Posted on 10/27/2020 6:17:57 AM PDT by C19fan
TV show Dallas was the main reason behind the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, it has been claimed.
Eurythmics co-founder Dave Stewart said that former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev told him that the 1980s soap opera 'had more effect' in ending the Cold War than anything else.
Mr Stewart, 68, said the Gorbachev admitted an illicit broadcast of the US show in Russia had opened his people's eyes to Western life, and the Texas-based show 'brought down' the communist superpower.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
>>Never a big fan of the show. Personally I thought it was blue jeans and cheeseburgers that did the USSR in.
Yep.
A smuggled pair of blue jeans or a bootleg rock and roll album were an escape into a different world.
And it is “funny” that Leftists in America have tried to stamp out or subvert fast food, rock and roll, and car culture.
There were probably a surplus stack of them from his Terry Vine episode of The Streets Of San Francisco -Dead Air.
I recall reading an interview with a Russian comedian and he said that he and many other hockey fans in Russia liked seeing Canadian and American NHL players not wear helmets in international tournaments because it was an interesting contrast to the Soviet and European players who had been required to wear them for those many years.
Who loves Poland, baby?
An interesting about Boris Yeltsin:
When Boris Yeltsin went grocery shopping in Clear Lake (TX)
Other stories I have heard was about when the Soviet Cosmonauts were training at NASA JSC and saw the local car dealers with lots full of cars just for the buying while in the Soviet Union at the time only the elite could get a car and then they waited months or perhaps years before getting delivery.
Then there was when they went on a field trip to the Astrohall gun show which at the time was about 3500 tables, many of which had class 3 weapons side by side with a shotgun shell through the trigger guard so you could get more on the table.
Would have loved to been in on their next call to the Kremlin!
I also knew a girl who had a big ol’ birthmark on her butt. She was actually intelligent. We’re friends to this day.
My dad told me a story he had heard about how the CIA or somebody in intelligence managed to flip an important Soviet guy who was visiting the states. They took him to an average supermarket and showed him around.
But he didn’t believe them. He thought it was a Potemkin village or a store just for wealthy people.
So they told him he could tell them any direction to drive in and they would stop at any store he wanted to see. After 2 or 3 more he got really angry. He realized what the Commies had been telling him was a lie all along....
Hmmm...
You gotta wonder...did the Russians kill JR?
Stilyagi 2008 trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpfcuU6taTE
“Hipsters is a lavish, candy-colored musical set in Cold War Russia circa 1955. It tells the story of a communist party youth, Mels (named after Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin), whose life is changed when he encounters Moscow’s vibrant underground, American influenced jazz scene and the non-conformist kids, Hipsters, who inhabit it. —” (C) Official Site
I think it was Yeltsin who said if the people back home knew how much food and selection was in American grocery stores, they would riot in the Soviet Union.
And Kruschev wanted to visit Disneyland.
Barack Hussein Obama deliberately set out to lower the American standard of living. Salaries as well as lifestyles.
He complained that Americans couldn’t just go setting their thermostat at whatever temperature they wanted when people even in Europe don’t have AC.
He said that we couldn’t just drive whatever car we want wherever we want to go.
Dallas may have been a factor, but Reagan was a primary cause, IMO.
>My dad told me a story he had heard about how the CIA or somebody in intelligence managed to flip an important Soviet guy who was visiting the states. They took him to an average supermarket and showed him around.
Yeah, there’s a good book about an American engineer that believed in the Soviet BS and ran away to Moscow. He lived there during the Great Depression and vainly thought that the USSR had blown away the Americans during the 30s and Stalin’s 5 year plans.
He crunched the production numbers at the end of the 30s and found out that even in the bowels of the Great Depression, construction output in the US in one year equaled all of Russia’s over five years. He couldn’t believe it, so he checked over and over, and finding the figures right showed other engineers.
They told him, “Those numbers are wrong.” When he insisted they were right, they responded, “It doesn’t matter what the numbers say. You are wrong. The Soviet system is far better than capitalism.” They told him that numbers aren’t true if they contradict the Soviet truth.
It was then he realized he had to escape back.
Earlier than that...a Russian intel agent in the late after visiting a supermarket, much smaller than current ones, remarked that “if the Russian people could see this they would kill us all.”
Not sure that Soviet prisoners of war in Germany would be overly impressed with the accommodations or life style.
I read about a guy in the 1980s who was travelling into East Germany and got stopped by the border guards and questioned about his Blondie LP.
Those guards had him sit in their office and play the Western music (which they enjoyed) 2 or 3 times before they let him leave.
JR did not commit suicide
Thanks for posting that. I also saw the attached video of a soviet “grocery store” in Moscow in 89. Watching all those old women picking through bare shelves and coolers, sniffing what appeared to be chicken, and putting it back with facial expressions like “what am I gonna feed my family tonight.”
I don’t usually feel bad for commies but anyone who doesn’t feel pity upon seeing that has no humanity.
Rocky IV ended the Soviet Union.
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