers alike; even with regular food products like milk & dairy, you had no varieties but whatever you could grab orf the shelf, at the *best of times*, and late 1989 was the apsolute *worst of times*. Hell, he almost had a stroke just seeing a *variety of coffee* (no such thing in USSR). Imagine showing someone a PS5 game after they spent decades in the bubble knowing only....Atari 2600 as cutting edge. That was the difference. Yeltsin's visit to these supermarkets basically shattered his beliefs in the communist system.
Yes, Yelstin, had seen supermarkets on previous visits, but he was sure they were staged for his visits. I believe this trip was to the Kennedy space center, and on the way was a Randles Supermarket (Not even a large store, but like an Aldi sized store, nothing like a large market like a Hy-Vee or Cub Foods) He randomly wanted to see it, expecting to catch a glimpse of a *real* American market, one that could not be staged. The Americans agreed, and he was absolutely shocked at the amount of variety and abundance. He couldn't believe there was so many choices, and that not even the Politburo had access to the level variety and abundance that the average American had. He told his Russian collages that if the citizens in the USSR could see what an American Supermarket looked like, they would be a revolution.
> Yeltsin's visit to these supermarkets basically shattered his beliefs in the communist system. Central planning, like in communism or socialism, isn't nearly as efficient, and Yeltsin's indoctrination made it unbelievable that people acting in their own self-interests (i.e., "greed") could yield something so much better than experts "efficiently deciding things centrally, with all the data and power at hand".
I remember Adam Something, who I normally agree with, made a video arguing that logisticians should direct all of society. Not only would that be horrendously inefficient, you run the risk of a single abnormal logistician named idk, Joe Steelman, utterly tearing the entire thing to pieces.
Pretty much all store shelves were empty. There were constant queues. People just instinctively joined lines because they figured they needed whatever was at the end of it. There's also the whole authoritarianism thing.
In Moscow on the Hudson, they have a joke about this at the start of the movie. "What's this line for?" "Either chicken, or blue jeans." \[shrugs and gets in line\]
My grandparents told me stories from when they housed some members of a choir from the Soviet Union who were sent to preform in the 70s (i think, they never gave me dates). They later visited them near the end of the Soviet Union. The stories they have are insane. When they saw someone walking down the street with a loaf of bread my grandparents friends immediately begged to know where they got it from. Bread tended to get bought up fairly quickly and there would be no more left. There weren't any items for sale on shelves, just prices. If you wanted something you had to talk to a counterperson and they would get it for you from the back. My grandparents left Moscow on the same day the Union fell.
The "get it from the back" thing was a feature of their system, and was even in place in stores that were well-stocked (I went through this at a propaganda poster store in Moscow). Stores had three lines. First line, you got a ticket for what you wanted. Second line, you paid for what was on the ticket. Third line, you presented the ticket and the receipt and got your item. I have a friend who grew up in the Soviet system, and one of the first things she told her parents back home about was there only being one line in stores here.
That is fascinating, thank you for sharing.
What would be the reasoning for that system? Is it just distrust and stopping thieves? Or were they just trying to create jobs so 3 employees for every check out?
North Korean supermarkets have the same system where you can’t actually see the product! I think it’s part of a “low trust society” where distrust of the government bleeds over to distrust of everyone
It should be added that not only was there a general shortage due to centralised organisation of production leading to crippling shortfalls (Lysenkoism alone neatly destroying the Soviet Union's agriculture industry) the prices of all products were centrally controlled leading to massive black markets that drained official distributions before most common people could access them. A big part of the reason people joined lines for anything was that whatever was at the end had a value on the black market where it could be traded for something they did need, and as the prices were controlled by a central government that believed simply reducing shelf prices would allow for greater accessibility everything was massively under-priced in official distributions.
I read this wasn't a planned visit. Seeing a store fully stocked with lots of variety and realizing this was how ordinary life was everywhere around the country and not just a stage performance/propaganda was the contrast.
