21 ms·

When Boris Yeltsin Went Grocery Shopping in Clear Lake

180 points by areoform 7y ago

akurilin 7y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWTGsUyv8IE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWTGsUyv8IE - linked from the article. I still remember walking into those stores with my mother during that era, to my eyes at the time that looked "just fine", I didn't know any better. Looking back now, not so much. And as someone on YouTube pointed out, that was in Moscow, which had it much better than regions further away from the sources of power.
- TaylorAlexander 7y ago
  It looked like people were paying money for food. Did they indeed pay, or was some food free? How did that work?
  - BerislavLopac 7y ago
    Why would it be free?
    - TaylorAlexander 7y ago
      Well I think a certain amount of food should be free, and only really communists talk about that kind of thing historically. I was curious if that had been implemented there. For example in present day japan individuals do not pay for medical care. I wondered if the soviets ever tried to do that with food. I’d like to see free food, shelter, clothing, medical care, and internet access made available to all people. I just wondered if the soviets tried any of that.
    - bgutierrez 7y ago
      Lots of us are unfamiliar with the day-to-day details of soviet communism. Were people paid for their labor? Was everyone given ration cards? Was a party membership enough to get some basic food from one of these stores? I think the question is, was money abolished along with capitalism?
      - Haga 7y ago
        My grandfather visited Moscow after chernobyl on invitation by some radiation chemistry prof he knew. You had to stand in line to buy a weight quantity of bread and other basic necessitys like cheese, butter oder meat. There was only one type of bread. They ate their eveninglunch in a park. I can not tell how the food was for official delegations but this was what a privat dinner with a relative well off friend looked like.
      - jackfoxy 7y ago
        I heard there was a Soviet-era joke along these lines: Q: Under true communism, will there be money? A: Yes and no. Some will have money, others won't.
        taejo 7y ago
        The one I heard was this: When Ivan was a boy, he asked a Party Man, "How will we know when true communism has been acheived?" The Party Man thought for a little bit, and said, "The shops will be full of goods, and there will be no money." Decades later, in the early 1990s, Ivan is now an old man. He looks through the windows of the department stores, and sticks his hands in pickets. He smiles to himself, and whispers, "At last, true communism!"
      - koverda 7y ago
        People were paid for work and you'd buy groceries with money.
        asdf21 7y ago
        So... capitalism?
        rrssh 7y ago
        Socialism, it’s in the country name.
        7y ago
    - anoncake 7y ago
      Why should it not be free? I'm not saying there aren't any reasons. But since the people nominally owned the Soviet economy, it's odd to assume by default that the people is charging itself.
      - tlear 7y ago
        They got away from that idiocy once they starved 10mil+ people to death. Money was there and barter(vodka as premium item that could get you anything, like seeing good doctor, getting car fixed, getting caviar). Also those stores also sold from the back to their friends
        anoncake 7y ago
        The idiocy of not charging money unless there is a reason for it? Why does everyone get incapable of reading when it comes to this topic... Also, citation needed for the Holodomor (which I guess you are alluding to) being caused by free food.
HillaryBriss 7y ago
supposedly something similar happened when Kruschev visited Los Angeles decades ago and thought that all the cars/trucks he saw jamming up roads and freeways were put there to impress him. we tell ourselves these stories to make ourselves feel good about our misshapen consumer-oriented economy. and it doesn't quite work as well now because they more or less have the same stuff in China. also, we're buying a lot of that stuff from China, so it makes even less sense.
- titanomachy 7y ago
  Is there any meaningful sense in which China is communist?
  - eropple 7y ago
    My understanding is that the party controls all land, has controlling interests in many if not most critical companies--as of 2016 the Chinese government owned three percent of all companies in China and up to thirty percent of industrial output[0]--and even theoretically independent companies have former Party officials or relatives of those officials running the show. So it's surely not your textbook Leninist system, but it has many aspects thereof; I suppose you might characterize it as a mixed-command economy. It isn't what we would describe in the vernacular as "socialist"--as that word today generally, outside of the fever swamps of the American right wing, refers to countries like the Nordic or other Western European countries that work within something of a mixed-market system; it's definitely more command-oriented than that, still. Leninist/Stalinist communism generally sports a number social factors that definitely still exist in China outside of the economic structure, such as strong informational control, a smorgasbord of human rights abuses, and a generally totalitarian mode of governance and operation. So I guess the question becomes "well, what does 'communist' mean?" My own, inexpert answer would be "it's not 'communist', except insofar as 'communist' is defined to mean 'what China does'," and my own thinking is that today it maps more to an ethnonationalist--though this isn't a perfect description as many groups are accepted, but at the same time one can see see the routine oppression of Tibetans, Uighurs, etc.--totalitarian state with a largely centrally-controlled economy. That doesn't map to any historical definition of 'communist' that I know of, but reasonable minds can differ. [0] - https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Wendy-Leutert-Challenges-ahead-in-Chinas-reform-of-stateowned-enterprises.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Wendy-L...
