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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)

#31

Post by tekla »

pydry wrote: post #23
hcurtiss wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#32

Post by bennysonething »

throwawayabcvd wrote: post #24
ubermonkey wrote: post #9

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…

[flagged]

You think Americans buying bananas from poorer countries makes those countries poorer?

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

#33

Post by mindslight »

pydry wrote: post #23
hcurtiss wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#34

Post by filoleg »

drewcoo wrote: post #19
advisedwang wrote: post #11

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…

". . . 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.

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

#35

Post by UncleSlacky »

kneebonian wrote: post #20
hcurtiss wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

Given that communism is stateless, moneyless and classless, it really wasn't real communism.

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

#36

Post by 908B64B197 »

throwawayabcvd wrote: post #24
ubermonkey wrote: post #9

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…

[flagged]

> 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 plaguing the country.

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

#37

Post by Thlom »

luckylion wrote: post #17
advisedwang wrote: post #11

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…

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.

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

#38

Post by macintux »

throwawayabcvd wrote: post #24
ubermonkey wrote: post #9

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…

[flagged]

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

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

#39

Post by morelisp »

bennysonething wrote: post #32
throwawayabcvd wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You think Americans buying bananas from poorer countries makes those countries poorer?

Bananas particularly are a case where this is blindingly obvious.

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

#40

Post by e1g »

BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #29
advisedwang wrote: post #11

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…

>”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…

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.
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