Boris Yeltsin's visit to a suburban Houston supermarket in 1989 (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Boris Yeltsin's visit to a suburban Houston supermarket in 1989 (2016)

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261 pointscbracketdash357 comments

I dunno about Yeltsin and the Houston store, but I do know this:

I went on a student tour of the USSR as a college student in 1991, arranged through my University (U of Alabama). I was getting a minor in Russian language, and it seemed like a fun trip. It actually got MORE fun because in the run-up to the trip (in spring, 91) there was some dissent in the USSR and many parents wouldn't let their kids go. In order to create a large enough trip, the University opened registration up to university-area retirees, so we ended up with a cohort of probably 30 folks. Half of us were under 25, and the other half over 65. It was the first time I'd ever really hung out with older people who weren't relatives, and that's really something we don't do enough of. Listen, if you have a chance to drink with WWII Hellcat pilots, do it.

Anyway.

Back then, you took certain American commodities with you to trade -- Levi's, Marlboros, etc. We met a pair of enterprising young black marketeers -- our age -- in Moscow, and hit off so well with them that they met us in (what was then) Leningrad for our last port of call. It was very cool, trying to converse in broken Russian and English, and generally being over the moon to have "friends" from the other side of the Cold War that defined both our countries up to then.

It went so well with Andrei and Volodya that, somehow, they finagled visas, and the next fall came to Tuscaloosa to visit us. Andrei immediately took up with my girlfriend's pal, but Volodya was shyer and stayed with Cassie and I for several weeks. And during that time -- and this would've been fall 91 into winter 92 -- obviously we did some shopping.

I remember vividly taking Volodya to the local supermarket, where we bought the sorts of cheap things students buy. Except obviously our budgets as upper-middle-class college kids allowed us things absurdly beyond the reach of anybody Volodya knew in Moscow -- like fresh fruit and vegetables in January. He was stunned, and we were kind of shamed by the plenty we had access to.

Then he saw the bananas. He really wanted bananas. He wouldn't ask for bananas. So I grabbed a bunch and put them in the basket.

"Are you rich?" No. I have a good student job. "Are your parents in government?" No. My dad's dead; Cassie's dad is a doctor in another state. "Anyone can shop here?" Absolutely.

I don't pretend for a moment the US was then, or is now, some kind of paradise. We fail our poor in material and constant ways. But those moments in the Bruno's with Volodya are something I'll never forget.

Damn, that was a good read. Thanks for sharing. It's rare to reevaluate ourselves and to see ourselves in a new light, and it sounds like you got a solid, grounded experience that has since anchored your perspective towards one of appreciation for what you/we have. Pretty cool gift.

Thanks, man.

The older I get the more astounded I am that our friendship with Andrei and Volodya happened at all, and the more regret I have that none of us retained any way to contact each other later. It was 1991. I was the only one of us to have an email address at the time.

Outside of academics [jk: and KGB] no one in USSR had an access to the Internet.

In the 1980s the internet was hardly in every home globally either.

The difference is that there was a dozen of scientific institutes and that was it. I.e. there was no Internet connectivity in my city (12th by population in Russia at the time) until 1994.

I wonder how that would compare to South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia, etc

In SA our office DSL in 2010 had a cap of 500MB a month.

Oddly, one of the sites I did actually correspond with online at the time was a university in Moscow. I had a job working for a grant in cross-cultural communication that used a sort of online model UN simulation with teams spread all over. It was pretty neat.

> Then he saw the bananas. He really wanted bananas. He wouldn't ask for bananas. So I grabbed a bunch and put them in the basket.

> "Are you rich?" No. I have a good student job. "Are your parents in government?" No. My dad's dead; Cassie's dad is a doctor in another state. "Anyone can shop here?" Absolutely.

In multiple communist countries in Eastern Europe, bananas were special because they only came ~once a year from Cuba. Anyone having access to them outside that time and/or getting more than a few would fit the profiles he described.

By contrast, some people in Eastern Europe had fancy ski huts available to them. You or I might have asked the same questions if you'd gone skiing with them in the 80s only to find out that his father is a draftsman. "Don't all of you have ski houses?"

For worker class in Russia, it is super common to own (as opposed to rent) your own apartment and also own a country house ("dacha").

You may be otherwise piss-poor, wage wise.

The supermarkets has improved greatly though - not quite the USA level, but on par with Western Europe or sometimes slightly better (more chains, easier to eat healthy)

Today, sure. In USSR, no apartment was privately owned, though. You were assigned one "according to your needs" - e.g. when I was a kid, my extended family of 5 (me, my parents, and my mom's parents) had a two-bedroom apartment of 48.5 m^2 total, 27.2 m^2 of which was the two bedrooms. To give an idea of the size, here's the floor layout of that exact series of apartment buildings:

https://i.imgur.com/ImxdsUG.jpeg

(Note that there are multiple apartments shown here - every "3K", "2K", or "1K" corresponds to one apartment with that many bedrooms. The "fraction" after that shows the total area and the combined bedroom area of each apartment in m^2.)

I think the best way to describe that arrangement was a "no-cost rent". You only had to pay utilities, and you couldn't have it taken away from you arbitrarily. But e.g. selling it or even renting it out would be impossible (legally; the black market existed regardless), nor could it be inherited.

There was a thing called building cooperatives which gave out the rights to gift or sell the apartment after the mortgage was paid. The private ownership on real estate was legalized in 1990 through that system.

Yes, although you still had to have a "need to improve living conditions", as measured in square meters currently allotted per family member, to get an apartment that way.

There was also the "build it to live in it" condominium programs that opened more opportunities specifically to those just starting their adult lives, who would otherwise qualify at most for a room in a communal apartment, and couldn't possibly afford a downpayment on that mortgage (15-20 monthly salaries). But those came late - many weren't even completed by 1991 - and they had considerable pushback from many local authorities, partly on the basis that such luxury was "undeserved" and unfair to older people who were in the line for regular apartments, and partly because some of their member-elected governance councils were starting to get political ambitions and push for more local self-administration in the 80s.

How old were you though?

That was similar in a lot of post-war Europe, e.g. for my grandparents in the UK.

The Americans have always lived in abundance and luxury in comparison.

This was late USSR, all the way up to its dissolution and privatization of housing in 1991. I was a small kid at the time, but I don't recall the standard being different depending on age.

The allotment of living space (counted as bedroom area per person) varied depending on the city, and sometimes there was a difference between the nominal and the actual number. In Moscow and Leningrad the designated minimum was around 7 m^2 per person, but in practice applying for a new apartment would be unlikely to succeed if you had more than 5 m^2. In some of the provinces, it could go as low as 3 m^2 per person.

And keep in mind that this is the minimum that entitled you to apply for a new apartment. Which means that you'd be put in a line to wait your turn to actually get one when one is available, say, 10 years later.

My wife is Bulgarian and spent some of her childhood in the USSR before her parents managed to get out (via South Africa).

A very clear memory for her is her Grandfather waiting 6 hours in line to get a banana because she said she wanted one, when she was about 4 or 5.

It's so weird to see the same sentiments echoed, yet makes sense given the above.

No, a ski hut or dinky dacha is not impressive in a country the size of Russia with abundant land, timber, and cheap labor.

Ending hunger is impressive.

> Then he saw the bananas. He really wanted bananas. He wouldn't ask for bananas. So I grabbed a bunch and put them in the basket.

And then I told Andrei and Volodya about Banana Republics.

I’m always a bit surprised that Soviet era Capitalist propaganda remains so effective to this day.

Of course Capitalism looks fantastic from the exploiters’ perspective.

Today more than ever it should be clear that the opulence of America in the 90s is completely unsustainable on a global scale.

That way of live has always been reserved for a global minority, one many of us may find ourselves excluded from in our lifetimes.

> Today more than ever it should be clear that the opulence of America in the 90s is completely unsustainable on a global scale.

It isn't clear at all. The material conditions of the 90s has and will be surpassed at higher efficiency using smaller energy budgets.

Capitalism has been responsible for lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty.

Communism, or any other system, can’t make that same claim.

Unless you have an alternative, your claims of exploration will fall on deaf ears.

“lifting out of poverty” is defined in terms of consumption.

A family living on a farm and providing most of their own needs, living sustainably for generations, is by most definitions “living in poverty” because they consume very little.

Now if you strip that family of their land and force them to work in factories their consumption goes way up since they no longer are able to support themselves.

That family has now been “lifted out of poverty”.

But yes, you are correct, no system has made people more depended on exploitation then Capitialism.

You realize “consumption” includes things like medical care, nutritious food, quality education, better housing? It actually makes up a very large part of consumption in developed nations.

You’re idealizing the crushing poverty of sustenance farming.

Have you ever been to a developing country? Talked to the families who choose to abandon their farming and work in a factory so their kids can get proper healthcare, better schooling and living in a house without a toilet that feeds into the river?

Plenty of them could continue to work as farmers and choose not too. Who are you to claim their choice is wrong?

I’m guessing you’ve lived a comfy life and take all of these things for granted and then sneer at those who want the same.

The poorest countries account for the least amount of trade globally. They don't have factories, but I imagine you would contrive that owning next to nothing and teetering on the edge of extreme poverty is preferable to working in a factory. That type of work is what created the 4 Asian Tigers, seems ridiculous to knock it.

You're romanticizing primitivism.

Lifting out of poverty is also defined in terms of "not starving to death because the winter was too long or cold", "not losing a half a years labor and food because a tornado hit your field", "not having to do manual labor 12 hours a day" and yes "access to material wealth" like indoor plumbing, labor saving devices like washing machines, and the ability to send your children to be educated instead of needing them as additional physical labor when they're old enough. Access to modern medical care and medications. I know some people enjoy farming, and enjoy the rough life. Me personally I'm glad that I don't have to plan months in advance to heat my house for the winter, can obtain literally any food I can imagine within 30 minutes and obtain enough food to feed a family for a month with little more than 40 hours of labor and a 1 hour shipping trip.

I would point out that under capitalism there have been famines even when there has been plenty of surplus food. A lack of famine either acute nor chronic is surely not a defining characteristic of capitalism.

You don't need a famine to starve to death when you're a subsistence farmer, you just need your local area to suffer an unexpected weather event. Too much winter, too much heat, too much rain, too many storms, too many insects. Take your pick of natural disaster. When you and your entire country are subsistence farmers, there's not exactly a lot of surplus or distribution networks to get you replacement food when your local area suffers.

This is pretty uniformly attributed to government policy, not "Capitalism". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)

I don’t know… my grandparents were literally sharecroppers and my grandmother said it was ducking miserable. When she was a child most people lost children to disease and still in 1920, sometimes to hunger. But the economy changed and improved and they eventually owned an air conditioned home and two cars. She said the improvement in her life from childhood until I was born were almost unimaginable.

Prey tell, how do you live? How would you in practice have your children and other family members live? If you're even moderately well off, very little if nothing stops you from seeking exactly the life you idealize in your comment. Resources for learning all its hard tricks and labors abound (largely due to the very same capitalist-fed internet of commodified information sharing that you disdain). But by all means, decide for hundreds of millions of subsistence farmers that their lives of toil were preferable to the things generations of them strove for despite "having to" consume more.

Unless you consider the Chinese to be a shining capitalism, the proportional of people in poverty hasn't been decreased by capitalism.

It’s doesn’t have to be “shining” capitalism to be free market reforms.

It’s pretty clear even “state capitalism” leads to wealth and the elimination of abject poverty.

That's actually not what it shows. It shows that the free market focused development model which was popular across the entire rest of the world did not, in aggregate, reduce abject poverty.

> It’s pretty clear even “state capitalism” leads to wealth and the elimination of abject poverty.

What even is the difference between such heavy state capitalism and socialism? Socialist economies existed with various level of market involvement and economic freedom, see Lenin's NEP - was the USSR initially a champion of free market reform?

You are mixing up democracy and capitalism. All democracies happens to be capitalist today since people quickly vote away communist leaders when they can, but that doesn't mean that democracy and capitalism are the same thing. China can be capitalist without democratic elections, I'd argue that is where they are today and where they have been since the "Chinese miracle" started.

China is capitalist, they just aren't democratic. They kept the authoritarian regime with sham elections from their communism days but changed everything else into capitalist systems, they are as capitalist as a typical western country today.

Authoritarian regime, control of society, control of economy are basically the definition of fascism. For obvious reasons the only clear difference with canon is the lack of anti-communism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism

By the way, elections in China are only at very local levels. Most of what we do elections for in western countries are indirect elections there. The Congress is not directly elected by people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_China

However you might want to check the 1929 elections in fascist Italy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Italian_general_election

>Communism, or any other system, can’t make that same claim.

I don't really think communism is a viable economic system, because of, you know, people. However, a couple of points should be made:

- Communism has always had to deal with enmity of world's richest and most influential nations (USA and UK in particular). Possibly because communism has had this inbuilt idea that it needs to spread to everywhere, whether they like it or not (kind of like some religions). Could this have been otherwise? I don't know.

- Between 1922 and 1962, USSR's economy grew at an average of about 9% real per annum, despite having to deal with the massive trauma of World War 2. Also, income inequality decreased. Population went from ~140 million in poverty to ~240 million living, um, not in poverty.

So... it is not quite as simple as you make it out to be.

Between 1922 and 1962, USSR's economy grew at an average of about 9% real per annum

Growing from a bad start and where you can copy a more developed nation makes this easier.

https://bearkunin.medium.com/soviet-union-facts-and-fictions...

>Growing from a bad start and where you can copy a more developed nation makes this easier.

True. But you know what really makes economic growth easier? Foreign aid. Also trade.

The USSR otoh had to deal with sanctions.

https://www.americanforeignrelations.com/E-N/Embargoes-and-S...

Yet they weren't alone in the world. They were next to China and other friendlies.

China was friendly with the USSR only briefly, like in the 1950s. It was desperately poor at the time, and received a lot of aid from the USSR.

I don't know what other friendlies you mean. USSR installed communist/socialist governments in the countries it liberated from German occupation after WW2, but those relationships were... complicated.