hellllllllooo 7y ago
https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/werner-herzog-gorbachev https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/werner-herzog-gorbachev Recent Werner Herzog interview talking about interviewing Gorbachev. He discusses a little about the Yeltsin years following and puts Putin's popularity in context of how bad things were during Yeltsin's term. Worth a listen if you have 20 minutes.
TaylorAlexander 7y ago
It’s interesting the notion of waiting in lines. Yesterday at Home Depot I needed a four foot length of hose cut from their hose area. Most employees, even a pair standing and talking right near the hose, said they couldn’t help me, we needed someone from plumbing. They called three separate times for someone from plumbing and after 10 minutes or so someone arrived. But another man had been waiting since just before me, so he was helped first. That took an additional 20 minutes. Even once he came to me, it took maybe 10 minutes because the hose didn’t have the right SKU and he didn’t know what to put on the ticket. So I had to wait more than 30 minutes for a single piece of hose. I bet that’s not as bad as lines were sometimes in the Soviet system, but it’s not fantastic on its own. Imagine if Boris Yeltsin had to wait 30 plus minutes for a four foot length of hose that none of the employees standing around were able or willing to help him with... I’ve been remembering to go to the small Ace Hardware store in town lately. They are much smaller but still seem to have stock of the right items, and I can get a person or two to help me immediately. Capitalism as we know it played a big role in the abundance we’ve had here, but it has also left the US with the most expensive medical care and alienated individuals. Our system may be better than the Soviet system in many ways, but is it the best we can do?
- bdamm 7y ago
  Honestly I'm tired of Home Depot. If you want real service go to your local Ace or similar. Plus they have a more refined selection of products.
  - luckydata 7y ago
    Ace barely scratches the surface if you need to do anything beyond what a normal homeowner would do by themselves. It's the training wheels of hardware stores but the selection (and quality) of tools is a lot lower because for higher priced, more specialized stuff nobody goes there.
    - bdamm 7y ago
      I agree, but Home Depot has been piling a lot of junk on their shelves lately. Think the $5 keychain package with strap when a $0.50 loop will do. Do they stock the $0.50 loop? Good luck finding them or anyone that will know where they are! But you'll surely have no problem finding the big stand of trinkets next to the terrible key cutting machine. Ace will just have a bin of loops and you pick the ones you want, done. This pattern, over and over. Yes, you CAN get great stuff at Home Depot for a decent price, but good luck getting out of there with all your bits at a reasonable price. It just seems to me that they're losing sight of what makes a big box store useful. Of course if I want a stack of PVC or conduit or pressure treated lumber I'm probably going to Home Depot (or a local lumber supplier.) This guy was looking for cuts of hose. That's an Ace visit.
dmix 7y ago
The same thing happened in Venezuela in the early 2000s when they initiated price controls to make food more "affordable" for the poor. The variety of products was the first thing that dropped to only the necessities. Then even the necessities started to drop in supply: > Further yet, price controls, expropriation of numerous farmlands and various industries, among other disputable government policies including a near-total freeze on any access to foreign currency at reasonable "official" exchange rates, have resulted in severe shortages in Venezuela and steep price rises of all common goods, including food, water, household products, spare parts, tools and medical supplies; forcing many manufacturers to either cut production or close down, with many ultimately abandoning the country as has been the case with several technological firms and most automobile makers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Venezuela#1999–2013 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Venezuela#1999–2013
- rayiner 7y ago
  My wife was a student in the eastern part of Germany in the early aughts, when life in pre-unification eastern Germany was still fresh in peoples’ minds. One thing that people would say is that “before the wall fell, we had plenty of money, there just was never anything to buy.” When I hear people say “X shouldn’t be subject to the market” I want to bang my head on the desk. You can’t just decide that, e.g. food won’t be subject to market forces by, e.g., imposing price controls. If you push on the balloon on one side, it will expand on the other side.
  - areoform 7y ago
