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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.
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)
At ~5:45 in the supermarket video, what am I looking at? Is that a Soviet TV dinner? https://youtu.be/t8LtQhIQ2AE?t=345
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You think Americans buying bananas from poorer countries makes those countries poorer?
Here's a picture of the store manager greeting Yeltin. Can you imagine? https://cdn.hpm.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/21152245/Paul-...
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…
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.
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.
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…
> "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?"
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…
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.
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> It's like, if you complained about the lack of consumer products in Cuba, how could you discuss that without bringing up the sanctions the US has placed on them for decades? Keep in mind Cuba is free to trade with 192+ countries all around the world. Easy to blame everything on the embargo, harder to take a long hard look at the systemic corruption, incompetence, generalized theft and human rights violations plagui…
Is that the case? I don't know a lot about how the blocade works but Wikipedia says "the United States has threatened to stop financial aid to other countries if they trade non-food items with Cuba" and "US-based companies, and companies that do business with the US, which trade in Cuba do so at the risk of US sanctions."