> Possibly because communism has had this inbuilt idea that it needs to spread to everywhere

Communist countries wanted to export communism, maybe for all the good and bad reasons democratic countries want to export democracy. However there were plenty of people in the west that wanted their country to become communist, especially up to the 80s. So the enmity against all the communist world was also a matter of internal affairs, to contain internal opposition.

That's a fair point.

On reflection, whether communism holds extra appeal in poor countries, or whether it was an accident of history that *rich* capitalist countries faced off against poor communist countries, communism's chances were kind of hamstrung by this enmity. The playing field was uneven.

So which system is truly better at lifting people out of poverty, all other things being equal, remains uncertain.

Bananas are a photogenic edge case, not a staple food. Far more representative of America's food-wealth are grains and meat -- which it produces in enormous amounts, and exports to the rest of the world. That doesn't happen by exploiting other countries, because no other countries are involved; it happens because of technology, because of mechanized agriculture and high-yield seeds and synthetic fertilizer and many other under-appreciated pillars of the modern world. And those technologies have been spreading through the world, lifting people out of poverty in vast numbers.

I won't ask you to show appreciation for heroes like Haber and Bosch and Borlaug and all the rest, but they have my thanks.

> opulence of America in the 90s

I can only go "???" to this. America has only gotten more "opulent" since the 90s. The US has not seen any sort of decline since the 90s in fact we've seen the boom of one of the biggest industries in the world, that allows us to even discuss this on our computers.

> The US has not seen any sort of decline since the 90s in fact we’ve seen the boom of one of the biggest industries in the world, that allows us to even discuss this on our computers.

Actually, that happened in not since the 1990s, and we were discussing issues like this on our computers then, too. I know, I was there.

But the opulence of the 1990s wasn’t because it was the height of technology, or average earnings, it was in large part driven by fashion and attitudes and their effect on lifestyle and the marketplace, driven in part by the lingering visible-status-oriented attitudes of the 1980s, in part by the perception of geopolitical and economic invincibility (both the–at that point–longest economic expansion in the modern period plus the fall of the Soviet Union, lopsided military engagements like Panama and the First Gulf War, etc.)

Greater aggregate and even median wealth looks and feels different in the shadow of the Great Recession and the Afghan and Iraq Wars.

How do you explain the success of the capitalist zones in China relative to the rest of the country with this worldview that the benefits of capitalism must come from exploiting others?

This one in particular specifically required exploitation, though. It's an avered historical fact.

certainly in a marxist analysis wage-laboring banana pickers are being exploited because they're alienated from the fruits of their labor (which are in this case literal fruits)

nevertheless, 01992 was a long time after democracy was restored in honduras in 01981 and the civil war began in guatemala in 01960, and bananas are still cheap today, including here in argentina, so evidently cheap bananas don't require the particular much more severe kind of exploitation the term 'banana republic' was invented to describe

Banana republics are exploitative in literally every definition of exploitation, because there was literal military violence involved. And even nowadays, Marxist analysis is far from the only framework in which workers in the global south are exploited. In fact almost any theory of exploitation except for the most radical libertarian/neoliberal would see an element of exploitation.

It turns out that since 1980 there has been economic growth, making the production and shipping of various commodities more affordable.

If banana republics weren't necessary to keep bananas affordable and profitable they would never have existed in the first place.

you are reasoning from the implied functionalist premise that forms of domination exist because they are necessary

this is a false premise

forms of domination exist not because they are necessary but because they are achievable—because those who support them are better organized and resourced than those who oppose them

those of us here in the 'global south' are generally not a fan of the term, lumping together as it does botswana, myanmar, the philippines, and argentina under a single rubric; it reflects a cartoonishly shallow analysis of the real social relations in the world system

I grew up with a guy that had a similar experience escorting Russian people in Florida? Alabama? Somewhere in the south where we hid defectors until everything was straight. He was driving some guy around who thought it was a guided tour to Potemkin villages, so he pulled out a map and said pick a place.

They drove to whatever that town was and he said, pick a store. After a couple of hours, I think his mind was blown.

This was a fairly rural, poor part of the state. Later they went to Atlanta and the guy was gaga over... everything.

There was a Russian group that made a stop at Cumberland Mall in suburban Atlanta. On that particular day, there was a shooting in the food court, so they got much more of the American experience than they expected. No one in their group was harmed but I'm sure it made an impression.

There's a YouTube channel of a Cuban immigrant visiting some American commercial institutions for the first time...

Supermarket - https://youtu.be/aBA41QgIty8

Costco - https://youtu.be/UhzQCeKlFDo

Texas Roadhouse - https://youtu.be/xRtitCJv4cc

Home Depot - https://youtu.be/TLsscvpsH8E

The supermarket was enough for me... what a night and day difference.

We have so much, we take it for granted.

A followup to the supermarket - https://youtu.be/1PUmVaesFks

We also deny it all, by law, to Cuba: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_embargo_against_...

The USA's stated goal is regime change. It’s willing to make life worse for Cubans to achieve that goal.

Cuban rulers would rather its citizens starve than implement democracy. They have fake elections to trick their people, each seat has only one candidate selected by the communist party so it is all a sham.

-> “Cuban rulers would rather its citizens starve than implement democracy.”

cuban here. please dont pretend america care about democracy. america have interests. when they need new regime they suppress democracy as needed or push for democracy. main idea to get some regime subservient to american economic interest.

why america has so many migrants at border but america do nothing or even talk about what crisis happening in central or south america country? instead they fighting proxy war in ukraine. why? more lucrative and profit opportunity in ukraine. south america not have resources or proxy war opportunity.

and given state of American government..race issues..economic issue..growing gap..unaffordable housing..America last country to dictate how other country should run.

i not favor cuban government, but your post bullshit. you idea that you know more about cuba like you on some pedestal.watch as you infrastructure crumble you homeless and drug population rise

I'm from Sweden, not USA. I think there are many problems with USA, but it isn't capitalism at least, I'd say the major problem is that their democracy doesn't properly represent the will of the people. Sweden isn't perfect, but I don't see many countries that does a better job, and Sweden is very capitalist, we voted about going towards communist but people didn't want to. Instead we have a strong capitalism, but with relatively high taxes and high government benefits, but other than that governments doesn't meddle much with companies, so freedom to do business is very high.

If Cuba was a democracy then I would disagree with the sanctions, but I don't think it is wrong to pressure a government into giving proper voting rights to its people. If Cuba actually implemented democracy and USA still sanctioned them then that would be bad, but that isn't the situation we are in.

The issue with Sweden is that it taxes work, not wealth.

You easily hit the 56% rate on income tax and even the poorest workers pay 25% VAT, meanwhile wealthy landowners and shareholders pay no inheritance tax and minimal capital gains and property tax.

So it impedes social mobility and encourages hard workers to move abroad - this has been made much worse with the refugee crisis too, as they're practically discouraged to work hard. And now look at the healthcare crisis, etc. as wages are a pittance compared to the USA, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, etc.

Taxing work instead of wealth greatly encourages Swedes to start companies. I think that is a big reason why we have so many successful start-ups from Sweden. Sweden discourages the corporate climbers, it is a very bad way to make money here, I don't think that is bad in itself, it means that smart people will try to do something outside of existing companies, either by moving abroad or by starting a company.

But I am not stupid, I too moved to Switzerland to work since it netted me many times more money per hour worked. That is why I said that Sweden isn't perfect, I'm not sure what the perfect system is, but Sweden is still pretty good.

Capital gains tax in Sweden is 30% and property tax is around 0.75% IIRC. I don't think they are that low - they're higher than most of Europe in fact.

And VAT is a double-edged sword... It's the only tax that essentially nobody can avoid, and thus the only tax that also applies to people who are already wealthy and could otherwise live their life without paying any tax.

>strong capitalism, but with relatively high taxes and high government benefits

So, communism, at least according to US conservative perspective.

This is all smokescreen. Cuba is perfectly capable of trading with Canada and it does. The citizens are still destitute due to government corruption.

This is true, but with a catch. Other companies and individuals in other countries can trade with Cuba... provided they can keep their operation separate with the operation that interacts with us customers/companies. And even if they manage to do so, they still are at risk to be flagged or to cause their costumers to be flagged as non compliant by the us banking systems. So to burden this risk to trade with a small and poor island might not be as attractive even to people not directly subject to the US embargo.

There is a huge portion of China that doesn’t care about being flagged by US banking and they make a perfectly fine trading partner.

The US is no more responsible for the abused citizens of Cuba than the abused citizens of North Korea.

From '96 - Role of the USA in shortage of food and medicine in Cuba https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8942780/

> The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States has informed the US Government that such activities violate international law and has requested that the US take immediate steps to exempt food and medicine from the embargo.

Exempting Food and Agriculture Products from U.S. Economic Sanctions: Status and Implementation - https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL33499.html

> In approving the FY2001 agriculture appropriations act, Congress codified the lifting of unilateral sanctions on commercial sales of food, agricultural commodities, medicine, and medical products to Iran, Libya, North Korea, and Sudan, and extended this policy to apply to Cuba (Title IX of H.R. 5426, as enacted by P.L. 106-387; Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act of 2000, or TSRA). Other provisions place financing and licensing conditions on sales to these countries. Those that apply to Cuba, though, are permanent and more restrictive. TSRA also gives Congress the authority in the future to veto a President’s proposal to impose a sanction on the sale of agricultural or medical products.

Of course, the USA always has great support for true democratic leaders like Batista, Pinochet, Rios Montt, Suharto, Galtieri, etc. /s

Ok that’s a lot of fun. Not suspended btw

There's also the reverse. Cuba is a strange place to see.. with shops selling 10 items total (spread on a wall), when they can afford to open. The pace of economy dictates life, it's so weird when it's so slow.

My dad moved to the US in 99 (he grew up in a town of about 50k people at the time). He said he was shocked people would stop for him when crossing the street, and he was amazed he could by a 1/2 gallon of ice cream for a couple bucks. Previously, he might have had ice cream once a year. He was also impressed and made happy by the abundance of meat and milk.

Funnily he was quite disappointed at the fruit situation coming from a tropical country, but that was more about freshness than quantity.

There's also the issue that people from tropical countries are used to a variety of fruit we simply don't have. There are various things that are either rare in the US or completely absent because they can't survive being shipped. Even subtropical--my wife loves dragon fruit but is unwilling to pay through the nose for the very inferior stuff in the market here.

While I do not have a taste for tropical fruit there are the bananas we encountered in Africa that ruined me. Since encountering those I have pretty much zero interest in US bananas, what we had there can't be bought in the US because they don't ship well.

This story is exactly how Europeans felt in the 1950s. Our supermarkets come from the US.

It saddens me that the leftist clowns of today have forgotten the importance of material wealth.

Do you mean the importance of not having entire industries bombed to craters? The "leftist clowns" in Europe today get most of their products from Europe, and they seem pretty content about it. Speaking for myself,the variety of cheeses in western Europe is flabbergasting.

Russia's poor are still not very well taken care of under capitalism. Witness all the Russian soldiers in Ukraine being impressed with washing machines and stealing them.

Please don’t take everything you read on the internet at face value. Every decently sized city there has at least one DNS, Eldorado and MVideo electronics chain:

https://youtu.be/XzNDGN6r1bw

I've heard that the "not decent" cities, or rural areas, are the worst. Any video of Moscow or St Petersburg is not a rebuttal to my statement.

DNS got its start in Siberia and has twice as many locations than Best Buy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_(retail_company)

Magnit (grocery chain) in Krasnodar: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnit

Cities all over the country as small as 50k have these stores and their competitors where you can buy fresh Mexican avocados and sparkling new Korean appliances.

Or, if you don’t want to go in store you can buy any item under the sun on Wildberries, Ozon and have it delivered to your front door.

The fact that inventory in stores, or delivery apps exist does not help when a lot of people in rural Russia can't afford it, as one of the sibling comments points out.

I've also heard (from Russians) that water access in rural Russia is poor.

I've been to grocery stores in Moscow, btw.

Let me introduce you to “food deserts” in urban areas and poor rural areas in the USA.

Russia is huge, yes - there are some very isolated places with poor people and without some utilities.

There’s also a lot of weekend (part time) dacha summer houses that don’t have full utility hookups.

I visited Russia in 2013 and 2014, and there were a lot of gritty places, but availability of modern retail shops, goods, etc. was basically the same as places in Europe at that time. My kid travelled there last summer and said the sanctions are having an impact, but a lot of it is on the order of, for example, McDonald's changing the sign outside to some knockoff brand and sourcing their ground beef and packaging from somewhere else.

To use a washing machine you need access to running water, sewage and electricity. The first two of those are still not available in large parts of the country.

And large portions of the population still cannot afford one.

The intersection of those two frequently ends up in the army, as that is the only social mobility they know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-QSymE3FEY

Similar story in Fall of '92. I was a freshman in college and this dude, Nikolai, down the hall in the dorm was one of two guys from Vladivostok on a program. Most of us in the hall bonded very quickly including Nikolai. One day, a smaller group among us were talking and somehow the topic of his cologne came up. It smelled literally like ammonia.

We wanted to give him something else, but how do you do that without being offensive? One guy had a plan. When Nikolai was showering in the hall showers, this guy went in and stole Nikolai's cologne and tossed it. The next day, he was puzzled as to who stole his cologne. We said, "it's alright, we'll get you a replacement" and took him to the mall to one of those booths with knockoff designer perfume and cologne.

The guy was just in awe of the whole place. Eyes wide open, looking at every store. At the cologne place, first sample he smelled, he lit up, smiled, and said, "Yes, this is much better than my old cologne."

The guy that tossed his old one paid like the $20 for the bottle.

Later, it turned out the guy got his girlfriend pregnant on the night he left for the US, and had to go back to marry her after the semester. Such a bummer. Hope he's doing well with a nice family because he was such a friendly and fun guy.

In 1995 I had the pleasure to be part of a State Department sponsored "cultural exchange" with our then new friends in the Russian Federation.

Basically it amounted to myself and about a dozen others, organized into a small chamber orchestra going to Russia for a summer, and in exchange a group of Russians formed into folk/pop entertainment group visiting and staying with us for a while during the school year.

