71–80 of 378 posts
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Bananas particularly are a case where this is blindingly obvious.
Please elaborate. How would stopping banana cultivation help any of those countries?
To be fair, it's not clear whether it would have had any impact by the late 20th century.
[0] Mig Pilot by John Barron
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,…
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.
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, Rob…
> In Yeltsin’s own autobiography, he wrote about the experience at Randall’s, which shattered his view of communism
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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…
> Keep in mind Cuba is free to trade with 192+ countries all around the world. 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."
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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.
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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…
>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 opp…
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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?
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.
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>”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…
> 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…
https://www.tvo.org/article/in-1983-gorbachev-took-a-stroll-...