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I’ll bet your wife’s Russian friends also thought she was pulling their legs when she described the cornucopia of fresh vegetables, lean meats, and stocked shelves in that grocery store.

Not really. They were shocked at the prices though.

Russian grocery stores are plenty stocked (and by "Russian" I mean eastern Ukraine, the part of the region I've visited). Their outdoor markets, even larger, often have the freshest meat, fruits and vegetables I've ever eaten. Eggs, cheese and non-pasteurized milk come straight from the local dairy farms. And it's real. It's not the flavorless, growth-hormoned, genetically-modified crap we call produce.

I've worked with women from Russia, Belarus, and the Ukraine, all of whom came to the US for graduate school and decided to stay here after they completed their studies. They were from upper-income families, but had living standards growing up that we would consider poverty-level. A Russian chemist I met here around 1990, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, initially claimed that the Kroger he was taken to was an elaborate set-up by the CIA to deceive him. When he finally realized that it was real, he broke down and cried.