I can't say that 1995 in post-USSR Ekaterinburg was incredibly different than 1991's pre-Russia Sverdlovsk. There were a few bits of free market showing up, but the general economic situation there was pretty dire. Even for me, who grew up in a very rural area and quite poor, felt like I came from nearly unimaginable wealth.

A couple years later the State Department and Russia repeated the exchange and I had a chance to show my host mother around the local shopping malls and such. The "change" from communism had already happened, the Russians by then were by and large waiting for America to arrive.

It was an amazing experience, once in a lifetime, and it has given me lots of both wanderlust and perspective that I've carried with me for the rest of my life. I was very happy to see the improvement in standard of living in many parts of Russia over the years, but I'm very sad to see what they're wasting it on at the moment in Ukraine.

That sounds like a once in a lifetime experience. What kind of music did you play, exactly? What instrument did you play?

I played violin. We played a mix of classical music and pop film scores. A local composer in one of the areas we visited composed a song for our group that we also played a few times.

The Russians played half late 80s early 90s synth pop and half Russian folk music complete with wardrobe changes. They were really cool.

What did they think when they went to Best Buy? (or maybe it was CompUSA, Radio Shack, or Circuit City back then)

Best Buy has been around since the early 1980s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_Buy

I don't recall making it to an electronics store at the time. But I do remember talking a lot about the state of consumer tech. Most of what we talked about or showed them in our homes was familiar even if they didn't have this or that device at home. My host family for example had a color TV, a Dendy NES clone, and a boom box that my host brother endlessly played Metallica mix tapes on. I saw a few desktop computers in passing, but have no idea what they were. They shared a single phone with the entire apartment building. It sat outside and was red. I think it looks almost exactly like the phones in Half Life Alyx.

The Internet was very nascent at the time and they all seemed nonplussed by the BBS scene.

> Then he saw the bananas. He really wanted bananas.

My friend's high school physics teacher had many memorable lines, one of them being:

"Bananas! I saw my first banana when I was already in college!"

My father hosted a few Americans in (back then) communist Poland. To them it was like time travel to some bizarro world bygone era. They really wanted to drive his car, which was also a "classic" tech and design wise.

Anyway all this spilled over to the 90s, making the weirdest things to be considered premium goods, like Vans shoes, vacation in Malta/Greece or McDonald's.

Eventually this all ended and I remember the exact moment I realized it: I saw a somewhat overweight teenager in a mall holding a pizza slice.

Every part of this sight would be out of place in the mid 90s, not to mention the previous system.

Just a couple democratic countries had to be murdered for those cheap cheap bananas.

> Listen, if you have a chance to drink with WWII Hellcat pilots, do it.

I would love to, but at this point they might all be dead… :(

Yeah. I realized that it's a near certainty that all the retirees I traveled with 32 years ago are now dead, especially the Hellcat pilot. He was I think 75 at the time.

Sitting in a hotel bar in Kiev with him, drinking vodka, and listening to tales of the Pacific theater -- mostly just antics with his buddies, but some flight stories -- was pretty amazing. I wish I had kept a journal back then, because I've mostly forgotten any specific anecdotes.

I've lived in the US my entire life, so I don't really know much else - but I am and always have been blown away by fresh fruit in January (the whole year!). Sometimes I turn over a fresh apple or pear in my hands and the sticker has "product of Chile" or some other South American country - blows me away every time I stop and think about it....

1986, my (China born) girlfriend-now-wife was over the moon to discover she could have as much milk as she wanted. In her experience it was reserved for kids and not something available to adults.

What gets me is how pivotal information is. Back in the days your reality was defined by a few, and as a social species.. we follow suit. Today it's not.. China tries to censor reality but even they fail to an extent.

Few years into our emigration to USA, my family brought my grandfather over to USA. He was a blue collar worker, electrician at the cement factory, entering that profession right after the war, which he spent under the occupation and mostly I think as a shepherd for cows and pigs in what is now Belarus. He has built several houses in his life and was always incredibly handy with tools. We took him to Home Depot. He looked around, stood silently for a while, and then cried. His words were "we have wasted so much our lives". Trading for nails and building materials, scrounging and scratching out a living, while the country spent all the money on weapons (currently being burned out in Ukraine, and good riddance)

As my father told my then girlfriend and now wife, Soviet Union was okay for us growing up there because we didn't know any better.

Now the challenge for us is that we’re still stuck thinking stores full of Chinese junk is the pinnacle of civilization and we’re unable to know any better despite accumulating evidence of planetary destruction.

But where lies the middle ground? Soviets having one sort of butter vs. 20 sorts of butter (yoghurt, drills, ...) many of which were produced abroad?

Maybe we can correct (economic) future by simply insourcing some goods and therefore work and forget about the knowledge society boloney?

You'll be called a fascist if you develop this view.

communist

Most of the food in the grocery store in the US is not produced abroad. Especially perishables like dairy which have import restrictions and would be too pricey to bring in from far away.

Both of you are missing the point. Soviets didn't have one sort of butter in the way west had its 20. You couldn't go to the store and buy however much of that shitty butter you needed when you needed it. You had to catch it when it's there and get in line before it runs out, or know someone who'd tip you off, or know someone who'd sell you from the back door. And then somewhere else (not where it was produced) they'd be dumping excess butter into the ditch because it went bad.

It really isn't something you want to find middle ground with. That's like looking for middle ground between wearing nail polish and having a gangrene.

I'm saying that market economies work best when there is real competition AND demand for products that provide better lifetime value and utility.

Corporate media drives culture towards positions that benefit it rather than society.

The demand part is cultural. Lowering barriers to entry to enable more competition is political.

Both are needed to change course for the west.

I don't disagree with what you are saying, I just find it funny that this discussion is happening in context of soviet planned economy, which had no market to speak of, no competition, complete politically moderated indirection between demand and production, and entrepreneurship being outlawed thus no concept of market entry.

> Maybe we can correct (economic) future by simply insourcing some goods and therefore work and forget about the knowledge society boloney?

WE do insource some goods – where we have comparative advantage, or where the cost of trade negates the benefits of trading with someone who produces it at lower opportunity cost. Insourcing beyond that draws the production possibilities curve inward, making us (and our trade partners) poorer.

Generally, this is a losing deal. It is possible that there are incidental distributional advantages, so that it makes us poorer in aggregate but distributes returns in a way which reduces harms from the current distribution. But that’s not obviously generally the case, and in any case without clear and overwhelming evidence that this would be the effect I’d rather just attack distribution from a position of greater aggregate prosperity than start lopping off prosperity and hoping better distribution came out of it.

we have a big cultural problem. our current economy is great at optimizing for low cost mass produced items that last 6 months and then get thrown in the dump.

a pair of shoes that lasts years isn't as profitable as a pair sold every 6 months. a coat or car that can be repaired is one less customer shopping for a new one. engineers design cars they don't have to work on or repair, and will never drive.

in a healthy economy new entrants who introduce more competitive products that push us towards some impossible limit for utility and value over the lifetime of the product would be more successful. but that's not happening.

maintainable products that last are out there (fewer every year) but people don't buy them.

I have a pair of 5 year old redwing boots that feel fantastic amd look great.

I have a 1986 Toyota pickup I can repair myself that runs like the devil was chasing it. (new Toyotas are a disgrace)

I don't know how to fix it beyond getting people to really value and embrace these concepts of simplicity, maintainability and longevity, over convenience, trendy, flashy, and novelty.

even weirder, if you ask people they will tell you they value maintainability and longevity. Something is perverting the market to drive people towards cheap bullshit. I believe this is concentration of power in cartels of companies that control the markets.

we have (accidentally?) erected a finely tuned machine that pushes markets towards cartels who sacrifice domestic craftsmanship and utility for mass produced crap while both creating and sponsoring the role models our culture idolizes. this is a feedback loop that will eventually become so inefficient that it will collapse.

thanks for coming to my TED talk please read shop class as soulcraft: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6261332-shop-class-as-so...

> engineers design cars they don't have to work on or repair, and will never drive.

Because that's what they're told to do. Very few engineers revel in making worse products for business reasons.

Lost me at cars. Cars used to be horrible. They’ve never been better.

I'm not sure. I was joking with a friend recently, telling him that he should have asked the seller in the salon for a real car, not his Mercedes that talks and turns on some settings that annoy him and he turns off again and again at every engine start. My mute and semi-dumb Citroen is a better car on that metric.

Cars have never been more reliable and safer, however "better" is a woefully underspecified and subjective thing.

Things I don't like about modern cars: they all look the same, crappy capacitive controls and touchscreens inside the car, constant tracking mandated by law, much harder to work on the car if you are a car enthusiast.

To me, a classic car from the 80s, or even early 90s is a far nicer vehicle to be in and drive, and provides a far better subjective experience, both in and out of the car, so in a sense, modern cars are "worse" for me.

> constant tracking mandated by law

I hate this. What is the year that this started?

YMMV (heh) depending on make and model, but as a rough guide, mid 2010s is when cellular modems and automotive telemetry started to become commonplace

The good news is that generation uses obsolete cellular modems that thanks to the 3G sunset can no longer connect to current networks.

As a kid from that era, I disagree.

> To me, a classic car from the 80s, or even early 90s is a far nicer vehicle to be in and drive, and provides a far better subjective experience, both in and out of the car, so in a sense, modern cars are "worse" for me.

Just to get this point out of the way: I believe that you are talking about enthuiast cars and not the the Oldsmobile, Taurus, and Chevy Calvaliers I rode around in as a kid.

If you are talking about a "fun-looking car", and you miss the 3-series from the 90's vs those today, buy a mini cooper. That's basically what they are now.

If you want to give up safety, reliability, affordabilty, and fuel efficency, you can still buy a 911. Move up the price range and you can buy Lambos and Masseratis.

Modern cars are safer in a crash and much more efficient. However the experience of sitting inside one, the everyday experience of using one is worse in nearly every single respect except for how much you pay at the gas station. And crash safety is the sort of advantage you hope to never experience.

> I have a pair of 5 year old redwing boots...

Ha! I have a 45 year old pair of Red Wing Pecos boots that's been resoled twice. Now just use them for yard work, though.

Have you gotten your Redwings resoled? Assuming you live in a 1st world country, how much did that cost? How much did you pay for the pair of Redwings?

Goodyear welted soles are expensive. You can buy 6 pairs of workboots from Walmart or hiking shoes from Decathlon at the same price. Resoling welted shoes cost more than double compared to going to buying a new pair of cheap Timberlands on discount.

What is this junk? I can't think of any I have bought or needed in many years?

Isn't the onus just as much on us as consumers?

Isn't it xenophobic to call it "Chinese junk"?

The cheap junk is designed here in the US to be as cheap as possible and break as soon as possible. We did that. Not them.

They're just building it.

I think it's a bit harsh to call them xenophobic, but I did have a similar thought recently. What's worse, manufacturing cheap junk for pay, or filling your home with cheap junk?

Maybe it was harsh. However I think it makes the Chinese people look bad, where they aren't really to blame. The CCP keeps labor prices low, and we exploit it, and then we sit here and complain the stuff they make is junk.

Labor prices are much lower in India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines among others, than they are in China. So there is a bit more to the story than "the CCP keeps labor prices low".

> Maybe it was harsh. However I think it makes the Chinese people look bad, where they aren't really to blame. The CCP keeps labor prices low, and we exploit it, and then we sit here and complain the stuff they make is junk.

When someone says "Chinese junk" you're not really insulting the people IMO. Just the cheap grade disposable crap you can find in corner bazaars. That stuff that breaks after 2 uses.

Like someone else said, in the 80s "made in Taiwan" was a rubbing joke and before that Japan. But it has nothing to do with the people, just the phase their industry is in.

It's like people here in Europe saying American cars are gas guzzlers (which they mostly are compared to EU models). You wouldn't take that personally.

The cost of labor has increased a lot in China and hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty. Perhaps other choices could do an even better job but certainly a far worse policies could be instituted.

>"What's worse, manufacturing cheap junk for pay, or filling your home with cheap junk?"

Thanks to modern economy in Canada for example people with median and below income currently can't afford to buy anything but junk. Same goes for quality food. Price of accommodation, food and many other things have skyrocketed.

This is what is "worse"

Just did a trip to Loblaws in Toronto yesterday. I disagree. Organic groceries -- sure -- median income people can't really afford it.

The traditional, raw items common to the Anglo-Irish diet like potatoes, corn, flour, butter, cabbage, etc are super cheap in Canada. Meat pricing has been super challenging since the pandemic started.

Canada don't really have the same kind of agricultural subsidies that the United States has. Buying a bag of doritos isn't cheaper than a bag of potatoes. Nor, a big mac cheaper than raw ground beef.

>"potatoes, corn, flour, butter, ... doritos"

Making those your main source is highly unhealthy. It does not matter if it is called "Anglo-Irish".

Greens, veggies, decent fruits, meat, fish - through the roof. In Loblaws in particular as I often shop in one.

Vine tomatoes - $5 (used to pay $2). Fucking green onions - $2 for pathetic bunch (used to pay $0.5 for a bunch at least 3 times as big). Smaller box of mixed greens - $6 (used to pay $3-$3.50). Etc. etc.

All of this regular, never mind organic.

Meanwhile median income in Toronto is just below 40K - https://wowa.ca/average-income-canada#Toronto . Combine it with the cost of accommodation and you get an idea.

A single meal at McDonald's is still pricier. What junk food is cheaper?

What is your point? I've heard that fast food places had become way more expensive. So yes average Jane/Joe would have nothing left after covering basic expenses. Myself I do not go to places like this at all. We either cook at home or on very rare occasions go to some restaurants where I can get some really good food.

I think that guy's point was that it isn't cheaper to eat junk than to eat "good and healthy" food.

I think that this is big distinction between USA/Canada.

Junk is way cheaper than healthy food if you buy it in the stores vs going to fast food restaurants. But yes almost everything is less expensive in the US.

> Greens, veggies, decent fruits, meat, fish

Potatoes are cheap because we have an industrial supply-chain for potatoes that developed and grew for a hundred years. This is linked to the whole "Anglo-Irish" thing. Potatoes are also cheaper to grow and store.

Greens and fruits are super-perishable and require lots of packaging and protection.

