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It's naive to imagine Yeltsin's mind was really changed by a spontaneous visit. He didn't have intelligence on what a US supermarket was like? The premiere of a

It's naive to imagine Yeltsin's mind was really changed by a spontaneous visit. He didn't have intelligence on what a US supermarket was like? The premiere of a superpower just randomly decided to visit a grocery store? No. Yeltsin was contemplating reforms and changes and wanted to collect a political tool he could later user if needed. He knew exactly how this visit would go, and it was intended so he could use it as rhetorical device to illustrate the necessity of reforms.

luckylion 4y ago
Who knows. At least according to (then Germany's chancellor) Helmut Schmidt, at an official visit of Brezhnev where he had invited him to his private home in Hamburg, Brezhnev was flabbergasted that the German chancellor could live in an average home, next to normal people, without walls and hundreds of soldiers separating them.
- Thlom 4y ago
  We have the same story in Norway. Apparently Nikita Khrusjtsjov visited then prime minister Einar Gerhardsen in his small and modest housing association apartment in 1964 and subsequently demanded to know where Gerhardsen REALLY lived, cause he couldn't imagine the prime minister living in a normal apartment in a normal apartment building. But he did and lived in the same apartment until his death in 1987.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    It might be a matter of Soviet diplomacy to act surprised. Is the story with Gerhardsen relayed by him / officials? Schmidt told it himself, so at least it's not something somebody made up and everybody repeated it because it's such a nice story, unless he himself made it up. He wasn't the type, but who knows.
    - Thlom 4y ago
      The story has been told by his son, but I think it is confirmed by several sources. I don't think Gerhardsen himself ever told it publicly.
ninth_ant 4y ago
I don’t think the official narrative implies he was naive. A senior person in an authoritarian system like that could be surrounded by “yes men” who would repeat the official Soviet lines that perhaps American supermarkets weren’t all that much different from soviet ones, or only available to the super rich, etc Perhaps they also received legitimate reports as well. An unplanned impromptu trip would be a good way to see which reports were the most accurate.
- advisedwang 4y ago
  Sorry I don't mean that Yeltsin was naive, but that it's naive for us in the present day (and the author) to believe that but for a random whim Yeltsin would have believed anything different.
drewcoo 4y ago
". . . has been brought to a state of such poverty" from the article also contradicts that the USSR was the greatest success story (until China) at lifting a very poor population out of poverty.
- filoleg 4y ago
  > [...] the USSR was the greatest success story (until China) at lifting a very poor population out of poverty. It is much easier to display numbers showing that you "lifted poor population out of poverty", when most of that poor population either got genocided or sent off to gulags or simply died off due to the aforementioned poverty. Not even mentioning the classic number massage. Before someone tries to go full-on "you are just an american shill", I grew up in Russia during 90s, and my parents+grandparents grew up in the USSR. One of them had to cover up his jewish ethnicity his entire life, I only found out about it many years later, after his passing. Let me just say, he wasn't doing that cover-up for some personal reasons at all. When it comes to the Soviet Union, the closer you are to the source material, the worse it looks.
spywaregorilla 4y ago
Assuming that leaders are always informed and thinking ahead isn't particularly wise.
- Barrin92 4y ago
  In Soviet Communist states visits, public displays and greetings were so tightly choreographed and planned that there is a very slim chance that anything like this is coincidental. When Nikita Khrushchev visited Mao in '59 the protocol was specified down to the handshake with the intent on the Chinese side to signify the low status of the relation given the Soviet-Sino split. Symbolism and performance was everything in Soviet politics, and even in Soviet life. American presidents might casually go and walk into some store on camera but this is not how Communist poltiicians thought.
  - spywaregorilla 4y ago
    Seems very doubtful to me. Pointing to one highly choreographed high profile incident is not convincing evidence that it was normative. This was not much of a PR stunt. It was at least on paper an unplanned visit. I don't believe he used it as persuasive evidence. Unless you think his biographer writing about him after he left office was doing so still for political posturing, he appears to have had a genuine emotional reaction. > bout a year after the Russian leader left office, a Yeltsin biographer later wrote that on the plane ride to Yeltsin’s next destination, Miami, he was despondent. He couldn’t stop thinking about the plentiful food at the grocery store and what his countrymen had to subsist on in Russia. > In Yeltsin’s own autobiography, he wrote about the experience at Randall’s, which shattered his view of communism, according to pundits. Two years later, he left the Communist Party and began making reforms to turn the economic tide in Russia.
    - Barrin92 4y ago
      >Unless you think his biographer writing about him after he left office was doing so still for political posturing I believe that about most politician's autobiographies, not just Soviet ones. I wouldn't be surprised if the autobiography was written with the explicit intent to sell better in the US, Prince Harry style. Soviet guy comes to the land of plenty, has a almost religious experience in a supermarket and shakes off his misbegotten Soviet ways, that's a Disney story lol. Of course he knew what was going on in the US and his own country long before.
phpisthebest 4y ago
>>The premiere of a superpower I think this attribute far too much intelligence to those in power. Like the people that claim Trump was doing 5D chess =. I generally believe all governments are lead by functional idiots and the human race survives in spite of their efforts to destroy us.
duskwuff 4y ago
It can be both. You can know intellectually that the Americans have a higher standard of living than Russians, and still be surprised by what that really means, at a practical level, for ordinary people.
- eschulz 4y ago
  Right, and also why would he care so much about grocery stores in America when he's in Russia and reviewing military and diplomatic intel about the US? "They have grocery stores that have more items than our stores" - boring. "A US diplomat was arrested and released in Latin America for something he did while drunk" - interesting.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    Everything is fundamentally driven by the economy, so having even a glimpse of that economy in practice (eg: a supermarket) is essential to drawing a more accurate picture of the wider military and geopolitics. If your foe can demand bananas any day of the year for pennies while you can't, you lost that war before it even started.
BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
>”He didn't have intelligence on what a US supermarket was like?” Take this all with a grain of salt because this is just what I remember from reading stories online of people who used to live in the USSR, but the average person realized the West had more material prosperity but they were under the impression the upper class folks were the only ones with real access to it. They believed the common worker still had to deal with limited selection and shortages, much like they did. Additionally, with whatever glimpses they saw of western consumerism they were told that the abundance was intentionally staged, like a Potemkin village. This was not uncommon for the USSR to do when dignitaries or journalists came to visit. So it made sense that the West would do this too. I have to imagine that as a Soviet citizen and dignitary he assumed everything he saw on his trip was staged or choreographed in some way. They intentionally made an unplanned stop to try and confront this. Perhaps he and his entourage already knew he was going to find a well stocked supermarket, but I can’t help but think cognitive dissonance kept him from really accepting it until he saw it firsthand.
- e1g 4y ago
  In 1989, I was a child growing up on the streets of a small town in Siberia. During those years, I believed everyone in America was prosperous - the 'common worker' didn't exist, and it was wealth all the way down. My family was not connected, and we were firmly middle class (in the "all animals are equal" way). The Soviet propaganda machine was compelling before my time, but by the 90s, common folks in the USSR were not under any delusion that life in the US was equally bad.
  - actinium226 4y ago
    My grandfather was born in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) and lived there as a child through the Nazi siege. In the 40's and 50's in the USSR he and his friends saw through the propaganda and knew that things in the US were much better. But you know what's strange? He lives in NJ now, he's been there for the last 25 years. He watches Russian state TV and also CNN and thinks he gets both perspectives. When Russia invaded Ukraine, he defended Russia, and spit out all the lines about the "nazi leadership" of Ukraine. "Bucha was faked," all that. I think he realized that he was in the minority and toned it down, but this definitely made an impression on me. It's not that certain people are immune to propaganda and some aren't. Anybody can fall into it.
mynameishere 4y ago
Maybe not. Khrushchev was apparently dazzled by corn, or as it was known then "sausage on a stalk". https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=khrushchev+corn https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=khrushchev+corn
codeulike 4y ago
He wasn't premier at the time. But anyway the article hints at what you are saying. An aide to Yeltsin later reported that in that visit to the grocery store in Houston “the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed” inside his boss. So perhaps he was already thinking that way, and an improptu visit to a supermarket would be of great interest to him.
- adolph 4y ago
  I was curious about what “Bolshevism” specifically meant in that context. Maybe it is the centrally planned part of Soviet communism as opposed to social democracy within an undirected private economy? Bolshevism (from Bolshevik) is a revolutionary socialist current of Soviet Marxist–Leninist political thought and political regime associated with the formation of a rigidly centralized, cohesive and disciplined party of social revolution, focused on overthrowing the existing capitalist state system, seizing power and establishing the "dictatorship of the proletariat". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolshevism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolshevism
toss1 4y ago
No, it's different. My college++ GF's father worked at as a CxO of an international company, spoke Russian, traveled there multiple times, and had a lot of friends & acquaintances in the diplomatic services. In the early 1980s, he told us about one of his diplomatic friends hosting some Russian dignitaries for a few weeks. Their consistent attitude about everything was "of course, we have this also in Russia", along with the general assumption that everything was either staged or in a 'walled garden' for the rich and/or powerful. Then, late in the trip, she accompanied them on a shopping trip to one of the new-ish (at the time) large-format supermarkets. The visitor was literally in tears, surrounded by the acres of plenty. It didn't matter whether it was just for the rich or not — it was so far beyond her experience that she couldn't hold it together. Similarly, another incident pointed out by a Russian expert [0]: when communist authorities in (IIRC) Bulgaria tried to show "Car Wash" redubbed as a racial morality play about capitalism and all anyone noticed that even the poorest people in LA had so many cars that we had machines to wash them. They may have a lot of good information, but it is not exhaustive. And remember, everyone examines the information they receive through the lens of their own experience and their own ego. Those growing up behind the Iron Curtain both had never experienced any kind of luxury that was not walled off only for the ruling class, and also had a desire to defend their own pride in their homeland. So, they wouldn't necessarily understand the importance or utter ubiquity of something like large supermarkets before seeing it in person and in live context. [0] https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1611418480183492613 https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1611418480183492613
thriftwy 4y ago
I think that Yeltsin had his own experience of shopping (or otherwise getting stuff shipped) from a "special distribution center" which he knew was unavailable to 99.8% of population yet had way worse selection of goods than the random USA supermarket. It was whatever stuff they could buy in Finland, basically. He had a family. Personal experiences are hard to beat. He also started his career in Yekaterinburg, from some mid-range position, so he was not that detached from the life of common folk. He just saw a very different kind of life which does not translate to knowing things in theory.
JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
You are seriously overrating world leaders. They are just guys who happened to find themselves there Maybe he did get the intelligence reports but he needed to go and see for himself in order to internalize them as opposed to just absentmindedly skim through them
huffmsa 4y ago
It's one thing to know something, it's another to actually see it first hand.
deleted 4y ago
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- deleted 4y ago
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luckylion 4y ago

