When Boris Yeltsin Went Grocery Shopping in Clear Lake

https://www.nhregister.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When-Boris-Yeltsin-went-grocery-shopping-in-Clear-5759129.php#photo-6130393

by areoform • 7 years ago

180 271 7 years ago

nhregister.com

akurilin• 7 years ago

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.

TaylorAlexander3• 7 years ago

It looked like people were paying money for food. Did they indeed pay, or was some food free? How did that work?

BerislavLopac• 7 years ago

Why would it be free?

HillaryBriss2• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

Is there any meaningful sense in which China is communist?

eropple8• 7 years 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-L...

seabrookmx• 7 years ago

I think people associate a "one party system" with communism. But really the system of government isn't strictly tied to how the economy is managed (see: monarchies, fascism).

You're right though. Economically China isn't communist. Especially in their "Special Administrative Regions" (Hong Kong, Macau).

Animats2• 7 years ago

supposedly something similar happened when Kruschev visited Los Angeles decades ago

Anatoly Dobrynin, the USSRs ambassador to the US from 1962 to 1986, wrote that when he arrived in New York, he was amazed to see traffic jams were real. In the USSR, they were claimed to be American propaganda.

The world has advanced a lot since then. The third world now has much worse traffic jams than the US.

(Dobrynin's autobiography describes how he became a diplomat. One day, Stalin was grumbling about the old diplomats around him, and said that the USSR needed New Soviet Men, like aircraft designers, as diplomats. The next day, Dobrynin, aircraft designer, was essentially arrested at his drafting table at work and sent to the Higher Diplomatic Academy in Moscow.)

hellllllllooo• 7 years ago

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.

TaylorAlexander3• 7 years 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?

bdamm2• 7 years 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.

luckydata4• 7 years 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.

mc32• 7 years ago

If you’re doing remodeling work or additions you need Home Depot or Lowe’s. Ace is for minor things around the house.

HillaryBriss2• 7 years ago

ah... Home Depot dysfunction. yesterday, at Home Depot a fellow customer told me about his experience buying bags of gravel. he paid for the materials and the HD workers told him they'd bring it out to the loading area so he could put it in his vehicle.

he waited there for forty minutes. no gravel. his patience ran out and he decided to ask for a refund. they sent him to the refund desk, which, naturally, required him to return the gravel before they could give back his money.

CryptoPunk5• 7 years ago

>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.

Healthcare is one of the least capitalistic parts of the economy, in the US and the rest of the Western world, and consequently, suffering from increasing costs.

In contrast to the increasingly regulated and subsidized major medical fields, the most capitalistic fields of medicine, like cosmetic procedures, have actually seen prices increase at below the rate of inflation over the last several decades.

ghettoimp• 7 years ago

I think you're calling cosmetic procedures a "capitalistic sector" of the medical industry because insurance companies won't cover these elective procedures, so folks have to pay for them out of pocket, so the providers have to price the service at a level that people are willing to pay for. That all seems like a good example of companies that are competing on price, classic capitalism, fair enough.

But if we pick any other particular area of medicine where prices are out of whack -- say drug companies that raise prices by exorbitant amounts, or hospitals charging hundreds of dollars for an aspirin -- isn't that still classic, unchecked capitalism in action? Aren't these just ordinary companies, working to optimize their profits by cornering a market on certain products or services and charging the maximal value they can extract from their customers?

jopsen• 7 years ago

It's not an either or...

Our supermarkets have lots of regulation ranging from what food may contain, how it is produced, to how it may be markedet.

derp_dee_derp• 7 years ago

Capitalism also funded the research and development of that medical care you're complaining about being too expensive. Better that it exists and is expensive rather than that medical care not existing at all.

jtr12• 7 years ago

Are you sure about that?

silversconfused• 7 years ago

Plenty of medical science has been done with less greedy motives, such as eliminating suffering. For that reason, medical science can easily survive the capitalists abandoning it.

KirinDave2• 7 years ago

This sounds like a positive claim that could use proof.

asdf214• 7 years ago

You can shop somewhere else besides Home Depot... that's the beauty of the free market.

eropple8• 7 years ago

Only if you've got alternatives. Where I am, your choices are Home Depot or ten-foot-wide hardware stores where you can find any bolt you want but can't get a sheet of plywood.

darkhorn• 7 years ago

Aren't there any other countries than Soviet Union and the USA?

dazc• 7 years ago

According to TV, no.

fatnoah• 7 years ago

I’ve been remembering to go to the small Ace Hardware store in town lately.

I never made a conscious decision to avoid the big box stores, but living in downtown Boston forced that decision on me, so I got used to going to a small, local store for just about everything. I've since moved to a suburb, but still go to the small stores, even when it's less convenient.