> Making those your main source is highly unhealthy.

I hope nobody is eating green onions as their main source of food. (I am being faceous)

Civilizations have since the dawn of time had some kind of staple cereal crop that provided the majority of the caloric intake. It can be rice, millet, maize, wheat or potato. If you don't use one of these as your main source of calories -- yeah, your grocery bill is going to be expensive in any place and in any time.

For sure -- food price inflation has gotten way more expensive this year and I have no idea how anyone lives in Toronto at the median household income. I think I agree with you, but maybe we have a different way of expressing things.

>"It can be rice, millet, maize, wheat or potato. If you don't use one of these as your main source of calories -- yeah, your grocery bill is going to be expensive"

That is exactly my case. Also I am toll(ish) muscular guy and do about 2 hrs of cardio per day. My main diet is lots of meat / fish / chicken in combination with salad (greens, tomatoes, cukes and green onions), apples and berries. So yes it is expensive but I consider it better choice when one can afford it and for my lifestyle.

Yes I love fried potatoes and some other unhealthy stuff so I may sometimes go wild on weekend but if I switch to it as main caloric source (and I did so some times) I do not feel all too well.

This is absolutely untrue. Beans, rice, corn, potatoes, cabbage and salad are cheaper than junk food.

It is also xenophobic to believe that Chinese are not able to design junk by themselves. They have a huge internal market and have a lot of reasons to do so. Also, a lot of the junk in question is white label, with pretty much no western engineer or designer involved even when it is sold in the US or Europe.

But the bottom line is, it is junk that comes from China, ergo Chinese junk.

I'm sure they do. But the junk comes from many places, and the responsibility is on the companies here. I just think calling it Chinese Junk is hiding the blame.

Look at my fridgidaire fridge and dishwasher - both recently broke at the same time after a few years. Both top of the line consumer models. They're still made in the US, but they're disposable junk sold at the homeless despot.

The fridge is $2k, but has the same cheap components from $400 fridges. Cost cutting is everywhere. Hold the right people accountable, IMO.

Much of the really well made stuff that we buy here in the US also comes from China. They are now quite capable of very high end manufacturing as well.

I tell people this sometimes but the market is so saturated with the cheap junk that people don't often believe me.

I usually use iPhone or MacBooks as examples.

I thought they were mostly built in South Korea and Taiwan. I don't usually pay much attention to the Apple world, though.

Foxconn and Pegatron are both Taiwanese companies (who make devices for many major manufacturers, not just Apple) but most of their manufacturing has been in mainland China.

Although some of that manufacturing has started to shift recently to India and Vietnam.

All designed in the US, using manufacturing methods pioneered (for the most part) outside of China?

I mean it was only a short while ago that they were able to manufacture metal balls with enough precision to make ballpoint pens.

Besides the fact that they are known for making jumps and leaps in progress by stealing trade secrets. Just calling it how it is, I don't think they deserve credit for working in this way at all, if it weren't the case then I'd be applauding them.

It the same way that "Made in Japan" or "Made in Taiwan" used to be a label for cheap knock offs. Over time, as China shifts their economy, it will probably change, but right now "Made in China" have a certain connotation, and it becomes an easy shorthand for the disposable crap that fills our stores.

China is in the special position of having both a great industrial capacity for complex products and at the same time being the main source of complex products that are poorly designed/constructed. So referring to "Chinese junk" identifies an objective economic phenomenon and is not simply a product of prejudice.

"Chinese junk" can also be used as a term of criticism for a tendency among Chinese suppliers to dishonestly skimp on quality. Hearing of the many troubles American companies have with suppliers in China, this seems to be a valid criticism. However, having worked in the Middle East, I can testify that this problem can be as bad or worse elsewhere.

It is noted than Japan had a similar reputation in the early 20th century, and I think Switzerland also had a reputation for poor quality in the 19th century. In both cases, the governments started programs to change things. There is desire within China to change their reputation. I've read that Alibaba is actively trying not to be seen as a venue for selling "Chinese junk."

>"being the main source of complex products that are poorly designed/constructed"

It is also the main source of complex products of high quality. Problem is the price. Where it matters I buy industrial grade stuff for home use. It works for ages. But it also priced accordingly. Canadians with median income and below simply can not afford quality stuff.

Meanwhile, not sure about the rest of the world, but my personal impression is that in Canada general public mostly thinks that Chinese only steal, copy and produce nothing but junk and are not capable of anything else. So yes it is racist / xenophobe attitude in my opinion.

It took them until 2017 to be able to make a fully homegrown ballpoint pen: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/18...

Yes it is Chinese junk if it is junk and manufactured in China - they have created an entirely new economy just for this stuff.

And "xenophobic" is just a nicer way to call someone racist. It was a smart move on China's behalf to produce this junk, they have most of the world's manufacturing.

Please can we stop with this ridiculous exaggeration. It is actually very harmful. There is no evidence of “planetary destruction” or anything like it.

You did not have to go as far as USA to see that. Trip to western Berlin would be enough. Countries that got under USA sphere of influence had it much better. They got lots of money with Marshall's plan to rebuild economies after war.

So even if they would knew there is a better life it was all decided at Jalta and they were most likely not able to do anything about it without straight out starting new war against Soviets running things in the east. Unfortunately scratching out a living was their destiny.

Except those in the "USA sphere" that had pro-US dictators forced upon them - like Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Indonesia, etc. - even Spain, Portugal, South Korea, Taiwan and Brazil suffered greatly under US-supported (to varying degrees) dictatorships.

He was mentioning west Berlin but yeah some had pro-US dictators some had pro-USSR dictators.

No they haven't. They have all lifted millions out of poverty.

Except that, materially, those in the "USA sphere" -- even those with pro-US dictators forced upon them -- are better off comparatively than their neighbours or a comparable country.

Just to look at the countries you listed and their GDP per capita:

1) Asia

Taiwan vs Mainland China South Korea vs North Korea Indonesia (under Suharto) vs Indonesia (under Sukarno)

2) Europe

Spain & Portugal vs Eastern European countries (These two are weird. They were originally old facist countries that stayed neutral during WWII. They were also rural and not industrial compared to every other Western European country until recently)

3) South America

Guatemala vs Nicaragua Brazil vs India (This is tough, since no country can really compare itself to Brazil in South America. I think Indonesia is probably most similar, but they are also on the list. India was more Soviet-aligned) Argentina & Chile vs every other Spanish-speaking South American country.

It's not all rainbows and sunshine, but everybody struggles to some degree during the cold war. Those that the CIA kept propping up are much much better economically than those that didn't receive US funding and arms. I can't believe I am defending the CIA in 2023. But here we are.

Most of these countries I have never been in but let's consider Taiwan. I've been there in the 70s. I've had many visits to China since the late 90s. They should have started out pretty much even since 1948. Admittedly, my memories are old but I would say 70s Taiwan was similar to 90s China--something held China back far more than Taiwan was held back.

I have also had a dramatic illustration of the endemic food problems in communist-era China. When I was first in China I could see over the crowds--eye height for me was above the top-of-hair height for virtually all the locals. This was just before the first people born in the capitalist era were coming of age. As they came of age my view got more and more obstructed--these days I'm taller than the average Chinese person but the difference is nowhere near as extreme. That's not genetics, that's nutrition. In other words, virtually everybody was stunted by inadequate nutrition during the communist era. (I can't make the height comparison for Taiwan, I was not an adult at the time.)

Or look at the economic situation in China back then. A discussion that played out again and again. Young female in China, generally a shopkeeper, talking to my wife (China-born, native speaker): "does he [referring to me] understand us?" Her: "no" (I can pick out an occasional word) Woman: "How do you like being married to an American?" Her: "I'm happy" Woman: "How do I get one?", often followed by providing pictures and contact information in the hopes she could play matchmaker. It's been many years since this has happened, though--there isn't the huge economic gap there used to be.

Or lets look at the other second-world countries. I've been in a good portion of them in the 70s. The economic gap was huge, there was also a big gap in how oppressive the government was. I see a lot of people throwing around the term "police state"--almost never with any idea of what that really means. Romania, 1975, we had a run-in with the police. Entirely their goof, their official wrote down the wrong thing and it was pretty easy to show it was their problem. Then came the hard part--they needed some paperwork filled out about the situation. Big problem--we needed translation, nobody was willing to be involved in a police matter even though their name would not appear. Finally a businessman from Austria overheard and offered to help as he knew we wouldn't find a local who was willing. Contrast this with China, IIRC early 2000s: My wife was looking for DVDs of Chinese TV dramas and there were few to be found--DVD sellers almost always only had movies. My wife was a bit naive about how much China had changed resulting in a miscommunication--it didn't occur to her that the "other" stuff he had nearby was porn, not what she was after. (Note: Illegal--almost certainly R18 stuff smuggled in from Hong Kong. There's no way that would have happened in the China she grew up in.) I realize the issue, we walk off but she doesn't make it clear why. The seller keeps pursuing us through the market (someone with an American partner was at the time seen as a lucrative prospect) until a cop shoos him off--and he talks back to the cop. (We did not stick around for the whole exchange, but he was complaining he had done nothing wrong.) That would *never* happen in a police state.

Or lets look at one of those dictatorships that you didn't list: Iran. Once again, 1975. While it was backwards it was a breath of fresh air compared to Pakistan and Afghanistan. (Note: This was before the time of Islamist issues. I wouldn't go back to any of those countries these days!)

Great story. I had a similar one with my French uncle. Home Depot blew his mind.

Worth noting this footage of a ussr grocery store (1990/91) : https://youtu.be/t8LtQhIQ2AE

Not endorsing the article, I think it's worth thinking beyond just the economic frame and also factoring in community resilience and such. There's arguments such as from writers like Orlov: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Orlov_(writer)

> this footage of a ussr grocery store

At least they were spacious! And the small trolleys were kind: you didn't have to feel bad that yours was empty.

Even developing contries' markets usually are groaning with produce. What a condemnation of the communist experiement!

Farmer markets were a separate thing, and that's where you'd find fresh produce (and quality meat), if you could afford it. Looked something like this in late 80s:

https://imgur.com/a/DAepLEJ

Thanks, I did not know this. Look at the smile on the face of the granny in the lower photo!

Did these farmers' markets operate during the communist era? Late, I presume?

At ~5:45 in the supermarket video, what am I looking at? Is that a Soviet TV dinner?

https://youtu.be/t8LtQhIQ2AE?t=345

The text says "kotlety" which are basically meatballs:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutlet#Cuisines_of_Russia,_Ukr.... But I don't understand what I'm looking at either. Maybe it's the ground meat mix that you shape the cutlets yourself before frying? But what is the bread-looking half on the left side?

From visuals it looks like buckwheat with possibly two cutlets under bechamel sauce

The right side is almost certainly buckwheat, known to Russians simply as “kasha.”

The left side is likely the cutlets themselves (the little brown outlines) surrounded by some (cold) white sauce that once heated turns more liquid.

It is buckwheat, known to Russians as “Grechka”. It is quite nice, goes well with meat or even mixed with milk. The white substance is most likely fat.

Haha I forgot we called it grechka. Technically grechnevaya kasha, but colloquially called either grechka or kasha; my grandpa was obsessed with it lol, so we just always called it “ne vkusnaya kasha” aka “not tasty porridge” lol

7:37 I would like to know how bad that meat smelled to get her to make that noise.

You can fit like 6 of those soviet grocery carts into a modern costco cart.

This sounds apocryphal. I don't doubt Yeltsin was impressed by his visit to the supermarket, but by 1989 the writing was more than on the wall for the demise of the USSR. I imagine it'd be more accurate to say that Yeltsin was excited by the prospects of a transformed economy, seeing the prosperity of the U.S. firsthand, rather than his visit being any kind of tipping point in the Soviet Union's downfall.

Anyway, Robin Williams predicted it all five years before Yeltsin's trip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHIcmoY3_lE

Who even cares? It’s Boris Yeltsin, famous good guy and Russian patriot who definitely had a positive income on Russia. Only Cold War-pilled Westerners would think that this would sound like a good story.

Straight from the horse's mouth:

> In Yeltsin’s own autobiography, he wrote about the experience at Randall’s, which shattered his view of communism

That's not straight from the horse's mouth, you left off the attribution (emphasis added):

> In Yeltsin’s own autobiography, he wrote about the experience at Randall’s, which shattered his view of communism, according to pundits.

From that paragraph it sounds like "pundits" are the ones saying it shattered his view of communism, not the autobiography itself.

(Edit: to be fair, that sentence is a really awkward attribution sandwich, so I can see how it might have confused.)

He wrote "When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people. That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it."

Pundits aren't super far out over their skis.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6kh3dw/ive_h...

https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When...

Yes, that's my point. Yeltsin's view may have been shattered, but the USSR was soon to be toast, either way.

Fascinating how Deng Xiaoping had the exact same epiphany visiting Singapore.

There was joke in the Soviet Union "if you see a line, get in it."

It didn't matter if the line was for toilet paper and you had enough. You'd get some extra toilet paper and barter with someone who had extra laundry detergent and not enough TP.

This was common Soviet experience.

It's somewhat surprising to me that Yeltsin, who was obviously high up in the party apparatus, was surprised at the plenty of the US, but nevertheless my point is that the story is not apocryphal.

Was it a trigger for the collapse of the Soviet Union? Honestly, probably. One among many.

I think my comment may have been confusing. The "Soviet experience" was well understood in 1989 (see the clip of the 1984 movie I posted). Only weeks away from Yeltsin's jaunt to the supermarket was the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a true harbinger of the demise of the USSR. Had Yeltsin visited a dreary American DMV, rather than a bountiful supermarket, nothing would have changed.

From what I saw on video, I bet he was. He might have travelled earlier to other Socialist block countries and saw lots of socialist facade stores there, but a visit to a place for simple folk in the US was much more impressive.

(This is why when I travel, I go not to the center, but to the fringes of the cities, to see how the common people live.)

And I'm sure this contributed to his ideas of how the country should be like.

Here's nearly the same exact story in a 1955 American anti-communist propaganda piece. Start at 3:20

https://archive.org/details/0038_Americas_Distribution_of_We...