    However, it is fruitful to point out that not all markets are created equal. Even if an exchange of money takes place in return for goods and services, the market that exists is not necessarily a free market. Sometimes this is true even in the most idealized of cases. For example, healthcare isn’t composed of one market, but several between different operators operating under different market forces and regulatory rules. As it’s too complicated to go into each, I’ll go into one that’s most apparent; the market between patients and healthcare providers (not insurance companies!). Assuming the most idealized of cases that exist without external constraints and regulations, this market would never be a free market. Because the buyer will never be in the position to make the decision to not buy the good. Even a rational free agent would not be in a position to disagree from making a purchase. The value each sentient lifeform places on their life is for all intents and purposes infinity in the healthcare context. No sane suicidal individual or hero would sign up for a purposeless, slow and painful death. This removes the essential mechanism that free markets have to regulate themselves; the freedom to not participate. In most markets, if a good or service is too expensive then the business selling them will go bankrupt or remain small due to a lack of buyers. This creates an incentive for a cheaper mousetrap to exist. But healthcare isn’t like that. Your choice is severely limited. At best, you can choose between providers (though for serious, and sadly incredibly routine, issues the immediacy of needing treatment trumps this) and at worst you’re unconscious and unable to make any decisions yourself. So the element of choice isn’t present making it axiomatically not a free market. Please note that I am not going into ancillary factors like the difficulties patients face in making informed decisions, the viral component that exists for certain classes of disease (you choosing not to do X in the case of a serious enough pathogen could lead to a sick household or an epidemic. See: the return of measles), the difficulty of rationing care (Americans spend more partly because they see their doctors less by design and are discouraged from accessing preventative care), and overall incentive misalignment between doctors, pharmaceutical manufacturers, hospital staff, insurers, HMOs etc that creates runaway effects. We treat all markets in the same way, but they aren’t all the same. The market for healthcare is different from consumer electronics and the market for plastic surgery (a procedure where I must note there is an option to say no). Reductively put, you can choose not to buy a MacBook Pro. But you can’t choose not to treat sepsis. So why does our literature usually assume that both are the same?
depa 7y ago
A very similar reaction to the Romanian communist chief of state when visiting a Macy's in New York: https://twitter.com/NightmarEclipse/status/978375022954909696 https://twitter.com/NightmarEclipse/status/97837502295490969...
el_don_almighty 7y ago
Khrushchev to Nixon in the 1959 Kitchen Debate, "...we will pass you and your capitalism in our advancement and wave to you as we go past..." SOCIALISM... some people never learn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CvQOuNecy4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CvQOuNecy4
- Animats 7y ago
  "...we will pass you and your capitalism in our advancement and wave to you as we go past..." In our high-speed train. That's China.
keketi 7y ago
> Yeltsin, then 58, "roamed the aisles of Randall's nodding his head in amazement," wrote Asin. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution." It's awe-inspiring to imagine that not too long ago the societal order of multiple countries depended on their millions of residents being ignorant of such a simple fact. What really gets my mind going is the next thought: what are some simple facts that would cause revolutions nowadays if made widely known?
- jbattle 7y ago
  I know people who genuinely believe that people in countries with socialized medicine have to wait months to see a doctor
  - asdf21 7y ago
    ... Because that's true, depending on the situation. https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2014/06/13/if-universal-health-care-is-the-goal-dont-copy-canada/#27492adb78d5 https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2014/06/13/if-uni... >The most visible manifestation of Canada’s failing health care system are wait times for health care services. In 2013, Canadians, on average, faced a four and a half month wait for medically necessary treatment after referral by a general practitioner. This wait time is almost twice as long as it was in 1993 when national wait times were first measured.
    - luckydata 7y ago
      It's true in the bay area to see an ENT doctor too. So your point is?
      - ameister14 7y ago
        The average wait to see a specialist across the US is closer to 24 days, the longest it's ever been - the average in Canada is 21 weeks, also the longest recorded.
bazooka_penguin 7y ago
If only he could see the free food samples at Costco's and Korean groceries.
kumarski 7y ago
I'm from Clear Lake. This is hilarious and is making its way through private threads I have with former astronauts and Nasa Employees. Love HN.
smogcutter 7y ago
Alright I got one: So it's a chilly Thursday morning in Brno, and everybody's in line to buy meat. They're waiting and waiting, and the line's not moving at all. Eventually a Party official comes out and says "Due to the conspiracy of wreckers, there isn't enough meat. All the Jews need to get off the line". So the Jews all get off the line and go home, but still everyone's waiting and there's no meat. Hours pass, and eventually the Party official comes back: "I'm sorry to report that there's still not enough meat. Everyone who's not a Party member needs to get off the line." So all the non-party members get off the line and go home. But still all the Party members are waiting and waiting, no meat. After another two hours waiting in the cold the official comes back and says, "We're sorry but there's no meat today. Everybody get off the line." As they're walking away from the line, one of the people who was waiting turns to the other and says: "You see? The Jews always have it the best!"
- fao_ 7y ago
  EDIT: I misread the punchline of the joke. Ignore this. That's amusing, but at the same time it is horrifically anti-semitic. Especially given what the Jewish people went through in the years leading up the the Russian Revolution (One toddler was torn apart by a fascist mob, in another town a number of months later Jewish people were forced into a church and then the church and people burned alive).
  - sb057 7y ago