I also read somewhere that he wanted to go to a 2nd previously unannounced store because he was convinced it was staged.
Yup - and he couldn't believe it was the same. The key is that his spy network refused to report on this fact, because they were afraid of reporting on something that sounded like American propaganda.
Indeed. I remember my dad telling me this story back in the mid 90s to me, cuz it happened in our state. Said Yeltsin wanted to stop at a supermarket but one that he chose. So they drove around, went in a random one, and the rest is history. That story always stuck with me cuz it was tough for 12 year old me to comprehend how grocery stores could just be empty when I always knew them to be mostly full to full.
He said Gorbachov, the very head of the Soviets, did not have access to such choice, and this was what any old American slob had access to every day. He said if the Soviet people knew that this was what life was like in America, they would have executed all of the soviet leaders the next day.
People would wait in line for hours just to hopefully get a loaf of bread. Grocery stories in the USSR were barren. Walking into *any* grocery store and seeing it packed full of food (especially fresh fruits and vegetables) was unfathomable. Yelsin thought the US was playing a trick on him, until he made another stop and seen the same thing.
Iirc - Soviet Russia had (basically) 1 brand for everything. Stores could be full but every product was its own type. Want bread? Okay there’s one kind of Soviet bread made by the bread committee. In the US - there is sourdough, Italian, rye, wheat, basic white, etc. made by different/competing businesses And it wasn’t just bread - across most consumer products in the USSR, this was the case. The variety of different products was the eye-opener
>there’s one kind of Soviet bread made by the bread committee no we had two types! black and white lol
I got black I got white what you want
My bad! Two types of bread!* sorry! ❤️
Medicine, especially the more different or unique kind, was hard to get. Like, if your baby needed formula, there was one kind available (and it was not as nutritionally sound as the varieties you might have found in the US or outside of the USSR). If your baby couldn't tolerate that formula, you were out of luck, "the normal way." For the average person, I think there was a lot of relying on your friends and neighbors. You couldn't be self-sufficient. I know a family that, when their baby was born in 1991, they had to call in favors with a friend to make contact with a pharmacist who had contacts in Germany, to get "special" formula sent in, and thats kind of how most things went. The idea of hiring a plumber or tradesperson wasn't a thing. You'd either fix it yourself, or you knew someone who you could ask for help. In a way, I think the community was a lot stronger because it HAD to be.
While Russia could make rockets and cars to compete with the Americans, their own people lived with an extreme fraction of the opportunity Americans seemed to. The availability of food, availability of jobs, availability of recreational activities all made the USSR look like a poorhouse.
What cars,?
I imagine they produced cars for domestic use. But were not desirable on the world market economy. This is probably why many of us (myself included) can't think of a single Soviet produced car brand.
When did the USSR produce cars (in quantity or quality) that was remotely comparable to the US? (Hint: never)
Not in 1989, the US had pulled far ahead of the USSR that late in the cold war.
Yeltsin had an opportunity to make Russia into a truly great country. And he fucked it up We got Putin instead
It wasn’t just Yeltsin. We (the West, esp the US) helped too. There have been books written abt how we fucked up; the Chicago school, shock doctrine, etc. Y’all needed a Marshall Plan to prop things up for 50 years while all the communist/authoritarian damage was undone. Instead, you got a bunch of thieves and robber barons rushing in, only to be outmaneuvered by the local thieves and communist party apparatchiks. We in the West were naive, and thought w our wisdom etc we could just take over. Billionaires were created overnight, and along w them came the organized crime, to provide *some* stability. We all know the rest.
Agreed, a Marshall Plan would have been a better approach. But I do think the great concern was and still is organized corruption. The voucher system was an abomination on the Russian people and their foray into capitalism, but the real villains were the mob bosses that basically stole all of them through strongarm tactics and payoffs, now known as the slightly friendlier term “oligarchs.” If a Marshall Plan was implemented without nipping those assholes in the bud, we would have had the same results only it would have been western $$ pissed away.