I have no doubt this happened, but my gut says the US govt set this up to help him make the transition look like a principled decision rather than an outright loss. I'm sure the CIA was more than happy to help him with PR side of things.

The biography of Viktor Belenko [0], a Soviet Mig-25 pilot who defected to America by way of Japan in 1976, has a story about him being shown around the US by some government handlers and disbelieving the grocery store he was taken to, until being shown several more like it. He thought at first that the grocery store was staged, or an unusual example and not the norm.

[0] Mig Pilot by John Barron

Same guy found American cat food better quality than the canned food in the USSR, and fed some to his guests on a couple occasions.

I have some extended family from Eastern European countries. It's just so unfortunate what happened. The road to hell, paved with good intentions. They're normal people stuck picking up the pieces of a failed regime. Even with some things being adjusted, it might take weeks to comfortably afford what a typical SDE could afford in an hour here.

No idea how people in the west romanticize it or say it was a good thing. I've even seen hostility directed towards Eastern Europeans living in the west (almost exclusively from radical college kids) joking about how they got what they deserved or anyone that ran from the USSR was a greedy business person and that the stories are made up.

They say this about Cubans in Miami too.

Yep. Blows my mind. I feel like many people just forget the difference between real life and internet sometimes.

We're talking about people that risked their lives to escape a system. Not your political opponents on twitter.

Ah, the glory days of America. Yesterday, the local market was out of eggs and bananas. There were long lines at too few staffed checkouts. There's a homeless encampment in the mall's parking area. This is in Silicon Valley.

The only solace I find as Americans crumble into poverty and wage slavery is that there is no real better alternative in the world today. The entire world’s glory days are behind it, every place is getting shitty. Everything is expensive and few people are thriving. The future looks joyless and barely survivable.

To me the explanation for why everything got shitty all at once is obvious: the global pandemic “synchronized” all nations and produced hardship everywhere simultaneously. Fragile systems in every country were strained.

By any possible metric people in the world today live better than in any point in history. Sure, last two years created a minor setback, but it will be forgotten in the next few years, when there will be another "everything is good and will grow forever" period in the cycle.

Some people have bought into the captalism "always bad" trope regurgitated over and over in r/antiwork on reddit. I just tune out when I hear "wage slavery"

Sounds like a combination of (a) panic-buying of commodities that people heard were in short supply, similar to the Great Toilet Paper Incident, and (b) local government that doesn't do anything about homeless encampments in mall parking lots. Over in my part of America, and as far as I can tell most parts of America, things go on as usual but with higher prices for some foods.

I could say something like this about the Nordics. The countries that brag over superiour healthcare over the dumb american capitalist.

Today, unless you pay private insurance, you can wait 13 years ( not a typo, you wait a teenager ) for hip surgery.

Sweden today. One of the richest “socialist” countries on the planet.

If you find this story interesting, I strongly recommend you read the new biography of Gorbachev:

https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393647013

By the time Yeltsin visited that grocery store, Gorbachev had been working for decades to put himself into a position of power so that he could carefully shift the USSR to a liberal Democratic government with a market economy. The fact that he actually got himself into position to execute this plan is mind blowing. I don’t think I have ever read a book which so radically reshapes how I view a piece of history.

Here's another thing to blow your mind: Gorbachev was the only Russian leader in history that resigned himself quietly, and then lived his life as a normal person.

In all of Russian history.

You could argue that Medvedev did, too, but this increasingly deranged puppet is sort of back in politics now.

Back in 1989 I, by chance, took a Russian univeristy professor that was visiting Portugal to the largest supermarket in Lisbon. As far as I rememmber, we had to buy some food to take home and cook her a meal and the supermarket was in the way.

As we waited in line to pay she asked us if she could go for another walk by herself. She said that the supermarket was like a cathedral to her. That was when it dawned on me, having been in the USSR before, the shock she was going through.

The modern Chinese relationship to foreign retail distribution operations such as Germany's Metro, France's Carrefour, the US's Walmart and Sam's Club and even Swedish IKEA could also be framed in this light.

There's a similar story of years earlier Mikhail Gorbachev visiting a Canadian grocery and being surprised and impressed.

https://www.tvo.org/article/in-1983-gorbachev-took-a-stroll-...

This is a much better article. It rings truer to the spirit of OP's post, whose timeline I think is too advanced to be believable; by '89 the tide had already turned.

This was one of my childhood supermarkets. Always surreal to see the photos of Boris Yeltsin wandering around in there.

Here's a picture of the store manager greeting Yeltin. Can you imagine?

https://cdn.hpm.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/21152245/Paul-...

"Well well well, looks like stocked shelves changed global geopolitics after all, didn't they?" Stocker, rolling their eyes "Yes, sir"

If I recall correctly, part of Yeltsin’s entourage demanded to see the man in charge of the bread department, hoping to learn about how it was kept so well stocked.

The collapse of the USSR wasn't caused by economics or arms races - see how regimes like Cuba, North Korea still survive. Low oil prices helped, but it could have happened during a boom, too. The 80s were not the worst economic or humanitarian crisis the USSR has faced, not even close.

The Soviet Union collapsed because the Party lost control of the country and the tensions and outright conflicts that previously prevented any challenge to its power tore up the country. It was conflicts between the nationalities, competition between bureaucrats of different levels over resources, the young Komsomol chiefs against the old gerontocrats, Moscow against the Russian regions, the Soviet Army against the KGB, the religious against the state atheism, innumerable other conflicts, with probably the ethnic/national conflicts having the most intensity. The USSR found out it couldn't control its own population and that is why it retreated from Eastern European countries as well.

The party lost control because of glasnost and perestroika which unleashed all the contradictions and conflict at once, which further caused chaos. It is no accident that the Communist party got itself banned in both Russia and Ukraine. In comparison China didn't try glasnost and did incremental and initially isolated economic reforms, with agriculture still being restricted to family farms to this day.

The USA didn't win the Cold War or cause the USSRs collapse, most of the time the policy was containment or even reapproachment, not rollback.

The only way they could have kept control of the country was to descend closer to 'hermit kingdom' like North Korea, had the economy produced even at 2/3rds of what the US did on a per capita basis, the Union would still exist as is.

We (the US) were able to trigger an arms race at a time when the Union was least able to afford it, and overwhelm what central planning could deal with.

In the same way the assassination of Ferdinand started WW1, that is to say, both would have likely happened anyways.

Yes, the relative abundance produced by capitalism would have overcome the USSR/Russia even absent Yeltsin's visit. Everywhere communism has been tried, it's failed, and the most assertive efforts have led to the death of tens of millions.

If USSR escaped unscathed from WW2 and America had instead been nearly destroyed we'd probably be hearing the exact opposite.

Oh yes, since Post Civil War and Pre WW2 Soviet Union was an amazingly productive economy without multiple famines and definitely didn't shoot over a million of their own citizens without a good reason.

The growth was pretty staggering, yeah. They progressed from agrarian to first man in space in 40 years.

The cost of that though. My grandmother and her sister were two survivors out of five children. The rest of the kids died of hunger and sickness during random migrations between villages in 1930s. Her father lost everything he had because soviets decided it’s theirs now, so the whole family had to move someplace else to find a new home. Not everyone had made it.

The growth was staggering because they stole grain and farmland from their citizens, exported it to buy machinery because the USSR couldn't manufacture themselves, which was also wasted since they didn't have the ability to keep the machines maintained properly.

So yeah, turns out you can do things if you starve your people to death. (See North Korea)

They industrialized fast enough to defeat the Nazis who otherwise would probably have exterminated them. The urgency and the threat they faced if they didnt industrialize quickly enough was real and existential.

And yes, in order to do so they caused millions of Ukrainians to starve by exporting all of the food they grew.

Exactly like Britain did to my ancestors in Ireland for profit.

It probably doesn't make sense to attribute it to communism, because Russia is doing the same damn throw human life into a meat grinder approach in the modern day despite no longer being nominally communist. But that poor outcome is definitely attributable to something in the neighborhood of communism, namely the more general totalitarianism, which communism was most certainly a gateway to.

Having said that, I'm not terribly keen on the nominally capitalist nominally democratic "inverted" totalitarianism that's on the rise. But given that more potent forms of totalitarianism are resurgent and eager to fill any power vacuums, I guess it's the best path we've got for now. I can just hope that the newer generations have developed enough memetic resistance to make the whole Facebook (nee Fox News) hysterical-nonsensical mob thing a passing fad.

>It probably doesn't make sense to attribute it to communism, because Russia is doing the same damn throw human life into a meat grinder approach in the modern day despite no longer being nominally communist.

Yeah, this is 100% about Russian borders, which are long, exposed, expensive to defend and present an existential threat on a (historically) fairly regular basis.

America's geography is pretty much the polar opposite, so it's hard to empathize.

Yet, contrast USA with Mexico (not communist). Geography is no match for governance. The USSR failed because their system of government, like every other communist state, produced abject poverty.

You're not completely incorrect, but the US has a far far better geography than Mexico, and it's not even close.

I would think that since the borders are expensive to defend, that would lead to trying to be more efficient with human life and other limited resources, rather than less.

Furthermore, talking about the defense of Russian borders is kind of ridiculous in the context of the current attack on Ukraine, where Russia is trying to expand its borders which would otherwise remain stationary. It only makes sense if you interpret "borders" as referring to some larger area outside the actual country but which they nevertheless feel entitled to.

>Furthermore, talking about the defense of Russian borders is kind of ridiculous in the context of the current attack on Ukraine, where Russia is trying to expand its borders which would otherwise just remain stationary.

It's expanding at the points where the Nazi advance almost succeeded in breaking the USSR, where Russia has its only warm water ports and where, long term, NATO, the alliance that destroyed Libya on a whim, was planning to set up military bases with offensive capabilities.

It's still about the vulnerability of its borders.

You're no longer talking about defense, but rather trying to justify an offensive war. Those lines on the map are Schelling points that had enabled a great deal of peace. And frankly they were much more defensible through their legitimacy with other nations, than whatever geographic obstacles are hoped to be obtained.

>they were much more defensible through their legitimacy

Right, just like the legitimacy of Libyan, Iraqi and Afghan borders conferred all the protection they needed.

Putin was the one who tried to explain to America that it would be better if everybody respected each other's sovereignty in 2003 but in 2003 we decided that this principle can go fuck itself.

If the threat model is to protect against an overt military invasion by the US, geographical features aren't going to matter much either.

Furthermore, national borders do seem to matter very much to many people. Europeans widely condemned the Iraq war, because they saw through its false pretenses. And the borders we're talking about are shared with Europeans.

But regardless, the countries the US has invaded still have intact borders! The US didn't annex part of Iraq to create a new US territory or carve off a chunk to give to Saudi Arabia. Rather it changed out the government wholesale while leaving the nominal country intact. Despite its shortcomings, this is a paradigm that helps these disputes converge over time. "Iraq" is now just a part of the US economic empire, regardless of the immoral actions leading to that. It's not right in the sense that it rewards the aggression, but it is right in the sense that it provides more civilian stability.

If Putin were still just playing the covert/political influence game, most people wouldn't be concerned. He did that, and lost hard. He then tried the surgical strike to change out the government, and lost hard. Since he's a loser by current conventions, he flipped the table and descended into WWII-style razing of civilian infrastructure, exterminating the population, and conquering land area. Then he throws out the justification that other countries might engage in the same, even though nobody has. That is what is grossly unacceptable, and needs to be stamped down hard if we want our era of relative peace to continue.

(Also, given that Putin speaks to play a situation rather than promote consistent ideals, what he's happened to say isn't really relevant)

>If the threat model is to protect against an overt military invasion by the US, geographical features aren't going to matter much either.

The US made the mistake of thinking that geographical features didn't pose them a problem in Afghanistan.

Then they realized how incredibly frail their supply chains could be when geography wasnt in their favor.

That mistake cost trillions.

>But regardless, the countries the US has invaded still have intact borders!

This is the most absurd excuse for American imperialism I think I've ever heard.

>Then he throws out the justification that other countries might engage in the same, even though nobody has.

So, Libya happened. America wants Russia to end up like Libya. Russia doesnt want to end up like Libya, so they invaded Ukraine.

>That is what is grossly unacceptable, and needs to be stamped down hard if we want our era of relative peace to continue.

I mean, if you excuse the wanton destruction of Libya by saying "hey at its a failed state but it has intact borders!" then you were basically begging for Ukraine to be invaded.

Sure, geography matters when your country has so little development that retreating to the mountains is a successful strategy. But that doesn't really say much about a developed country that would suffer significant losses by retreating to natural cover.

> This is the most absurd excuse for American imperialism I think I've ever heard.

I'm not excusing American imperialism. I am against American imperialism - note how I readily described Iraq as becoming part of the US empire, as opposed to the usual rejection of the idea that the US is an empire. However I am against Russian imperialism as well, and this situation is rooted in Russian imperialism.

> So, America wants Russia to end up like Libya. Russia doesnt want to end up like Libya.

Once again you're trying to justify offensive conquest by invoking the necessity of defense. If Russia was/is going to "end up like Libya", this has only been made more likely by Russia invading its neighbor.

>Sure, geography matters

It more than matters. It dictates the very shape of humanity.

>But that doesn't really say much about a developed country

It matters as much to developed countries as it does to non developed. Switzerland didn't get wealthy by being easy to invade.

>However I am against Russian imperialism as well, and this situation is rooted in Russian imperialism.

Realistically treating Russian defense concerns as a sheer irrelevance is helping to perpetuate this war.

We can be aggressive imperialists or we can stay out of their neighborhood but we can't be both and not provoke a reaction. You can condemn Russian imperialism all you like but if you threaten the bear it will still claw your eyes out.

>Once again you're trying to justify offensive conquest by invoking the necessity of defense. If Russia was/is going to "end up like Libya", this has only been made more likely by Russia invading its neighbor.

The scary part is that this just isnt true. Control over Sevastopol and the land bridge to crimea puts them in a much better defensive position than before.

Destroying western Ukraine ("demilitarising") as a viable functioning state also renders it much less useful to the west, both as a partner and as a means of threatening Russia, turning it into an expensive and dangerous liability.