Who knows. At least according to (then Germany's chancellor) Helmut Schmidt, at an official visit of Brezhnev where he had invited him to his private home in Hamburg, Brezhnev was flabbergasted that the German chancellor could live in an average home, next to normal people, without walls and hundreds of soldiers separating them.

Thlom 4y ago
We have the same story in Norway. Apparently Nikita Khrusjtsjov visited then prime minister Einar Gerhardsen in his small and modest housing association apartment in 1964 and subsequently demanded to know where Gerhardsen REALLY lived, cause he couldn't imagine the prime minister living in a normal apartment in a normal apartment building. But he did and lived in the same apartment until his death in 1987.
- luckylion 4y ago
  It might be a matter of Soviet diplomacy to act surprised. Is the story with Gerhardsen relayed by him / officials? Schmidt told it himself, so at least it's not something somebody made up and everybody repeated it because it's such a nice story, unless he himself made it up. He wasn't the type, but who knows.
  - Thlom 4y ago
    The story has been told by his son, but I think it is confirmed by several sources. I don't think Gerhardsen himself ever told it publicly.

ninth_ant 4y ago

I don’t think the official narrative implies he was naive. A senior person in an authoritarian system like that could be surrounded by “yes men” who would repeat the official Soviet lines that perhaps American supermarkets weren’t all that much different from soviet ones, or only available to the super rich, etc Perhaps they also received legitimate reports as well. An unplanned impromptu trip would be a good way to see which reports were the most accurate.

advisedwang 4y ago
Sorry I don't mean that Yeltsin was naive, but that it's naive for us in the present day (and the author) to believe that but for a random whim Yeltsin would have believed anything different.

drewcoo 4y ago

". . . has been brought to a state of such poverty" from the article also contradicts that the USSR was the greatest success story (until China) at lifting a very poor population out of poverty.