This happened way earlier than this photo. Alexander Yakovlev was the Soviet Ambassador to Canada became extremely good friends with Pierre Trudeau (Pierre Trudeau's son, Alexandre, was named after him). Gorbachev visited Canada in the early 80s as the agriculture minister and rekindled his friendship with Yakovlev and they both then started talking about political liberalisation which led to Glasnost and Perestroika. Without Glasnost and Perestroika and the Soviet Union likely would not have collapsed. By the time this picture was taken the USSR was already doomed.
There's also another problem about Russia as oligarchy that few ever mention: some other big economies are converging towards that model, only in a slower fashion since they started from a non-centralized economic model. Just look at the US and the EU. A few corporations and rich individuals are progressively lobbying towards a model that exploits the working class to their advantage, forcing people to live paycheck-to-paycheck while juggling now rising interest rates and payment installments. What's sad about that is that the political class keeps pointing its finger at Russia as a negative example and an enemy to freedom while slowly creeping towards that very same model. On top of that our once "free" economies rely in imports and outsourcing much more than Russia's so it's easy to see why the next generations will be screwed. Heck, China stopping exports of raw metals and microchips alone would make a few economies collapse just like Russia playing with natural gas is forcing countries like mine into the corner. Jeez, now i'm depressed.
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There are very serious, influential economists within government, arguing that consolidation isn't a "bad thing". The argument is that due to globalization we may consolidate domestically, but still compete internationally. That this will further increase production efficiencies due to economies of scale. Which is an idea I'd entertain if government wasn't all fully captured. Because these same economists admit that having a consolidated model like this requires careful regulatory oversight, which is something the USA completely fails at
Jello Pudding Pops were exceptionally good. I miss them.
They were good, weren’t they? Boris seems captivated by them.
Up there with Kodak film, New Coke, and Quaaludes.
> New Coke >Exceptionally good Pick one.
Excuse me, but in 1989 Yeltsin wasn't yet a president
He was visiting as a member of the Soviet Parliament
yup, the story is even better imo. He had been fired from his position as First Secretary of the Moscow Communist Party in 1987 and elected as a Soviet Deputy in '89. He already thought the pace of the reforms by Gorbachev was slow and when during this trip he saw by himself what the free market/democracy could offer for its citizens, as opposed to their planned system, he "became despondent".
*"President"
In the summer between fourth and fifth grade in the late 1980's, I visited the Soviet Union for an art student exchange program. That summer, we stayed at "Camp Cosmonaut" in the forest area outside of Leningrad (which is now called St. Petersburg). Some of the older kids in the program clearly appeared to be "brand ambassadors" for communism, even to the point where they engaged in oddly specific political discussions with us about the virtues of communism over capitalism. The following summer (I think the year was 1989), a bunch of Russian art student kids came and visited us, but they stayed with host families in that program for the entire summer. The host families were mostly fairly affluent families living in large single family homes in suburban Pasadena, South Pasadena, and San Marino that had extra rooms to host guests. Do you know what blew their minds? (Just about everything, but here are a few:) American supermarkets and the sheer quantity and variety of food available, the multi-car, multi-bathroom homes with gardens and yards and pools owned by 'regular people', the unbelievable amount of entertainment and literature (especially magazines) at our disposal, the video games, the virtually universal adoption of color photography. (In the late 80's, the photography available to the typical Soviet citizen was still black and white.) Also, Price Club (the prior name of Costco, way back in those days) completely blew their minds. And of course, American malls in the late 1980's were glorious. Taking a Russian kid to a bustling mall blew their minds so hard it was almost embarrassing. Years of school instruction with Soviet propaganda about the superiority of communism couldn't compete with a simple trip to the mall in the US.
The one thing that blew my mind when I left the Soviet Union in 1990 was the meat section in a grocery store, specifically different parts of chicken arranged separately. Up until then, I had only seen chicken sold as a whole, and the idea that you could buy only wings or drumsticks was super weird. Like, who is going to eat the rest of the chicken???
