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

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

#81

Post by allarm »

pydry wrote: post #41
tekla wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#82

Post by helloworld11 »

avgcorrection wrote: post #73
helloworld11 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> 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 deserv…

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.

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

#83

Post by spywaregorilla »

Barrin92 wrote: post #25
spywaregorilla wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#84

Post by alamortsubite »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #80

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.

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

#85

Post by borski »

allarm wrote: post #78
borski wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

#86

Post by nanidin »

macintux wrote: post #38
throwawayabcvd wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You're complaining that someone relaying personal anecdotes about comparative scarcity didn't turn it into a multi-page thesis on globalization?

I find my time on HN would be better served with an option to hide green accounts with "throwaway" in the name.

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

#87

Post by Barrin92 »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #83
Barrin92 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 emotion…

>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.

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

#88

Post by actinium226 »

alamortsubite wrote: post #12

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…

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.

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

#89

Post by smiley1437 »

suzzer99 wrote: post #63
BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>”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…

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!

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