    A toddler being torn apart by fascists several years before fascism was first espoused is rather remarkable.
    - fao_ 7y ago
      Do you think that fascism was created by the Nazis? Just because the manifesto was not written, does not mean that there were people without fascist beliefs, even if they couldn't call themselves fascists yet.
  - afro88 7y ago
    I read the joke as making fun of anti-semites, not being anti-semitic.
antonpirker 7y ago
"451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons" - Sorry, this content is not available in your region. Oh come on! Seriously?
wastenaut 7y ago
Hmmm, I always thought it was me, but there really is a natural reaction of dismay, to witness what seems to be a bottomless pit of goods always on standby on store shelves. In particular, with perishables, I look at the things that won't possibly sell before being removed for lack of freshness, and I've always considered it to be an absurd waste. The other night, I walked by a Dunkin Donuts, and a garbage bag of donuts and bagels had spilled across the sidewalk. It was probably $100 worth of food getting dumped into a landfill because it was day-old baked goods. But the line out the door at eight in the morning meant that profits had more than cleared that margin of disposable food. How to reconcile that with the bums panhandling and playing doorman all day? That stores display perishable products for the sake of advertising to foot traffic has always freaked me out on visceral level. To waste a quantity of human activity for purely ostentatious purposes doesn't sit well with one's primal conscience.
- KozmoNau7 7y ago
  It is an inherent problem in capitalism. We're throwing away perfectly good food and other products, for no reason other than they aren't profitable enough, and giving them away would cut into sales of competing or newer products. Meanwhile millions die each year, from starvation, disease and lack of access to clean drinking water. Because it is not profitable enough to help them.
- scotty79 7y ago
  > It was probably $100 worth of food getting dumped into a landfill because it was day-old baked goods. 100$ at their prices or 100$ of flour and sugar? I think what they mostly were throwing out was peoples work but that's exactly same thing as with any form of advertisement.
Mugwort 7y ago
He looks skinny.
jbarham 7y ago
Actually Canada has a stronger claim to speeding the fall of Communism given that Gorbachev had a similar revelation when he visited Canadian supermarkets in 1983: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15129713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15129713
stcredzero 7y ago
The link in the article: "By contrast, this is what a Russian grocery store looked like at the same time." I remember going back to my hometown to visit my parents, who live in a somewhat rural part of a "Red State." By the Walmart out by the run-down local mall, there's this depressing discount food store, which, as far as I can tell, exists for the people who are too poor to shop at the Walmart. Most of it contained boxes and bins like the Soviet store. Most of it was dry and canned goods. There is great wealth and opportunity in the US. There is still something left to do, however. The solution isn't to emulate Venezuela or the Soviet Union, obviously. Yet, there is disaffection here in the US as well, and there is a reason for it. The solution isn't to punish and blame the disaffected.
socrates1998 7y ago
I remember this, but I wasn't sure if it was real or not. It seems like Yeltsin really did want to abandon communism after he visited a grocery store. Crazy. Cool article.
elamje 7y ago
Any other Clear Lakers here?
- bawigga 7y ago
  Here! Always fun seeing Clear Lake mentioned on HN!
aasasd 7y ago
Yeltsin here looks like just some late-middle-aged executive guy—which he was, as he wasn't president yet. My favorite pic of his, from the time of actual presidency, is rather different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Clinton_Yeltsin_1995.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Clinton_Yeltsin_1995.jpg
igivanov 7y ago
While recounting anecdotes and making witty observations, let's not forget that this man was responsible for bringing incredible misery upon the people of Russia. Not he alone, but he was the main one. Also a drunkard, a dictator and a darling of the West.
baybal2 7y ago
Really the key quote is: > Yeltsin, then 58, "roamed the aisles of Randall's nodding his head in amazement," wrote Asin. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution."
mindcrash 7y ago
"In 1989 Russian president Boris Yeltsin's wide-eyed trip to a Clear Lake grocery store led to the downfall of communism." It didn't led to the downfall of communism but it helped tremendously in Yeltsin's understanding what communism really was and is: just another form of human exploitation by a small group of elitists (or aristocrats). Noteworthy is the following description of events which happened while travelling in the US: ""For a long time, on the plane to Miami, he sat motionless, his head in his hands. 'What have they done to our poor people?' he [Yeltsin] said after a long silence." He added, "On his return to Moscow, Yeltsin would confess the pain he had felt after the Houston excursion: the 'pain for all of us, for our country so rich, so talented and so exhausted by incessant experiments'." He wrote that Mr. Yeltsin added, "I think we have committed a crime against our people by making their standard of living so incomparably lower than that of the Americans." An aide, Lev Sukhanov was reported to have said that it was at that moment that "the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed" inside his boss." Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Yeltsin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Yeltsin In case anyone wants to know what actually led to the dissolution of the USSR check out this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Unio...