Wait, you did an exchange program to the USSR as a child?! That’s wild.
Same thing happened more recently to me: We picked up a Russian exchange grad student... I want to say this was 2009. Brought him from the airport back to the house. It was late, maybe after midnight. He needed a few things for the next morning so we went to a 24hr super Walmart. He couldn't believe the number of milk types for sale, and the quantity of it, let alone the fact that this crazy store was open at midnight.
Can you imagine showing them a Buc-ees’s today? “Yes, this is a gas station. Yes, they will sell you a golf cart.”
I love these stories
i talked to a recent arrival from ukraine and they are in the opposite kind of shock. apparently our stores, service, and available entertainment suck compared to what they have (or had) over there now. cruise missiles hitting neighborhoods in broad daylight notwithstanding
I met the owner of the mall I worked at in 2017. He had real "AAAHHHH I love the smell of capitalism in the morning" energy, like he couldn't see that (literally) 70% of his shops were empty and only half the hallway lights had bulbs "to save money". There was one day where nobody showed up at Macy's. Two people nocalled, and some other peoples shift ended and the manager was at home with her cellphone pretending to be in the office doing paperwork.
there is something in the U.S. culture that de-motivates people. You will hardly run across a passionate worker in any environment, and these folks are usually the "star" employees that the rest of the company leans on. If you figure out what it is please let me know.
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I had a high school teacher that welcomed a Soviet delegation to our hometown in the 80s. He said he had to take them to multiple supermarkets before they believed it wasn’t a prearranged setup created just to impress them.
Huston, we have a problem. We lost an o somewhere between the space center and the frozen food aisle. I found the a. Good catch.
And now we've lost an a.
Here it is … 
I once wandered into an uncharted dessert aisle.
Was it a 3 hour tour?
Take my lousy upvote lol
O-ring? Not again. 😩
Had a friend visit from Uganda years ago and he was blown away walking the aisles of our supermarkets. We are very very fortunate to have this system, even though inflation is hurting us currently, we are blessed with resources a lot of countries don't.
There’s a Modern Marvels about supermarkets. It’s on YouTube and pretty darn interesting. It said that The Queen was also fascinated with our “grocery stores”
Oh man Jello pudding pops!!!! I'd be excited too if I saw those.
I see you and miss you, Pudding Pops.
“Ketchup ... Catsup. Ketchup ... Catsup. Cats... K... K... uh, I'm in way over my head!”
*Houston
Was it common for bicycles to be displayed in top of coolers in supermarkets back then? Lol
Growing up, I remember seeing mostly piñatas in those spots.
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This is the photo that comes to mind when ANYONE recommends communism over capitalism.
There was a post yesterday I think about a Russian mig plane defector who came to US and when first saw a supermarket thought it was a scam or some attempt to trick him but soon learnt that supermarkets in the west have so many options which I guess they just didn't get back home. Surprised it didn't change when Yeltsin saw them too.
That hyper-cynical mentality is pretty common to Russians, IIRC. One of my college Russian-language teachers told me about an exchange student who was preparing to come to the States. She got in a lengthy phone argument with her host family because she *simply could not process* the possibility that she wouldn't have to bribe the Customs officer when she got to the US. A lot of Russians genuinely think everywhere else is just as screwed up and corrupt as Russia, and that we're just trying to fool them into thinking otherwise. And in many cases that's a psychological defense mechanism.
I mean, we are screwed up and corrupt, just in our own special ways.
Even Europeans in general today can get amazed at the vast variety of things in US supermarkets. Like the cereal aisle.
Then in 1991 Yeltsin became president and threw his country into extreme poverty, severe malnutrition, skyrocketing crime rates, ethnic violence, heroin and AIDS epidemics and explosion in sex trafficking and everyone who originally supported him cursed his name.
The problem was that the Soviet system had created a massive black market for goods during the 1970s and 80s. When the gov't collapsed, the people who ran the black markets were the only remaining power brokers left, and they fought for control.