filoleg 4y ago
> [...] the USSR was the greatest success story (until China) at lifting a very poor population out of poverty. It is much easier to display numbers showing that you "lifted poor population out of poverty", when most of that poor population either got genocided or sent off to gulags or simply died off due to the aforementioned poverty. Not even mentioning the classic number massage. Before someone tries to go full-on "you are just an american shill", I grew up in Russia during 90s, and my parents+grandparents grew up in the USSR. One of them had to cover up his jewish ethnicity his entire life, I only found out about it many years later, after his passing. Let me just say, he wasn't doing that cover-up for some personal reasons at all. When it comes to the Soviet Union, the closer you are to the source material, the worse it looks.

spywaregorilla 4y ago

Assuming that leaders are always informed and thinking ahead isn't particularly wise.

Barrin92 4y ago
In Soviet Communist states visits, public displays and greetings were so tightly choreographed and planned that there is a very slim chance that anything like this is coincidental. When Nikita Khrushchev visited Mao in '59 the protocol was specified down to the handshake with the intent on the Chinese side to signify the low status of the relation given the Soviet-Sino split. Symbolism and performance was everything in Soviet politics, and even in Soviet life. American presidents might casually go and walk into some store on camera but this is not how Communist poltiicians thought.
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  Seems very doubtful to me. Pointing to one highly choreographed high profile incident is not convincing evidence that it was normative. This was not much of a PR stunt. It was at least on paper an unplanned visit. I don't believe he used it as persuasive evidence. Unless you think his biographer writing about him after he left office was doing so still for political posturing, he appears to have had a genuine emotional reaction. > bout a year after the Russian leader left office, a Yeltsin biographer later wrote that on the plane ride to Yeltsin’s next destination, Miami, he was despondent. He couldn’t stop thinking about the plentiful food at the grocery store and what his countrymen had to subsist on in Russia. > In Yeltsin’s own autobiography, he wrote about the experience at Randall’s, which shattered his view of communism, according to pundits. Two years later, he left the Communist Party and began making reforms to turn the economic tide in Russia.
  - Barrin92 4y ago
    >Unless you think his biographer writing about him after he left office was doing so still for political posturing I believe that about most politician's autobiographies, not just Soviet ones. I wouldn't be surprised if the autobiography was written with the explicit intent to sell better in the US, Prince Harry style. Soviet guy comes to the land of plenty, has a almost religious experience in a supermarket and shakes off his misbegotten Soviet ways, that's a Disney story lol. Of course he knew what was going on in the US and his own country long before.

phpisthebest 4y ago

>>The premiere of a superpower I think this attribute far too much intelligence to those in power. Like the people that claim Trump was doing 5D chess =. I generally believe all governments are lead by functional idiots and the human race survives in spite of their efforts to destroy us.

duskwuff 4y ago

It can be both. You can know intellectually that the Americans have a higher standard of living than Russians, and still be surprised by what that really means, at a practical level, for ordinary people.

eschulz 4y ago
Right, and also why would he care so much about grocery stores in America when he's in Russia and reviewing military and diplomatic intel about the US? "They have grocery stores that have more items than our stores" - boring. "A US diplomat was arrested and released in Latin America for something he did while drunk" - interesting.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  Everything is fundamentally driven by the economy, so having even a glimpse of that economy in practice (eg: a supermarket) is essential to drawing a more accurate picture of the wider military and geopolitics. If your foe can demand bananas any day of the year for pennies while you can't, you lost that war before it even started.

BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago

>”He didn't have intelligence on what a US supermarket was like?” Take this all with a grain of salt because this is just what I remember from reading stories online of people who used to live in the USSR, but the average person realized the West had more material prosperity but they were under the impression the upper class folks were the only ones with real access to it. They believed the common worker still had to deal with limited selection and shortages, much like they did. Additionally, with whatever glimpses they saw of western consumerism they were told that the abundance was intentionally staged, like a Potemkin village. This was not uncommon for the USSR to do when dignitaries or journalists came to visit. So it made sense that the West would do this too. I have to imagine that as a Soviet citizen and dignitary he assumed everything he saw on his trip was staged or choreographed in some way. They intentionally made an unplanned stop to try and confront this. Perhaps he and his entourage already knew he was going to find a well stocked supermarket, but I can’t help but think cognitive dissonance kept him from really accepting it until he saw it firsthand.