180 points by areoform 7y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWTGsUyv8IE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWTGsUyv8IE - linked from the article. I still remember walking into those stores with my mother during that era, to my eyes at the time that looked "just fine", I didn't know any better. Looking back now, not so much. And as someone on YouTube pointed out, that was in Moscow, which had it much better than regions further away from the sources of power.

TaylorAlexander 7y ago
It looked like people were paying money for food. Did they indeed pay, or was some food free? How did that work?
- BerislavLopac 7y ago
  Why would it be free?
  - TaylorAlexander 7y ago
    Well I think a certain amount of food should be free, and only really communists talk about that kind of thing historically. I was curious if that had been implemented there. For example in present day japan individuals do not pay for medical care. I wondered if the soviets ever tried to do that with food. I’d like to see free food, shelter, clothing, medical care, and internet access made available to all people. I just wondered if the soviets tried any of that.
  - bgutierrez 7y ago
    Lots of us are unfamiliar with the day-to-day details of soviet communism. Were people paid for their labor? Was everyone given ration cards? Was a party membership enough to get some basic food from one of these stores? I think the question is, was money abolished along with capitalism?
    - Haga 7y ago
      My grandfather visited Moscow after chernobyl on invitation by some radiation chemistry prof he knew. You had to stand in line to buy a weight quantity of bread and other basic necessitys like cheese, butter oder meat. There was only one type of bread. They ate their eveninglunch in a park. I can not tell how the food was for official delegations but this was what a privat dinner with a relative well off friend looked like.
    - jackfoxy 7y ago
      I heard there was a Soviet-era joke along these lines: Q: Under true communism, will there be money? A: Yes and no. Some will have money, others won't.
      - taejo 7y ago
        The one I heard was this: When Ivan was a boy, he asked a Party Man, "How will we know when true communism has been acheived?" The Party Man thought for a little bit, and said, "The shops will be full of goods, and there will be no money." Decades later, in the early 1990s, Ivan is now an old man. He looks through the windows of the department stores, and sticks his hands in pickets. He smiles to himself, and whispers, "At last, true communism!"
    - koverda 7y ago
      People were paid for work and you'd buy groceries with money.
      - asdf21 7y ago
        So... capitalism?
        rrssh 7y ago
        Socialism, it’s in the country name.
        7y ago
  - anoncake 7y ago
    Why should it not be free? I'm not saying there aren't any reasons. But since the people nominally owned the Soviet economy, it's odd to assume by default that the people is charging itself.
    - tlear 7y ago
      They got away from that idiocy once they starved 10mil+ people to death. Money was there and barter(vodka as premium item that could get you anything, like seeing good doctor, getting car fixed, getting caviar). Also those stores also sold from the back to their friends
      - anoncake 7y ago
        The idiocy of not charging money unless there is a reason for it? Why does everyone get incapable of reading when it comes to this topic... Also, citation needed for the Holodomor (which I guess you are alluding to) being caused by free food.

HillaryBriss 7y ago

supposedly something similar happened when Kruschev visited Los Angeles decades ago and thought that all the cars/trucks he saw jamming up roads and freeways were put there to impress him. we tell ourselves these stories to make ourselves feel good about our misshapen consumer-oriented economy. and it doesn't quite work as well now because they more or less have the same stuff in China. also, we're buying a lot of that stuff from China, so it makes even less sense.

titanomachy 7y ago
Is there any meaningful sense in which China is communist?
- eropple 7y ago
  My understanding is that the party controls all land, has controlling interests in many if not most critical companies--as of 2016 the Chinese government owned three percent of all companies in China and up to thirty percent of industrial output[0]--and even theoretically independent companies have former Party officials or relatives of those officials running the show. So it's surely not your textbook Leninist system, but it has many aspects thereof; I suppose you might characterize it as a mixed-command economy. It isn't what we would describe in the vernacular as "socialist"--as that word today generally, outside of the fever swamps of the American right wing, refers to countries like the Nordic or other Western European countries that work within something of a mixed-market system; it's definitely more command-oriented than that, still. Leninist/Stalinist communism generally sports a number social factors that definitely still exist in China outside of the economic structure, such as strong informational control, a smorgasbord of human rights abuses, and a generally totalitarian mode of governance and operation. So I guess the question becomes "well, what does 'communist' mean?" My own, inexpert answer would be "it's not 'communist', except insofar as 'communist' is defined to mean 'what China does'," and my own thinking is that today it maps more to an ethnonationalist--though this isn't a perfect description as many groups are accepted, but at the same time one can see see the routine oppression of Tibetans, Uighurs, etc.--totalitarian state with a largely centrally-controlled economy. That doesn't map to any historical definition of 'communist' that I know of, but reasonable minds can differ. [0] - https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Wendy-Leutert-Challenges-ahead-in-Chinas-reform-of-stateowned-enterprises.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Wendy-L...

hellllllllooo 7y ago

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/werner-herzog-gorbachev https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/werner-herzog-gorbachev Recent Werner Herzog interview talking about interviewing Gorbachev. He discusses a little about the Yeltsin years following and puts Putin's popularity in context of how bad things were during Yeltsin's term. Worth a listen if you have 20 minutes.

