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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.

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.