Very famous visit (in Texas, I think). It was in the last days of Communism there - he visited an American supermarket and was amazed.
Of course he was told that it was a PR stunt - to stock up the store just before he visited.
Funny thing is that we keep doing that ‘stunt’, at least every time I go to a supermarket - must be a lot of Russians roaming the country, needing to be tricked.
http://englishrussia.com/2015/01/20/borist-yeltsin-in-american-supermarket/2/
20-25 years ago, a friend somehow got on the list of *hosts* for some delegation or other of Soviets. I don’t recall the entire scenario.
We are in a very rural area of small villages and farms. In the course of a tour, they visited the local supermarket, a small, sole-proprietorship at the time, nothing like a big supermarket in a large city. The soviets were impressed, but skeptical. They assumed it was Potemkin. So, our friend handed them a map and told them to pick anywhere at all. They did and he drove them to a succession of stores.
As I recall the tale, they were very quiet after that.
Once we had a super heavy snow storm and nothing was moving. In 2 days the store shelves were almost totally empty. In a few days, they were stocked again but I realized how close we are to starvation. It was very sobering.