e1g 4y ago
In 1989, I was a child growing up on the streets of a small town in Siberia. During those years, I believed everyone in America was prosperous - the 'common worker' didn't exist, and it was wealth all the way down. My family was not connected, and we were firmly middle class (in the "all animals are equal" way). The Soviet propaganda machine was compelling before my time, but by the 90s, common folks in the USSR were not under any delusion that life in the US was equally bad.
- actinium226 4y ago
  My grandfather was born in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) and lived there as a child through the Nazi siege. In the 40's and 50's in the USSR he and his friends saw through the propaganda and knew that things in the US were much better. But you know what's strange? He lives in NJ now, he's been there for the last 25 years. He watches Russian state TV and also CNN and thinks he gets both perspectives. When Russia invaded Ukraine, he defended Russia, and spit out all the lines about the "nazi leadership" of Ukraine. "Bucha was faked," all that. I think he realized that he was in the minority and toned it down, but this definitely made an impression on me. It's not that certain people are immune to propaganda and some aren't. Anybody can fall into it.

mynameishere 4y ago

Maybe not. Khrushchev was apparently dazzled by corn, or as it was known then "sausage on a stalk". https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=khrushchev+corn https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=khrushchev+corn

codeulike 4y ago

He wasn't premier at the time. But anyway the article hints at what you are saying. An aide to Yeltsin later reported that in that visit to the grocery store in Houston “the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed” inside his boss. So perhaps he was already thinking that way, and an improptu visit to a supermarket would be of great interest to him.

adolph 4y ago
I was curious about what “Bolshevism” specifically meant in that context. Maybe it is the centrally planned part of Soviet communism as opposed to social democracy within an undirected private economy? Bolshevism (from Bolshevik) is a revolutionary socialist current of Soviet Marxist–Leninist political thought and political regime associated with the formation of a rigidly centralized, cohesive and disciplined party of social revolution, focused on overthrowing the existing capitalist state system, seizing power and establishing the "dictatorship of the proletariat". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolshevism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolshevism

toss1 4y ago

No, it's different. My college++ GF's father worked at as a CxO of an international company, spoke Russian, traveled there multiple times, and had a lot of friends & acquaintances in the diplomatic services. In the early 1980s, he told us about one of his diplomatic friends hosting some Russian dignitaries for a few weeks. Their consistent attitude about everything was "of course, we have this also in Russia", along with the general assumption that everything was either staged or in a 'walled garden' for the rich and/or powerful. Then, late in the trip, she accompanied them on a shopping trip to one of the new-ish (at the time) large-format supermarkets. The visitor was literally in tears, surrounded by the acres of plenty. It didn't matter whether it was just for the rich or not — it was so far beyond her experience that she couldn't hold it together. Similarly, another incident pointed out by a Russian expert [0]: when communist authorities in (IIRC) Bulgaria tried to show "Car Wash" redubbed as a racial morality play about capitalism and all anyone noticed that even the poorest people in LA had so many cars that we had machines to wash them. They may have a lot of good information, but it is not exhaustive. And remember, everyone examines the information they receive through the lens of their own experience and their own ego. Those growing up behind the Iron Curtain both had never experienced any kind of luxury that was not walled off only for the ruling class, and also had a desire to defend their own pride in their homeland. So, they wouldn't necessarily understand the importance or utter ubiquity of something like large supermarkets before seeing it in person and in live context. [0] https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1611418480183492613 https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1611418480183492613

thriftwy 4y ago

I think that Yeltsin had his own experience of shopping (or otherwise getting stuff shipped) from a "special distribution center" which he knew was unavailable to 99.8% of population yet had way worse selection of goods than the random USA supermarket. It was whatever stuff they could buy in Finland, basically. He had a family. Personal experiences are hard to beat. He also started his career in Yekaterinburg, from some mid-range position, so he was not that detached from the life of common folk. He just saw a very different kind of life which does not translate to knowing things in theory.

JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago

You are seriously overrating world leaders. They are just guys who happened to find themselves there Maybe he did get the intelligence reports but he needed to go and see for himself in order to internalize them as opposed to just absentmindedly skim through them

huffmsa 4y ago

It's one thing to know something, it's another to actually see it first hand.

deleted 4y ago

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deleted 4y ago
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