[rellimpank]

--back during the Nixon years-(early '70's, Leadville, Colorado was on of the stops on a transcontinental bus trip of mid-level Russian bureaucrats , husbands and wives (the USSR had started letting trusted people out without hostages at home)--

--I have always been convinced that trips like that infected, so to speak , the Russian government with people who had seen that there was a world out there better than what they had---

[SpeakerToAnimals]

Yes, and I saw it myself. It was a good day.

[driftless2]

Many Russians in high gov. places knew the score. Members of the Soviet Union foreign embassies and high-ranking diplomats and their wives used a lot of their rubles on shopping trips to ritzy stores in large western cities.

Obviously, they couldn't relay that info and what life was really like outside the SU to the average soviet citizen.