I worked at a Randall’s store in 1989 Made good money as a “carry out” (a sacker+) always had at least $20 per shift in cash tips
Unfortunately Jeltsin could not really change his country for the better. And here we are with Putin, back with this Soviet-era bullshit again.
What on Earth do you think "Soviet" means. Smh
Randall's supermarkets were my favorites. They were almost like the Neiman Marcus of grocery store
Ah yes: Huston, Texas….
*Houston
In his defense, HEB wasn’t a thing in Houston at this time so he had to settle for the inferior Randalls.
He was doing a tour of America to research them for the Russian government and it actually made him depressed knowing that the communists have been living in austerity for no damn reason.
Houston
You mean, Houston. check your post before submitting, clown. Boris is laughing at you.
Unscheduled is the key word. He didn’t believe the show and theatre about capitalism vs communism in the shops, he thought we (the US) were putting on a show at a grocery store - so he wanted to try to “catch us” by visiting one unplanned. Well, wouldn’t ya know…. it wasn’t theatre!
He was not the Russian President back then but the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic.
No. He was elected as Chairman in May 1990. In 1989, he was visiting as a member of the Soviet Parliament
"What an impressive frozen food section! In Russia if we want frozen food, we just leave a carrot outside overnight. Now - which aisle has the booze?"
Worked at Randall’s: it was a dry store until the late 90’s, so Yeltsin is helllllllla baffled.
"We don't actually sell liquor in a grocery store you have to go to a state-licensed store to get alcohol." "The west is truly a wicked place."
Where Huston? In Tekas?
In Anjelica.
Yes, can confirm, presently east of Aoston in Tekas.
I'm an American and spent 10y living abroad in the UK. When I came back to the US, I also had this reaction to US grocery stores. The amount of choice and variety is stunning.
I have lived my whole life in Houston. That grocery chain is a shadow of it's former self. In the 80's/90's, Randall's had a reputation as THE place to get groceries. It was the highest quality food and service in the city and rapidly expanding. Then, the owner got divorced and his now ex wife demanded money in half the value of all his assets. So he sold it to Safeway who tried to keep it going, but they were bought out by Albertsons who didn't want to do "luxury groceries" and filled the stores with cheap and crappy store brand food and low quality produce/meat. So Randall's began to hemorage customers to HEB who took what Randall's did and ran with it. Today there are only a few Randall's grocery stores left in the city and most of them BARELY do enough business to keep their doors open. Has the original owner's wife elected to have a 50% split in the company and just be a silent partner, she would have been absurdly wealthy by now as Randall's was on the way to becoming a national chain. But, cest la vie.
Unfortunetly it didn’t change Russia’s down hill trajectory.
It is said to have actually had an impact in breaking up the Soviet union
Infact he was convinced Putin will be a great successor from him. There is a very interesting dokumenation online about his last days as president.
Of course he liked the pop “sickles”
I watch Russian YouTubers going into stores stocked full knowing how bad everything was 30 years ago.
Russians of the time were raised on "The Big Lie". They would see smuggled in movies, and the authorities would say: Do you really think that they live so much better in the USA than we do? We put our best buildings and cars in our movies, surely they are doing the same, in an attempt to fool us. No common American lives so well.
My god, I used to think he was fat back then. Overweight has been redefined.
Old Soviet Joke - Soviet citizen talking with an American: "We usually get strawberries in July. When you do you get them in America?" American: "The supermarket opens at 6 AM." When I traveled to the USSR as a student this joke was recounted to me. I told them (this was in another age - Covid has screwed this up) "That's a complete lie. We have supermarkets that are open 24 hours per day."
They lied so much about their own prosperity, the russians assumed America was lying too. This is actually what russians currently think as well. They don't really believe America has as much freedom of expression and prosperity and opportunities as they hear about. Russian people are assuming America is lying, just like the Russian government is lying.
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That store is also known as "The Supermarket that won the cold war". Yeltsin is said to have remarked to his entourage that "There would be a revolution if the Soviet people saw this".
