Posted on 09/29/2021 7:01:16 AM PDT by Beave Meister
09/16/1989 - Boris Yeltsin and a handful of Soviet companions made an unscheduled 20-minute visit to a Randall's Supermarket after touring the Johnson Space Center. Between trying free samples of cheese and produce and staring at the meat selections, Yeltsin roamed the aisles of Randall's nodding his head in amazement.
A post earlier this year on Houston’s Reddit that mentioned late Russian president Boris Yeltsin’s wide-eyed trip to a Clear Lake grocery store led to a trip to the Houston Chronicle archives, where a batch of photos of the leader were found.
It was September 16, 1989 and Yeltsin, then newly elected to the new Soviet parliament and the Supreme Soviet, had just visited Johnson Space Center.
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.chron.com ...
And when they took him to a liquor store, it really blew his mind.
So much wodka here!
Have you been to Kroger’s lately? Boris would feel much more at home shopping the Covid ravaged stores of today.
I once had a German explain to me that government wasn't the way to get rich in their country. He then offered me the example of their Angela Merkle, who lives a fairly moderate lifestyle, to billionaire Nancy Pelosi.
And today, my WalMart Super Center looks very much like the images we used to see of USSR grocery stores....
Well, props to him for being open minded enough to both see what was in front of him, as well as realize how far his homeland had fallen, and for making attempts to fix it.
And, to whomever organized the field trip.
We’ve got decades more of the useful idiots doing their thing now than we did then.
We could have ended communism much quicker by just inviting Soviet leaders to the USA and letting them randomly drive around, visiting stores, farms and other businesses.
If I had walked into the store as it is now, back in 2019 I'd have assumed they were going out of business. That they were desperately trying to buy products from any supplier, any warehouse with what little capital they could scrape together.
I believe it was this trip that he also visited a farm that belonged to the family of one of my highschool classmates. I always thought that was really neat.
My late mother worked briefly at the United Nations in the 1950s. Her contacts there got in touch with her after she had moved to Tennessee to tell her that a Soviet delegation was visiting Nashville (late 1960s, perhaps) and instructing her to give them a driving tour of the city.
They wanted to see slums and only slums. She took them to the worst parts of Nashville, Jo Johnston projects, and others like it, and the Soviets were outraged that she was showing them only middle class housing. They wanted to see where the truly poor lived. She could not convince them that this was as bad as it got.
Now large stores in Siberian look like what Yelsin saw - there is a YouTube video or two documenting this.
In the 1960’s, my mom had a Hungarian neighbor. The neighbor’s relative ‘got out’ of the Soviet Union and was temporarily living with my mom’s neighbor.
One day, my mom took him with her to the grocery store. She said he stopped in front of the meat and produce counters and actually had tears in his eyes.
And now the GUM store in Moscow, pretty much looks like any other mall.
Khrushchev saw the same thing on his visit blew it off.
He understood the long term value for Soviet hegemony of the class of useful idiots that had been carefully fostered and which were then self propagating in ivory towers around the west. He knew their power to bring about what socialism was really meant for: to bring people under the sway of the governing elites and be thankful for their proverbial turnip for dinner too.
Khrushchev anyone?
No, you have to remember that generationally the early communist were simply evil. There were no good commies for those what if scenarios no matter what the delusions of the useful idiots: Lenin opened the gulags and Trotsky did his part to help fill them.
Yeltsin was part of a younger generation who couldn’t shelter himself from socialism’s failings by living in the West the way someone like Sanders can.
But the Left has moved on from thinking socialism will bring about prosperity to hating prosperity and thinking socialism will do things like save Mother Earth and keep humans in their place.
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