TaylorAlexander 7y ago

It’s interesting the notion of waiting in lines. Yesterday at Home Depot I needed a four foot length of hose cut from their hose area. Most employees, even a pair standing and talking right near the hose, said they couldn’t help me, we needed someone from plumbing. They called three separate times for someone from plumbing and after 10 minutes or so someone arrived. But another man had been waiting since just before me, so he was helped first. That took an additional 20 minutes. Even once he came to me, it took maybe 10 minutes because the hose didn’t have the right SKU and he didn’t know what to put on the ticket. So I had to wait more than 30 minutes for a single piece of hose. I bet that’s not as bad as lines were sometimes in the Soviet system, but it’s not fantastic on its own. Imagine if Boris Yeltsin had to wait 30 plus minutes for a four foot length of hose that none of the employees standing around were able or willing to help him with... I’ve been remembering to go to the small Ace Hardware store in town lately. They are much smaller but still seem to have stock of the right items, and I can get a person or two to help me immediately. Capitalism as we know it played a big role in the abundance we’ve had here, but it has also left the US with the most expensive medical care and alienated individuals. Our system may be better than the Soviet system in many ways, but is it the best we can do?

bdamm 7y ago
Honestly I'm tired of Home Depot. If you want real service go to your local Ace or similar. Plus they have a more refined selection of products.
- luckydata 7y ago
  Ace barely scratches the surface if you need to do anything beyond what a normal homeowner would do by themselves. It's the training wheels of hardware stores but the selection (and quality) of tools is a lot lower because for higher priced, more specialized stuff nobody goes there.
  - bdamm 7y ago
    I agree, but Home Depot has been piling a lot of junk on their shelves lately. Think the $5 keychain package with strap when a $0.50 loop will do. Do they stock the $0.50 loop? Good luck finding them or anyone that will know where they are! But you'll surely have no problem finding the big stand of trinkets next to the terrible key cutting machine. Ace will just have a bin of loops and you pick the ones you want, done. This pattern, over and over. Yes, you CAN get great stuff at Home Depot for a decent price, but good luck getting out of there with all your bits at a reasonable price. It just seems to me that they're losing sight of what makes a big box store useful. Of course if I want a stack of PVC or conduit or pressure treated lumber I'm probably going to Home Depot (or a local lumber supplier.) This guy was looking for cuts of hose. That's an Ace visit.

dmix 7y ago

The same thing happened in Venezuela in the early 2000s when they initiated price controls to make food more "affordable" for the poor. The variety of products was the first thing that dropped to only the necessities. Then even the necessities started to drop in supply: > Further yet, price controls, expropriation of numerous farmlands and various industries, among other disputable government policies including a near-total freeze on any access to foreign currency at reasonable "official" exchange rates, have resulted in severe shortages in Venezuela and steep price rises of all common goods, including food, water, household products, spare parts, tools and medical supplies; forcing many manufacturers to either cut production or close down, with many ultimately abandoning the country as has been the case with several technological firms and most automobile makers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Venezuela#1999–2013 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Venezuela#1999–2013