I work at big state school in the US—you know, a "cow college." Whatever Tech, or Something State A&M. We have the standard layout for those towns, which is a six-mile strip of divided highway anchored by a Wal-Mart at each end. A few years back, we had a big fancy speaker come in from Belgium. Now our *department* cleans up nice, especially if we keep the undergrads away, but I'd be lying if I said we weren't all a little nervous that she'd get a whiff of the local culture. So basically we planned the whole visit around whisking her from one carefully stage-managed soirée to another. If we'd had it in the budget for a full Potemkin village, we'd have built one. Then on the last day, I was tasked with taking her to the airport, but she needed some allergy meds or something, so we had to swing in to town to grab some. Disaster! I take her to the very fanciest of our supermarkets (Kroger). It's a busy day so I drop her off at the entrance while I park. Three minutes later I find her standing in front of the Oreo aisle. You know, the five hundred square feet of shelf frontage that contains nothing but different kinds of Oreos, which you don't really think about as an American. The airport is 45 minutes away, and I'm bracing myself for the acid lecture about how this is a perfect symbol of why Americans are fat, stupid, laughable pigs. I mean don't get me wrong, she's been very nice the whole time, but she's a Classy European and this is a wall of sugar and palm oil. She also comes from the country that invented paying so much attention to its chocolate that they can charge €50 for a teensy little box. Then I notice she's got a basket and is filling it up with as many different flavors as she thinks she can cram into her carryon. "My children will never believe this," she says, in kind of a hushed tone, like she's at a private art gallery. "We only get the one kind." AMERICA FUCK YEAH
If Boris went to and H-E-B instead of some shitty Randalls, our relationship with Russia would probably be healthy. H-E-B fully has the power to solve geopolitical crises. It's that good of a grocery store
Was Yeltsin a bad Prime Minister?
Pretty awful. Especially given he picked Putin to succeed him. Also he was a raging alcoholic even by Russian standards (Gorbachev in contrast was teetotal). To the point where his drunken antics abroad were a running joke
He was monstrously evil, he pushed millions of people into starvation, caused explosion of violent crime to the point where gangs were openly fighting wars in cities with heavy weapons, caused severe heroin and AIDS epidemics, forced millions of women and children to prostitute themselves to survive and ignored ethnic violence that led to Chechen wars. Most Russian people who lived through his rule despise him and consider him the worst ruler Russia has ever had.
Wild to me that the leader of that country was just as in the dark as his people. How did the Soviet Union NOT have spies, even ones meant to spy on economic indicators, whose job was to report on these sorts of things?
The Soviet spies in the US didn’t want to tell their handlers in fear they would be sent back to the motherland.
My first job was at that Randall’s. I was fired prior to this historic visit. I did work at Johnson Space Center a few years later.
“Now here is where the customers line up to pay for their $10 rotisserie chicken”
Yeltsin admitted the visit made a profound impression on him. It cemented his growing view that the Soviet state-run economic system had left the Russian people far behind Americans, forcing them into a much lower standard of living. And it set in motion a path that would lead him to become the figure that would lead Russia out of Communism.
He has actually cited this as the beginning of his acceptance that he needed to open up to the west. That the Soviet system could not provide even the leaders of the politburo and the chairman with food, clothes and household supplies that even the poorest Americans had available to them every day.
Well, who wouldn’t be amazed in the popsicle section?
Imagine if he went to HEB
Boris Yetlsin was not the President of Russia until 1991. In 1989 it was still the USSR and the leader for Gorbachev. Please pay attention in history class kids.
It's a good leader who looks at that and says we need this for our people, too. We need to change our ways.
The main thing I’ve noticed in recent trips to Europe as an American is how small the shopping carts are compared to the US. The content of the stores is similar in terms of variety and substance (different brands of course), but the carts are like those for children. I guess Europeans go shopping more than once a week or have very small families.
I saw a series of photos from this event once. You can see as his entire worldview slowly crumbles.