> Switzerland didn't get wealthy by being easy to invade.

Yeah, back before modern missiles, satellites, fighter jets, and drones. Back when the physical storage of gold was economically significant. Back before technological infrastructure started creating outsized productivity. In the modern day, what actually creates and protects Switzerland's way of life is their economic and political connections to their neighbors.

> We can be aggressive imperialists

Repeat after me: Ukraine wanting to join the US economic empire is not aggression. Ukraine wanting to join NATO to protect themselves from Russia is not aggression. Now write it on the blackboard 100 times.

> if you threaten the bear it will still claw your eyes out

More like when the bear occasionally comes out of the woods and wanders into yards, it will be tolerated. When the bear starts routinely posing a danger to humans, the bear will be shot.

> Destroying western Ukraine ("demilitarising") as a viable functioning state also renders it much less useful to the west

I agree this has become their open goal. Russia failed at stealing it, so they'll try to destroy it and kill everyone living there. Ultimately the more Russia destroys, the larger Ukraine's IMF loans and other foreign indebtedness will be. That indeed disgusts me, but not as much as genocide.

The first part of the article I can relate to, but how it tied to the conclusion and this: “the average Russian spends about 50% of their income on food.” — is utter nonsense.

Here is on the napkin calculation of grocery basket to salary from retail and service sources[0] for central region:

5600 ₽ * 100 / 62000 ₽ => 9,0323 %

[0] MOEX:FIVE https://www.x5.ru/ru/PublishingImages/Pages/Media/News/Index...

[1] MOEX:HHR https://stats.hh.ru/central_federal_district

And here is the 2022 state of supermarkets in Russia:

[2] Typical near apartment supermarket, only of this retail chain there is, 18300 of these in country https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTy04V1bTDs

[3] Hypermarket https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kG9yfCwG_s

I am from somewhat medium class but not poor background and I know very few people who earn that much, is that advertised as average monthly salary? Maybe they need to check the median? (The first link wouldn't load for me.)

Edit: fwiw friend about to receive a degree in economy says 62000 is basically a bullshit number for a single person, and if they are talking families well 5600 is also (it may be enough for one person to survive without eating out but not a family). Does not compute.

You can browse https://stats.hh.ru by yourself, sure salary differs by region and occupation, but it is even much higher for educated or just hard-working people, especially in tech. How is it bullshit, exactly ? (Only way I can think if you compare really low wage gov clerk with high tech worker and then average (50000 + 250000) / 2 = 150000 but it is not the case)

You chose the worst place to get your numbers. Try browsing avito and see if any of the 10000 rub/month flats in city center are available. The numbers are there only to attract you.

But for the record none of the .ru links you gave work for me currently. Does hh even host a representative amount of jobs for cleaning staff, shop salesperson, cooks and other jobs many regular people have? How many people don't have the chance to work for good clean money and get by with gigs or grey salaries? Consider that, double monthly food expense and it may be not 50 percent but not too far. It may be hard to grasp if you happen to be in a muscovite software engineer bubble.

How is publicly traded job marketplace company (hh.ru) is the worst place to source salary numbers ? Here is another superjob.ru, yeah Avito you mentioned[0],

Somehow, you argue without even bothering to access websites in question. Are you trolling ?

[0] https://www.avito.ru/all/vakansii/polnyy_den-ASgCAQICAUCQCxS...

Not sure if you got my point that numbers on these platforms are a scam, it's pretty well known that they are unrealistic and posted to attract attention (aside from select few like Yandex maybe). You keep picking bad biased sources, and you have yet to clarify how to feed a family on 5600 per month

It's naive to imagine Yeltsin's mind was really changed by a spontaneous visit. He didn't have intelligence on what a US supermarket was like? The premiere of a superpower just randomly decided to visit a grocery store?

No.

Yeltsin was contemplating reforms and changes and wanted to collect a political tool he could later user if needed. He knew exactly how this visit would go, and it was intended so he could use it as rhetorical device to illustrate the necessity of reforms.

Who knows. At least according to (then Germany's chancellor) Helmut Schmidt, at an official visit of Brezhnev where he had invited him to his private home in Hamburg, Brezhnev was flabbergasted that the German chancellor could live in an average home, next to normal people, without walls and hundreds of soldiers separating them.

We have the same story in Norway. Apparently Nikita Khrusjtsjov visited then prime minister Einar Gerhardsen in his small and modest housing association apartment in 1964 and subsequently demanded to know where Gerhardsen REALLY lived, cause he couldn't imagine the prime minister living in a normal apartment in a normal apartment building. But he did and lived in the same apartment until his death in 1987.

It might be a matter of Soviet diplomacy to act surprised.

Is the story with Gerhardsen relayed by him / officials? Schmidt told it himself, so at least it's not something somebody made up and everybody repeated it because it's such a nice story, unless he himself made it up. He wasn't the type, but who knows.

The story has been told by his son, but I think it is confirmed by several sources. I don't think Gerhardsen himself ever told it publicly.

I don’t think the official narrative implies he was naive.

A senior person in an authoritarian system like that could be surrounded by “yes men” who would repeat the official Soviet lines that perhaps American supermarkets weren’t all that much different from soviet ones, or only available to the super rich, etc

Perhaps they also received legitimate reports as well. An unplanned impromptu trip would be a good way to see which reports were the most accurate.

Sorry I don't mean that Yeltsin was naive, but that it's naive for us in the present day (and the author) to believe that but for a random whim Yeltsin would have believed anything different.

". . . has been brought to a state of such poverty" from the article also contradicts that the USSR was the greatest success story (until China) at lifting a very poor population out of poverty.

> [...] the USSR was the greatest success story (until China) at lifting a very poor population out of poverty.

It is much easier to display numbers showing that you "lifted poor population out of poverty", when most of that poor population either got genocided or sent off to gulags or simply died off due to the aforementioned poverty. Not even mentioning the classic number massage.

Before someone tries to go full-on "you are just an american shill", I grew up in Russia during 90s, and my parents+grandparents grew up in the USSR. One of them had to cover up his jewish ethnicity his entire life, I only found out about it many years later, after his passing. Let me just say, he wasn't doing that cover-up for some personal reasons at all.

When it comes to the Soviet Union, the closer you are to the source material, the worse it looks.

Assuming that leaders are always informed and thinking ahead isn't particularly wise.

In Soviet Communist states visits, public displays and greetings were so tightly choreographed and planned that there is a very slim chance that anything like this is coincidental. When Nikita Khrushchev visited Mao in '59 the protocol was specified down to the handshake with the intent on the Chinese side to signify the low status of the relation given the Soviet-Sino split.

Symbolism and performance was everything in Soviet politics, and even in Soviet life. American presidents might casually go and walk into some store on camera but this is not how Communist poltiicians thought.

Seems very doubtful to me.

Pointing to one highly choreographed high profile incident is not convincing evidence that it was normative. This was not much of a PR stunt. It was at least on paper an unplanned visit. I don't believe he used it as persuasive evidence. Unless you think his biographer writing about him after he left office was doing so still for political posturing, he appears to have had a genuine emotional reaction.

> bout a year after the Russian leader left office, a Yeltsin biographer later wrote that on the plane ride to Yeltsin’s next destination, Miami, he was despondent. He couldn’t stop thinking about the plentiful food at the grocery store and what his countrymen had to subsist on in Russia.

> In Yeltsin’s own autobiography, he wrote about the experience at Randall’s, which shattered his view of communism, according to pundits. Two years later, he left the Communist Party and began making reforms to turn the economic tide in Russia.

>Unless you think his biographer writing about him after he left office was doing so still for political posturing

I believe that about most politician's autobiographies, not just Soviet ones. I wouldn't be surprised if the autobiography was written with the explicit intent to sell better in the US, Prince Harry style.

Soviet guy comes to the land of plenty, has a almost religious experience in a supermarket and shakes off his misbegotten Soviet ways, that's a Disney story lol. Of course he knew what was going on in the US and his own country long before.

>>The premiere of a superpower

I think this attribute far too much intelligence to those in power. Like the people that claim Trump was doing 5D chess =.

I generally believe all governments are lead by functional idiots and the human race survives in spite of their efforts to destroy us.

It can be both. You can know intellectually that the Americans have a higher standard of living than Russians, and still be surprised by what that really means, at a practical level, for ordinary people.

Right, and also why would he care so much about grocery stores in America when he's in Russia and reviewing military and diplomatic intel about the US? "They have grocery stores that have more items than our stores" - boring. "A US diplomat was arrested and released in Latin America for something he did while drunk" - interesting.

Everything is fundamentally driven by the economy, so having even a glimpse of that economy in practice (eg: a supermarket) is essential to drawing a more accurate picture of the wider military and geopolitics.

If your foe can demand bananas any day of the year for pennies while you can't, you lost that war before it even started.

>”He didn't have intelligence on what a US supermarket was like?”

Take this all with a grain of salt because this is just what I remember from reading stories online of people who used to live in the USSR, but the average person realized the West had more material prosperity but they were under the impression the upper class folks were the only ones with real access to it. They believed the common worker still had to deal with limited selection and shortages, much like they did.

Additionally, with whatever glimpses they saw of western consumerism they were told that the abundance was intentionally staged, like a Potemkin village. This was not uncommon for the USSR to do when dignitaries or journalists came to visit. So it made sense that the West would do this too.

I have to imagine that as a Soviet citizen and dignitary he assumed everything he saw on his trip was staged or choreographed in some way. They intentionally made an unplanned stop to try and confront this. Perhaps he and his entourage already knew he was going to find a well stocked supermarket, but I can’t help but think cognitive dissonance kept him from really accepting it until he saw it firsthand.

In 1989, I was a child growing up on the streets of a small town in Siberia. During those years, I believed everyone in America was prosperous - the 'common worker' didn't exist, and it was wealth all the way down. My family was not connected, and we were firmly middle class (in the "all animals are equal" way). The Soviet propaganda machine was compelling before my time, but by the 90s, common folks in the USSR were not under any delusion that life in the US was equally bad.

My grandfather was born in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) and lived there as a child through the Nazi siege. In the 40's and 50's in the USSR he and his friends saw through the propaganda and knew that things in the US were much better.

But you know what's strange? He lives in NJ now, he's been there for the last 25 years. He watches Russian state TV and also CNN and thinks he gets both perspectives. When Russia invaded Ukraine, he defended Russia, and spit out all the lines about the "nazi leadership" of Ukraine. "Bucha was faked," all that. I think he realized that he was in the minority and toned it down, but this definitely made an impression on me. It's not that certain people are immune to propaganda and some aren't. Anybody can fall into it.

What has you convinced you’re not falling for propaganda on Ukraine — that it’s him who is wrong?

Well, one year long invadion should give you a hint. Detaining people for calling it war instead of "special operation" is another one. Calling other neighbours "fake/artificial" countries is another bad sign that Russia's intentions are not good.

People were not detained in the USA for using the wrong nomenclature to describe the Iraq invasion, and yet that was also an unspeakably cruel, venal war of cynical aggression knowingly perpetrated on laughably false pretenses. To this day roughly half of Americans think it was the right move - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/19/iraq-war-co...

So I don't think factors like that are so good at separating "good" invasions from "bad" ones.

Maybe the invasion of Iraq was also bad!

The thing is, there's vanishingly few "good invasions".

Even fewer when you're intent on annexing territory and capturing resources and large numbers of people.

The logic error you've committed above: Stifling dissent about the war with authoritarian measures may not be a necessary condition for an invasion to be bad, but it still can be a hint that the invasion is bad.

Rejecting the territorial integrity of the country invaded, similarly, can be a pretty good hint.

>"Even fewer when you're intent on annexing territory and capturing resources and large numbers of people."

As ugly as it sounds I would actually prefer that the US had annexed countries it had invaded. This way it would at least be responsible and people would leave in more decent place than before. Instead they came in, murdered and otherwise fucked people and then left without much remorse and repercussion.

People were detained for using the wrong nomenclature around communism though. Or are we brushing the whole McCarthyism era under the rug?

Yes, and?

When McCarthy did it, it didn't show how strong McCarthy was; it showed how weak he was. When Putin does it, it doesn't show how strong Putin is, either.

To see Putin as a weak evildoer is falling for US propaganda.

The truth is more nuanced. Strong powers take advantage of weak powers and the US is no exception. We do it by expanding NATO territory. There are also arguments to be made that the US pushed Putin into the war. As it is a strategic move to have russia use up its arms fighting a neighbor rather than the US. The war also greatly increased US natgas exports to Europe.

It's pretty immoral / weak to for the world's superpower to push neighboring countries into war for these reasons.

1. NATO expansion isn't driven by US imperialism. We aren't conquering countries and forcing them to join; they are asking to join - and not because we're tying a big aid package to NATO membership. They're joining because they're worried about Russian imperialism.

2. You say it's accepting propaganda to see Putin as weak. But you see him as being pushed into war by the US. That's not something that happens to someone who is strong.

3. "As it is a strategic move to have russia use up its arms fighting a neighbor rather than the US."

Absolutely. More: It's to NATO's advantage to have Russia use up its arms fighting a non-NATO-member.

Sure, Putin is not a good leader for Russia, he's power-hungry and does not seem to have the best interests of the Russian people in mind. However by those same metrics you should consider US leadership as also being a weak evildoer.

Is it good or evil to push other countries into war knowing that thousands will die?

Is it good or evil to profit off the resulting energy crisis?

Is it even smart to risk a global nuclear war to destroy outdated arms and decades old tanks?

Is it good or evil to trigger economic collapse via sanctions causing starvation both inside the country and to export nations? Don't we consider Mao and Stalin some of the most evil people that ever lived for doing the same? Starvation is a terrible way to die yet it isn't even seen as collateral damage.

Putin will die anyway in the next couple decades. It made no sense to poke the bear and trigger all this. It ultimately just strengthens China and increases the amount of global suffering.

The US did not push Russia into this war. Putin chose this war.

All your moralizing is completely missing the point, because you are assigning cause to the wrong agents.

The US absolutely had a hand in this and not just NATO expansion.