rayiner 7y ago
My wife was a student in the eastern part of Germany in the early aughts, when life in pre-unification eastern Germany was still fresh in peoples’ minds. One thing that people would say is that “before the wall fell, we had plenty of money, there just was never anything to buy.” When I hear people say “X shouldn’t be subject to the market” I want to bang my head on the desk. You can’t just decide that, e.g. food won’t be subject to market forces by, e.g., imposing price controls. If you push on the balloon on one side, it will expand on the other side.
- areoform 7y ago
  However, it is fruitful to point out that not all markets are created equal. Even if an exchange of money takes place in return for goods and services, the market that exists is not necessarily a free market. Sometimes this is true even in the most idealized of cases. For example, healthcare isn’t composed of one market, but several between different operators operating under different market forces and regulatory rules. As it’s too complicated to go into each, I’ll go into one that’s most apparent; the market between patients and healthcare providers (not insurance companies!). Assuming the most idealized of cases that exist without external constraints and regulations, this market would never be a free market. Because the buyer will never be in the position to make the decision to not buy the good. Even a rational free agent would not be in a position to disagree from making a purchase. The value each sentient lifeform places on their life is for all intents and purposes infinity in the healthcare context. No sane suicidal individual or hero would sign up for a purposeless, slow and painful death. This removes the essential mechanism that free markets have to regulate themselves; the freedom to not participate. In most markets, if a good or service is too expensive then the business selling them will go bankrupt or remain small due to a lack of buyers. This creates an incentive for a cheaper mousetrap to exist. But healthcare isn’t like that. Your choice is severely limited. At best, you can choose between providers (though for serious, and sadly incredibly routine, issues the immediacy of needing treatment trumps this) and at worst you’re unconscious and unable to make any decisions yourself. So the element of choice isn’t present making it axiomatically not a free market. Please note that I am not going into ancillary factors like the difficulties patients face in making informed decisions, the viral component that exists for certain classes of disease (you choosing not to do X in the case of a serious enough pathogen could lead to a sick household or an epidemic. See: the return of measles), the difficulty of rationing care (Americans spend more partly because they see their doctors less by design and are discouraged from accessing preventative care), and overall incentive misalignment between doctors, pharmaceutical manufacturers, hospital staff, insurers, HMOs etc that creates runaway effects. We treat all markets in the same way, but they aren’t all the same. The market for healthcare is different from consumer electronics and the market for plastic surgery (a procedure where I must note there is an option to say no). Reductively put, you can choose not to buy a MacBook Pro. But you can’t choose not to treat sepsis. So why does our literature usually assume that both are the same?

depa 7y ago

A very similar reaction to the Romanian communist chief of state when visiting a Macy's in New York: https://twitter.com/NightmarEclipse/status/978375022954909696 https://twitter.com/NightmarEclipse/status/97837502295490969...

el_don_almighty 7y ago

Khrushchev to Nixon in the 1959 Kitchen Debate, "...we will pass you and your capitalism in our advancement and wave to you as we go past..." SOCIALISM... some people never learn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CvQOuNecy4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CvQOuNecy4

Animats 7y ago
"...we will pass you and your capitalism in our advancement and wave to you as we go past..." In our high-speed train. That's China.

keketi 7y ago

> Yeltsin, then 58, "roamed the aisles of Randall's nodding his head in amazement," wrote Asin. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution." It's awe-inspiring to imagine that not too long ago the societal order of multiple countries depended on their millions of residents being ignorant of such a simple fact. What really gets my mind going is the next thought: what are some simple facts that would cause revolutions nowadays if made widely known?

jbattle 7y ago
I know people who genuinely believe that people in countries with socialized medicine have to wait months to see a doctor
- asdf21 7y ago
  ... Because that's true, depending on the situation. https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2014/06/13/if-universal-health-care-is-the-goal-dont-copy-canada/#27492adb78d5 https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2014/06/13/if-uni... >The most visible manifestation of Canada’s failing health care system are wait times for health care services. In 2013, Canadians, on average, faced a four and a half month wait for medically necessary treatment after referral by a general practitioner. This wait time is almost twice as long as it was in 1993 when national wait times were first measured.
  - luckydata 7y ago
    It's true in the bay area to see an ENT doctor too. So your point is?
    - ameister14 7y ago
      The average wait to see a specialist across the US is closer to 24 days, the longest it's ever been - the average in Canada is 21 weeks, also the longest recorded.

bazooka_penguin 7y ago

If only he could see the free food samples at Costco's and Korean groceries.

kumarski 7y ago

I'm from Clear Lake. This is hilarious and is making its way through private threads I have with former astronauts and Nasa Employees. Love HN.

smogcutter 7y ago

Alright I got one: So it's a chilly Thursday morning in Brno, and everybody's in line to buy meat. They're waiting and waiting, and the line's not moving at all. Eventually a Party official comes out and says "Due to the conspiracy of wreckers, there isn't enough meat. All the Jews need to get off the line". So the Jews all get off the line and go home, but still everyone's waiting and there's no meat. Hours pass, and eventually the Party official comes back: "I'm sorry to report that there's still not enough meat. Everyone who's not a Party member needs to get off the line." So all the non-party members get off the line and go home. But still all the Party members are waiting and waiting, no meat. After another two hours waiting in the cold the official comes back and says, "We're sorry but there's no meat today. Everybody get off the line." As they're walking away from the line, one of the people who was waiting turns to the other and says: "You see? The Jews always have it the best!"

fao_ 7y ago
EDIT: I misread the punchline of the joke. Ignore this. That's amusing, but at the same time it is horrifically anti-semitic. Especially given what the Jewish people went through in the years leading up the the Russian Revolution (One toddler was torn apart by a fascist mob, in another town a number of months later Jewish people were forced into a church and then the church and people burned alive).
- sb057 7y ago
  A toddler being torn apart by fascists several years before fascism was first espoused is rather remarkable.
  - fao_ 7y ago
    Do you think that fascism was created by the Nazis? Just because the manifesto was not written, does not mean that there were people without fascist beliefs, even if they couldn't call themselves fascists yet.
- afro88 7y ago
  I read the joke as making fun of anti-semites, not being anti-semitic.

antonpirker 7y ago

"451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons" - Sorry, this content is not available in your region. Oh come on! Seriously?

wastenaut 7y ago

Hmmm, I always thought it was me, but there really is a natural reaction of dismay, to witness what seems to be a bottomless pit of goods always on standby on store shelves. In particular, with perishables, I look at the things that won't possibly sell before being removed for lack of freshness, and I've always considered it to be an absurd waste. The other night, I walked by a Dunkin Donuts, and a garbage bag of donuts and bagels had spilled across the sidewalk. It was probably $100 worth of food getting dumped into a landfill because it was day-old baked goods. But the line out the door at eight in the morning meant that profits had more than cleared that margin of disposable food. How to reconcile that with the bums panhandling and playing doorman all day? That stores display perishable products for the sake of advertising to foot traffic has always freaked me out on visceral level. To waste a quantity of human activity for purely ostentatious purposes doesn't sit well with one's primal conscience.

KozmoNau7 7y ago
It is an inherent problem in capitalism. We're throwing away perfectly good food and other products, for no reason other than they aren't profitable enough, and giving them away would cut into sales of competing or newer products. Meanwhile millions die each year, from starvation, disease and lack of access to clean drinking water. Because it is not profitable enough to help them.
scotty79 7y ago
> It was probably $100 worth of food getting dumped into a landfill because it was day-old baked goods. 100$ at their prices or 100$ of flour and sugar? I think what they mostly were throwing out was peoples work but that's exactly same thing as with any form of advertisement.

Mugwort 7y ago

He looks skinny.

jbarham 7y ago

Actually Canada has a stronger claim to speeding the fall of Communism given that Gorbachev had a similar revelation when he visited Canadian supermarkets in 1983: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15129713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15129713

stcredzero 7y ago

The link in the article: "By contrast, this is what a Russian grocery store looked like at the same time." I remember going back to my hometown to visit my parents, who live in a somewhat rural part of a "Red State." By the Walmart out by the run-down local mall, there's this depressing discount food store, which, as far as I can tell, exists for the people who are too poor to shop at the Walmart. Most of it contained boxes and bins like the Soviet store. Most of it was dry and canned goods. There is great wealth and opportunity in the US. There is still something left to do, however. The solution isn't to emulate Venezuela or the Soviet Union, obviously. Yet, there is disaffection here in the US as well, and there is a reason for it. The solution isn't to punish and blame the disaffected.

socrates1998 7y ago

I remember this, but I wasn't sure if it was real or not. It seems like Yeltsin really did want to abandon communism after he visited a grocery store. Crazy. Cool article.

elamje 7y ago

Any other Clear Lakers here?

bawigga 7y ago
Here! Always fun seeing Clear Lake mentioned on HN!

aasasd 7y ago

Yeltsin here looks like just some late-middle-aged executive guy—which he was, as he wasn't president yet. My favorite pic of his, from the time of actual presidency, is rather different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Clinton_Yeltsin_1995.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Clinton_Yeltsin_1995.jpg

igivanov 7y ago

While recounting anecdotes and making witty observations, let's not forget that this man was responsible for bringing incredible misery upon the people of Russia. Not he alone, but he was the main one. Also a drunkard, a dictator and a darling of the West.

baybal2 7y ago

Really the key quote is: > Yeltsin, then 58, "roamed the aisles of Randall's nodding his head in amazement," wrote Asin. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution."

mindcrash 7y ago

"In 1989 Russian president Boris Yeltsin's wide-eyed trip to a Clear Lake grocery store led to the downfall of communism." It didn't led to the downfall of communism but it helped tremendously in Yeltsin's understanding what communism really was and is: just another form of human exploitation by a small group of elitists (or aristocrats). Noteworthy is the following description of events which happened while travelling in the US: ""For a long time, on the plane to Miami, he sat motionless, his head in his hands. 'What have they done to our poor people?' he [Yeltsin] said after a long silence." He added, "On his return to Moscow, Yeltsin would confess the pain he had felt after the Houston excursion: the 'pain for all of us, for our country so rich, so talented and so exhausted by incessant experiments'." He wrote that Mr. Yeltsin added, "I think we have committed a crime against our people by making their standard of living so incomparably lower than that of the Americans." An aide, Lev Sukhanov was reported to have said that it was at that moment that "the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed" inside his boss." Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Yeltsin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Yeltsin In case anyone wants to know what actually led to the dissolution of the USSR check out this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Unio...