We interfered with Ukraine elections: https://www.cato.org/commentary/americas-ukraine-hypocrisy

Dan Carlin has a great 'Poking the Bear' episode that goes into detail on the many ways in which the US provoked Russia/Putin. Of course Putin was the primary cause of the war but it is foolish to believe that the US is blameless.

I don't understand how this is supposed to be a gotcha. Are you assuming that everyone opposed to Russia's invasion of Ukraine think the USA invasion of Iraq was good? I think in both cases it's very easy to identify which side is in the wrong, and it's the one invading another country.

Well, I think mislabeling as a “one year long invasion” what is a decade long war with Ukraine intentionally shelling urban centers in violation of a negotiated peace speaks to having been taken in by propaganda.

Not sure if this is a troll or a bot but I'll take the question seriously and answer it seriously. After all, this did occur to me at the time.

What convinced me that I'm not falling for Western propaganda? What it came down to was the following argument, and it has to be an argument and not a soundbite because in order to get beneath the propaganda we have to go deep.

- Many of Russia's claims against Ukraine are either true or have real elements of truth to them. Yes the founder of Azov is an avowed nationalist*. Yes, there have been laws passed in Ukraine that required greater use of Ukrainian language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_policy_in_Ukraine#201.... Yes, the parliament of Ukraine considered giving Hero status to Stepan Bandera, who is a controversial figure because (among other things) he did work with the Nazis in WWII. Yes, there was fighting in Donbas, and while I don't know about Ukraine intentionally shelling civilians, I can imagine that at least there were civilians killed as a result of Ukrainian fire in that area since 2014.

- None of these arguments rise to the level of necessitating military intervention.

- Russia did not take steps to de-escalate the conflict. There were so many things Russia could have done if it was genuinely interested in peace and friendly relations with a sovereign Ukraine. If you're worried about persecution of Russians in Ukraine, make it easy for them to get to Russia. If you're concerned about fighting, use your status as a UNSC member to call for a peacekeeping mission. Russia did none of these things.

I could go on, but the main argument is that when you look past the emotionally charged arguments, the substance and the necessity of military action just aren't there. Bandera's quite a character, but put his history aside for a moment and ask yourself what's his relevance to the current conflict: Yushchenko awarded him hero status in 2010. Yanukovich cancelled this a couple months later. In 2019 Ukraine's parliament took up the issue and decided against giving him an award. And Russia wants to send in soldiers for that? Because they considered him for an award and rejected the idea?

* He (Andriy Biletsky) is quoted as having said something about "lead the white races .. against Semite-led untermenschen" but the Guardian article that makes the claim provides no citation.*

> while I don't know about Ukraine intentionally shelling civilians, I can imagine that at least there were civilians killed as a result of Ukrainian fire in that area since 2014

Ukraine has intentionally shelled urban centers for a decade — and you think Russia is wrong to protect ethnic Russians from that?

> Russia did not take steps to de-escalate the conflict. There were so many things Russia could have done if it was genuinely interested in peace and friendly relations with a sovereign Ukraine.

Do you mean like asking France and Germany to negotiate a peace that protects the people of Donbas while remaining part of Ukraine?

Russia did that in 2014 — and it was cynically exploited to arm Ukraine for this conflict by NATO, who refused to protect the people in Donbas from Ukrainian shelling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjwSNiCSpnw

What should Russia have done to protect the ethnic Russians in Donbas — having tried to negotiate a peace only for Ukraine to shell their cities for another decade?

> I could go on, but the main argument is that when you look past the emotionally charged arguments

You’re the one making emotional strawmen about Banderites rather than focusing on the stated Russian objective of protecting Donbas after a decade of diplomacy failed.

Is that because you learned about the Russian “position” from NATO propaganda rather than directly from RT?

This is the Russian position, according to RT:

> Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, citing Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements, designed to give Donetsk and Lugansk special status within the Ukrainian state. The protocols, brokered by Germany and France, were first signed in 2014. Former Ukrainian president Pyotr Poroshenko has since admitted that Kiev’s main goal was to use the ceasefire to buy time and “create powerful armed forces.”

https://www.rt.com/news/569954-ukraine-us-nato-biden/

So to protect the people of Donbas, Russia fires missiles at Kiev, Kherson, Odessa, Lvov? To protect those people it launches an invasion and calls on the Ukrainian army to overthrow its government? To protect those people it annexes Kherson?

To protect those people it tries to decimate the energy infrastructure of Ukraine so that people will freeze in the winter and beg their government to stop fighting?

Do you honestly believe that Putin actually has the best interests of the people of Donbas at heart? Do you really think that's what this is about? When Russian journalists get murdered he shows no compassion. He doesn't give a fuck about the people of Donbas, he doesn't even give a fuck about his own people.

> So to protect the people of Donbas, Russia fires missiles at Kiev, Kherson, Odessa, Lvov?

> To protect those people it tries to decimate the energy infrastructure of Ukraine so that people will freeze in the winter and beg their government to stop fighting?

This is the brutality of war — and why Russia tried to make the Minsk agreements work.

> Do you honestly believe that Putin actually has the best interests of the people of Donbas at heart? Do you really think that's what this is about?

Yes — I believe that a substantial reason for this is what happened in Donbas. Russians are angry at Putin for being weak and allowing this violence against ethnic Russians.

I certainly believe that this is more about protecting Donbas and Russia than the past decade of events has been good faith by NATO — Russia’s story makes sense, while NATO is openly lying by pretending this was an unprovoked attack.

- - - - -

You didn’t answer:

What specifically should Russia have done when a decade of diplomacy failed?

> Yes — I believe that a substantial reason for this is what happened in Donbas. Russians are angry at Putin for being weak and allowing this violence against ethnic Russians.

There was no violence to speak of. In all of 2021, only 25 civilians died, lowest annual figure since the war in Ukraine began in 2014. These deaths were mainly due to land mines in regions illegally occupied by Russia. To build support for the new invasion, Russian state media has blown these deaths out of proportion for years, depicting the situation as if people were living under constant artillery attacks and hiding in basements year after year.

> What specifically should Russia have done when a decade of diplomacy failed?

Cut funding and arming of the so-called "separatists" and remove Russian tanks, guns and military personnel from Ukraine. Politically, if they want a stable neighbour with exemplary human rights record, then they should encourage the integration of Ukraine into NATO, OECD and the EU. All countries in the region that have integrated with western organizations have seen dramatic improvements in all areas of human development.

> This is the brutality of war

You're 100% wrong here. This is not the brutality of war but the brutality of Russia. If the main goal is to protect the ethnic Russians of Donbas, why fire missiles at Lvov? Why try to send tanks into Kiev? Why capture Kherson? You know why? Because protecting Donbas is not the goal! It was a paper-thin excuse for some non-sense power politics and territorial expansion.

I already answered what Russia should have done. Russia claims "diplomacy has failed" and it's so paper thin. Even the US went before the UN in the case of Iraq. Russia did not go to the UN in this case. Their news programs (which I watch) will tell you they did, and their ambassador probably put forth some slapdash resolution, but did they take it seriously? No. Did they raise legitimate concerns and act like a partner interested in resolving a problem, as opposed to someone looking to escalate a problem into an excuse? No. They accuse Zelensky of being a drug-addicted fascist. Have you seen him? Have you seen Putin? Did you not see the anger and hatred in Putin's face on Feb 24? I did. I was shocked by it. I'd never seen his face so contorted. And this wasn't some propaganda show that took a clip out of context, I watched his whole speech on Russia's channel one.

I'm pretty sure you're just trolling at this point. Don't you have better things to do? I do, and I'm going to go see to them. Good day, sir.

> Even the US went before the UN in the case of Iraq.

…and then invaded unilaterally, anyway. In violation of UN laws.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_the_Iraq_War

> You're 100% wrong here. This is not the brutality of war but the brutality of Russia.

Look up what the US did in Iraq and Afghanistan. We literally droned people trying to save people we’d droned in so-called “double taps”.

We standardized that practice: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26296941

> Did they raise legitimate concerns and act like a partner interested in resolving a problem, as opposed to someone looking to escalate a problem into an excuse?

They spent a decade trying to work with countries like France and Germany to enact the Minsk accords — which those countries promised to guarantee.

Did those NATO countries act like a partner interested in resolving a problem? — did they even do what they’d promised in that treaty?

> Have you seen him? Have you seen Putin? Did you not see the anger and hatred in Putin's face on Feb 24?

Yes — Putin’s speeches have been thoughtful and considered, explaining their reasons. Especially compared to the vapid virtue signaling from Ukraine and NATO.

> I'm pretty sure you're just trolling at this point.

This is a bad faith ad hominem because you’re uncomfortable answering the questions of someone who disagrees with you.

That’s a sign you don’t have good support for your beliefs — notice how you’re bothered but I’m not?

The crimes in Bucha were corroborated by not only the testimony of the residents there, but also the security cameras left in homes and businesses and even satellite photography. The Russians left corpses laying out in the streets for weeks as they occupied the town.

https://youtu.be/8ek5jt8Ru3o

I have no idea about Bucha.

I do know that US media has lied or propagandized numerous aspects of this war — from the origins to the current status.

My question was that broader one:

How do you know this isn’t like Iraq (where the media lied about reasons) or Afghanistan (where the media lied about status, until the sudden collapse)?

> have no idea about Bucha

Maybe start with international accounts of war crimes?

Why is that interesting?

Both sides have presented evidence of war crimes and I already believe that soldiers do brutal things in conflicts.

> both sides have presented evidence of war crimes

Both sides always do. One side, in this case, has international validation. If you’re ignoring evidence and going off headlines, of course you’ll have a shallower view.

Considering Iraq invasion and how it was "presented" at the time everything is possible but it's hard to me to understand how can someone trust an authoritan regime lead by someone like Putin. I think some people are just pissed off and try to find something against the system that treated them "unfairy"

Not sure if this provides any insight to you, but FWIW my grandfather is not pissed off. He's one of the most easy-going, happy-go-lucky people I know. He doesn't really care a whole lot about the conflict, those are just his conclusions from what he's seen. And he has interests in life outside of what's covered on news programs, he just likes to keep up with the news, as do most normal people.

As to how anyone can trust the regime, if the only information you consume is what's curated by the regime, and if interesting-but-crtical views are not pushed forward, your thinking will be skewed. This is human nature.

I think this exchange between Lex Fridman and a girl who fled from North Korea is very interesting: https://youtu.be/usDqSEKDVsA?t=562

I was born in 1961, was a child growing up on the streets of a small town in Siberia just like yourself but I guess I am an older version by what looks to be 10-15 years. The town was satellite science type called Akademgorodok. We were middle class "equals" just as you described but that was in 70s. In the 80s as far as I can remember neither myself nor my friends believed any of that Soviet Propaganda. Our parents were mostly scientists and some (very few yet) had visited the West and we had pretty good ideas what's in the stores over there ;)

> but the average person realized the West had more material prosperity but they were under the impression the upper class folks were the only ones with real access to it

This propaganda technique is called reverse cargo cult. They don't try to directly refute the facts on the ground. They just claim that clever people realize it's all an illusion. It's devastatingly effective. No one wants to be on the wrong side of a sneer. https://hanshowe.org/2017/02/04/trump-and-the-reverse-cargo-...

"In a regular cargo cult, you have people who see an airstrip, and the cargo drops, so they build one out of straw, hoping for the same outcome. They don’t know the difference between a straw airstrip and a real one, they just want the cargo.

In a reverse cargo cult, you have people who see an airstrip, and the cargo drops, so they build one out of straw. But there’s a twist:

When they build the straw airstrip, it isn’t because they are hoping for the same outcome. They know the difference, and know that because their airstrip is made of straw, it certainly won’t yield any cargo, but it serves another purpose. They don’t lie to the rubes and tell them that an airstrip made of straw will bring them cargo. That’s an easy lie to dismantle. Instead, what they do is make it clear that the airstrip is made of straw, and doesn’t work, but then tell you that the other guy’s airstrip doesn’t work either. They tell you that no airstrips yield cargo. The whole idea of cargo is a lie, and those fools, with their fancy airstrip made out of wood, concrete, and metal is just as wasteful and silly as one made of straw.

1980s Soviets knew that their government was lying to them about the strength and power of their society, the Communist Party couldn’t hide all of the dysfunctions people saw on a daily basis. This didn’t stop the Soviet leadership from lying. Instead, they just accused the West of being equally deceptive. “Sure, things might be bad here, but they are just as bad in America, and in America people are actually foolish enough to believe in the lie! Not like you, clever people. You get it. You know it is a lie."

I see parallels to this now all the time - in conspiracy believers, and people from the Midwest who take it as common knowledge that life in California is a complete hellscape right now, because their preferred media sources tell them so every day.

Aka "everybody does it". People paid to go to pro-Putin demonstrations don't believe that people who go (maybe... used to go) to contra-Putin demonstrations were not paid. That's where I first heard about it.

Right, or like one fellow I know "It's the same anywhere you go". No, it's not.

It's also the defense many people use to comfort/lie to themselves when the politician they support is caught lying/being a scumbag: "Aaah, politicians, they're all the same!".

I had never heard of reverse cargo-cult before, thank you for the explanation and example

It really exposes the motivation for otherwise mystifying behavior!

Their intelligence officers must have known. They lived here as diplomats and free access to just travel around. Maybe people like Yeltsin didn't believe them or the KGB was afraid to tell people, but they should have known.

There is a soviet joke. Two workers in France discuss, one really wants to move to the soviet union, the paradise for workers, the land of plenty. The other is more hesitant, he also heard stories of famine and repression. All capitalist propaganda, says the first one, and I made up my mind, I am going. Well, says the other one, I might join you, but first you go, and you tell me how it is, and if it is what you say it is, I go too. But if it is what those capitalists say it is, you might not be free to write your mind so let's devise a code: if you can write freely, write in black ink, if you are coerced, use red ink, and I will know I shouldn't come.

A month later, he receives a letter, in black ink, saying "the soviet union is fantastic, workers are really cared for here, we have freedom, food, prosperity, everyone is happy. The only inconvenience is that I really cannot find any red ink anywhere".

In the 1970s, one of my professors was assigned to be guide/translator for a group of visiting Soviet social scientists in Los Angeles. He asked them what they wanted to see and they insisted on a tour of Watts, so they could see the "real America" behind the Potemkin villages. So they all got into a schoolbus and went over to Watts. The Soviets wouldn't believe that they were really seeing Watts, because this neighborhood singled-out in Soviet propaganda as a pit of misery actually seemed to show a better quality of life than what they had at home. So, they insisted on getting off the bus to ask random people on the street what area they were really in.

Maybe not. Khrushchev was apparently dazzled by corn, or as it was known then "sausage on a stalk".

https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=khrushchev+corn

He wasn't premier at the time.

But anyway the article hints at what you are saying.

An aide to Yeltsin later reported that in that visit to the grocery store in Houston “the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed” inside his boss.

So perhaps he was already thinking that way, and an improptu visit to a supermarket would be of great interest to him.

I was curious about what “Bolshevism” specifically meant in that context. Maybe it is the centrally planned part of Soviet communism as opposed to social democracy within an undirected private economy?

Bolshevism (from Bolshevik) is a revolutionary socialist current of Soviet Marxist–Leninist political thought and political regime associated with the formation of a rigidly centralized, cohesive and disciplined party of social revolution, focused on overthrowing the existing capitalist state system, seizing power and establishing the "dictatorship of the proletariat".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolshevism

No, it's different.

My college++ GF's father worked at as a CxO of an international company, spoke Russian, traveled there multiple times, and had a lot of friends & acquaintances in the diplomatic services.

In the early 1980s, he told us about one of his diplomatic friends hosting some Russian dignitaries for a few weeks. Their consistent attitude about everything was "of course, we have this also in Russia", along with the general assumption that everything was either staged or in a 'walled garden' for the rich and/or powerful. Then, late in the trip, she accompanied them on a shopping trip to one of the new-ish (at the time) large-format supermarkets. The visitor was literally in tears, surrounded by the acres of plenty. It didn't matter whether it was just for the rich or not — it was so far beyond her experience that she couldn't hold it together.

Similarly, another incident pointed out by a Russian expert [0]: when communist authorities in (IIRC) Bulgaria tried to show "Car Wash" redubbed as a racial morality play about capitalism and all anyone noticed that even the poorest people in LA had so many cars that we had machines to wash them.

They may have a lot of good information, but it is not exhaustive. And remember, everyone examines the information they receive through the lens of their own experience and their own ego. Those growing up behind the Iron Curtain both had never experienced any kind of luxury that was not walled off only for the ruling class, and also had a desire to defend their own pride in their homeland. So, they wouldn't necessarily understand the importance or utter ubiquity of something like large supermarkets before seeing it in person and in live context.

[0] https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1611418480183492613

I think that Yeltsin had his own experience of shopping (or otherwise getting stuff shipped) from a "special distribution center" which he knew was unavailable to 99.8% of population yet had way worse selection of goods than the random USA supermarket. It was whatever stuff they could buy in Finland, basically.

He had a family. Personal experiences are hard to beat. He also started his career in Yekaterinburg, from some mid-range position, so he was not that detached from the life of common folk. He just saw a very different kind of life which does not translate to knowing things in theory.

You are seriously overrating world leaders.

They are just guys who happened to find themselves there

Maybe he did get the intelligence reports but he needed to go and see for himself in order to internalize them as opposed to just absentmindedly skim through them

It's one thing to know something, it's another to actually see it first hand.

This post is over half a decade old, I wonder what percent of American budgets are spent on groceries in 2023? More or less than 8%? There is more to this story. Freakonomics did an episode about the Cold War "Farms Race".

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-the-supermarket-helped-...

Just looked up 2021 and 2022 in Mint, we're right at 8%, kind of interesting.

Someone wrote and produced a retelling of this story as an opera. It was hilarious.

https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/shows/houston-ma...

Adam Curtis’ most recent work, Traumazone, aims to capture some of the feeling of what it was like to go through the collapse of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the “capitalism” that followed. I found it very powerful and helped me empathise better with those citizens and leaders. Watching Gorbechev and Yeltsin struggle and try their best to navigate the disaster. It’s quite different from his previous works. He doesn’t narrate. I personally think it’s a masterpiece in alternative documentary making.

https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/traumazone-2022/

It appears that the situation in Russia is much improved and Boris would likely feel the transition he initiated brought them close to parity in terms of availability and variety:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2DBFaucddw

I'm from Australia and I was blown away by a run of the mill H-E-B supermarket in 2022. The size, scale, selection was quadruple what I'm used to at home. A co-founder took me to when I visited him in Fort Worth and I joked that I felt like Yeltsin visiting.

No fan of the USSR but that photo is not entirely arcuate

here is what it looked like

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/0c/56/2d/0c562d975c99e89786ec...

not much different from food stores in the US during the 40s. Maybe blandness is a worthwhile trade off it is means less obesity and other ill of modern diets.

There were very few markets that looked like that, most of them heavily concentrated in the two biggest cities of Moscow and Leningrad. There were plenty of towns where even in the mid-to-late 90's people would have been surprised to see a market like this.

My dad had to drive 65 miles (by public transportation only with multiple stops) to get into one of these stores. You weren't allowed to buy over certain amount of groceries unless you have permission slip ("kartochka"). Permission slip specifies the number of children you have. And even with "kartochka" it wasn't that too much food you could buy anyway.

Also, as a child growing up mostly in outskirts of Moscow region (oblast), I don't remember even visiting one of these stores. I was about 20 y.o. (now 40) when I first saw a supermarket similar to this one in the town 65 miles from Moscow where I grew up.

Also, it doesn't mean everything was that bad, or we haven't had enough food on the table. Most of the food was unprocessed and simple, and the most was from farmers. For example, there was no to little cheese, but there was meat, and milk, and veggies. I have to admit that a large number of meat (especially chicken) was a humanitarian assistance (notorious "nozhki Busha" - Bush's chicken legs).

Yeltsin should have had a chat with the cashiers. How many days of vacation do they get? How many days of sick leave? How many days of maternity leave? Do they have health insurance? Can they be laid off without notice, or fired without cause?

USA cashier: 0/0/0/no/yes Soviet cashier: 22/infinite/18 months/yes/no

Oh, but the variety of items on the shelves!!!

For those of you who don't have family who escaped from Cold War era Eastern European communism, you should have the added context that this is actually a pretty commonly shared experience—and even something of a trope. My mom and grandparents upon going to a Canadian supermarket for the first time after escaping from communist Czechoslovakia in the late 1960s couldn't believe it. They were used to stores that only sold a few products and eating oranges once a year at Christmas. Of course conditions varied within different eastern bloc countries and even at a local level, but the general thrust of the theme is recurrent.

I grew up in 80s Czechoslovakia. I do not remember empty shelves like those in the article but other then that yes. Oranges on Christmas. Fewer things in general - shops were smaller.

You had to stand in line for several days if you wanted to buy a car (Škoda). You had no idea what color it would be once it was your turn. Most groceries we had was homemade especially meat and vegetables. You could buy some stuff from west but from specific shop [0]. You had to have special currency for this that could be obtained on black market.

People are now used to have anything on demand. But they are also used to shitty things like tasteless tomatoes (in case of supermarkets not only during winter).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuzex

It isn’t really useful to compare the Soviet Union in it’s final 1-2 years of total crisis to the USA. You see videos of empty supermarkets, lines and many other problems. But this certainly is not an accurate depiction of normal life during most of the Soviet period. The 70s and early 80s did not have a lot of the problems that arose in 1989.

Soviet Union was rolling downhill starting from 1965, with lines and empty stalls.

"Иван Васильевич меняет профессию[1]" is a 1973 movie and it depicts shortages, scarcity of consumer goods and "having to know people" to get decent service.

1. http://imdb.com/title/tt0070233

> The 70s and early 80s did not have a lot of the problems that arose in 1989.

In late 1980s the systemic problem became a problem everywhere. However, food stamps were already a thing in some regions in mid-1970s.

And the "sausage trains" were a well-known phenomenon since at least early 70s. This was a term for the trains that people would take to buy stuff in larger cities like Moscow that didn't exist in smaller cities like Ryazan or Tver.

To note, "smaller city" are still a half million population province capitals.

It's not the smaller towns where people could live off the land for the most part.

Perhaps not that important, but this article is from 2016.

It's somewhat important, although the title makes it clear the article is not about a current event.

What's up with the comments in the article, though? 1 real comment, 41 spam. Is that a Blogger thing?

Gorbachev's take was "let's think it through and hear all opinions and then decide what should be done about long term future of USSR". Yelsin dropped "let's think it through". Although privatisation of state enterprise by distributing vouchers to all citizens has merit on paper, one must ensure that population is educated about realistic ups and downs of stocks and is given some basic security to make long term rational decisions. Putin dropped "hear all opinions" The rest is history. West should have bailed our Russia through some equivalent of Marshall plan to avoid present day situation.

> West should have bailed our Russia through some equivalent of Marshall plan...

Definitely should have. However, it would have fell into the lap of the US to give the lion’s share and I remain unpersuaded the US had at that time the economic strength to pull that off without putting itself into an existentially compromising posture. Politically I doubt the Russian Federation would have consented to the kind of terms Germany and Japan did for the Marshall Plan and GARIOA respectively.

The Marshall plan was offered to and declined by the USSR, and they declined on behalf of USSR Eastern European satellites, so there were marketing hooks to revive a Marshall Plan. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out informal overtures were made for a similar plan and rebuffed by the Russian Federation; after all NATO membership was briefly and informally broached.

I suspect the Cold War wore out both opponents, and for the US it was a closer call than many admit today. Much like WW2 in the first half of US involvement was a pretty close call that was only admitted much later.

US in early 90s way WAY healthier than US today, on the verge of dot com boom, and aid we would have provided would not be 100% loss like military aid to Ukraine today. What was needed is to give some kind of alternative work to employees of state enterprises, who were willing to work for very little money and had some skills. We ended up doing the same for China, only without any strategic goals and time limits. As a result, mid America now just about needs a Marshall plan itself to prevent political instability.

> West should have bailed our Russia through some equivalent of Marshall plan to avoid present day situation.

The West gave multiple large rounds of aid in the early 1990s, but that seemed to slow down with the first Chechen war.

Having been born under the Soviet occupation and witnessing it for a few years before the the whole thing collapsed, it was the German mail order catalogs that made most people realise how bad we had. So the soviet union collapses, there's litterly nothing to buy, huge unemployment,etc. But some start going to western Europe (especially Germany) and suddenly you go from only seeing crappy russian made stuff to Japanese VHS players, proper audio systems, clothing that looks cool and comfy. I used to scroll those catalogs for hours thinking how the hell Germans have so much stuff+ trying to convert deuchmarks to our own currency just to realise that it would take my dad's entire salary just to buy some of of those things in the catalog. The beginning of 90s was crazy: we started having these black plastic carrier bags with celebrities printed on them- it was insanely popular thing to buy! I remember we had this guy in a wheelchair in our town - someone brought him a proper baseball hat from the US, people kept talking about it for weeks how he's the only one with this hat( some jackass took the hat from the poor guy a few weeks later). We were litterly decades behind. And then wild capitalism started. By the end of 90s, the country had more or less anything you could buy in western countries. Looking back,even though I was just a little kid back then,the progress we made in three decades is insane.

As a U.S.-er, this is how I feel when I see Europe with their health care.

The main thrust of the comments here seems to be defending against the idea that Yeltsin was genuinely surprised. It's sad to me because this indicates that the main lessons from this very dark period of "real existing socialism" haven't been learned. Oh well, maybe next time!

The author seems to believe that Yeltsin was a moron who thought that the most advanced capitalist country in history would possibly be comparable to a country that belonged to the Tsar less than one hundred years prior.

Well, maybe he was an idiot.

Your comment glosses over so many complex dynamics of how the USSR failed and mismanaged its way into how it was in the late 80's vs. the U.S (and many other major countries) that it's absurd. Of course Yeltsin understood that his own country had dealt with many problems that the U.S had never had to face, but this didn't blind him to the fact that they could have done much better after so many decades of propaganda, and failed to do so because of many self-created problems. The smack to the face that was the supermarket showed him just how far his huge country had fallen behind. It was not stupidity in "failing to compare plausibly" that affected him, it was seeing that even fundamental aspects of well-being were inexcusably failing in the USSR.

Your comment is very blind to this basic fact, and excuses atrocious mismanagement with platitudes about tsars.

Germany and Japan, as well as China, were absolute wastelands of ruin and destitution after the second world war, and had suffered decades of terribly backwards previous leadership, yet they made good on enormous well-being changes in much less time than the USSR had to do the same by the time of Yeltsin's supermarket visit.

> Your comment glosses over so many complex dynamics of how the USSR failed and mismanaged its way into how it was in the late 80's vs. the U.S (and many other major countries) that it's absurd.

My comment glosses over. Compared to an anecdote about how a supermarket visit “Brought Down the Soviet Union”? This is the thing that you leaped to respond to? You are dripping with hypocrisy.

That low-quality article deserves no more rebuttal than the sentences that I spared on it.

It's not just the anecdote, it's everything that it implies, based on decades of history books, literature, many other anecdotes (some excellent ones right here in this thread). A cheap comment that dismisses complex things in its criticism of a complex thing isn't any less facile for pretending to be lightly stated.

Well the UK belongs to a King to that day, how does it make it any less of a developed country?

You seem to greatly downplay the historic Russia.

The historic pre-Bolshevik Russia was nothing to boast about, either. Just look at literacy rate or percentage of rural population.

Compared to whom? France or Germany? The whole British Empire?

The Tsar was a shorthand for how undeveloped Russia was.

I'm not sure why it is a shorthand. A wide range of countries have monarchy, such as Belguim or Sweden. There are also a lot of piss-poor non-monarchies.

Overall you sound like a person of socialist education who never evaluated their upbringing critically.

I don’t care what I sound like to you.

With the first source linked in the article being Breitbart, I'd take the rest of the content with a pinch of salt.

Now russians have everything they wish and more yet behave like barbarians. Some cultures never change and they wish the same for everyone in their neighbourhood. Perhaps karma and sanctions will revert that country to the state they deserve.

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