RandallBrown• 7 years ago

At the same time, I can preshop Home Depot online and it will tell me the row and bin that I need to go to for just about every item in the store. IKEA is the only other store I've ever actually been able to do that.

smacktoward• 7 years ago

I was just thinking about this myself, having recently had to spend exorbitant times waiting in line at both my local Sprint store and a Best Buy. It does seem like this is a problem that isn't specific to Home Depot (where I've had to wait in long lines as well); it's more a problem that seems to be metastasizing across all sorts of big retail.

My suspicion is that it has something to do with the jobs these companies offer being increasingly precarious, poorly trained and ill-paid. Corporate America has spent decades striving to get to a point where workers can be treated as interchangeable widgets, swapped around at will and just discarded when they wear out. Well, they got there, and now we discover that when you build an entire culture around treating people without respect they don't have a lot of respect for you or the job you're asking them to do either.

Workers in the old Soviet Union supposedly had a joke: "they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work." It's not hard to imagine someone working first-line customer support at a big box store saying the same thing.

sonnyblarney2• 7 years ago

A singular example of 'having to wait for a few minutes' in Home Depot doesn't really help make your case.

Whatever we might not like about the 'Big Box' nature of it ... 'Home Depot' is actually an excruciatingly example of that which is articulated in the article.

HD is this massive place where you can buy a gazillion different types of products (and services); there is an amazing degree of variety and specialization in every little aspect of it all.

Home Depot is in many ways a luxury store of the suburban middle class, a blatant example of the massive surpluses inherent in the modern economy. It's a testament to a lot of things. It's a kind of 'bourgeois for the masses'.

Consider for a moment that such a thing doesn't even exist in Europe! Now, most of this is cultural, in that, for a variety of historical reasons, they don't have that 'DOY' kind of culture; but make no mistake, it's also economic. People generally don't have the garage space (or a garage/shed) in which to store all of the semi useful bounty they collect from such a place. And neither the income to support it.

If HD were a place wherein it was impossible to get service, where staff 'knew nothing' and it was a desperately terrible business, then I think there'd be a point to be made but as it stands ... 'having to wait in line once for something' is almost crossing the line into entitlement.

And of course, the reason lines existed in the Soviet Union is something else entirely, and so the comparison is problematic to begin with.

Education and Health Services are 'problem areas' for capitalism, at least in the American sense, but I suggest with some meaningful reforms, it could work out. A handful of European nations have 'somewhat/mostly private' though still 'socialized' systems that work well.

"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.". This is really a historical statement. If we can move past issues of national pride and the 'we are better / I told you so' jingoisms, there's a lot to be learned from this. In fact, so few statements communicate so much.

dmurray• 7 years ago

In what sense does such a thing as Home Depot not exist in Europe? In Ireland we have two chains of big warehouse-style DIY stores: Woodies and B&Q, sized around 50,000 sq ft. In both of them you can get power tools, timber, bathroom and plumbing supplies, garden furniture, paint, flooring, doors...

I've never been in a Home Depot but they sound pretty similar. Are they just so much bigger?

rasz• 7 years ago

Imagine if Boris Yeltsin had to wait 30 plus minutes for a four foot length of hose

You have rubber hose!?!?! What do you mean its not rationed? I can buy whole 4 feet at once? Are you sure I dont need my ration stamps? and someone will actually cut it for me? :o no signup lists? I only have to wait 30 minutes? so quick I dont even have to hire someone to stand for me!

https://culture.pl/en/article/10-mind-boggling-oddities-of-c...

razius3• 7 years ago

This! I don't think western people can grasp the communist queues and shops.

stcredzero8• 7 years ago

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.

I was at Home Depot to get some roller blinds, which they advertised they could cut to measurements. I got the blinds and went to the machine, which basically had a thing to spin the blinds around and cutting blade screw-clamped to a ruler-like fixture, which allowed adjustment to measurements. (The point being, that you could align the blade to any measurement shown on the ruler.)

A store clerk finally comes after a long time, and I give her the measurements. Her response: "The machine doesn't do fractions." This was clearly a lie. The machine did fractions. The clerk didn't.

Digory• 7 years ago

I’ve felt a general decrease in retail experience in the past year or so. Maybe Amazon is eating everybody's lunch. But labor is tight, and employee quality is down.

NYT reported yesterday that we are well past full employment -- because employers are willing to hire anyone, including felons, and will overlook things that used to be firing offenses.

razius3• 7 years ago

Not even in the same ballpark, imagine having to queue up for 5-6h to be able to buy your monthly ration of 1kg of sugar in the only shop in town without knowing if it will run out by the time you get there or not.

30m waiting time with the option of coming back or going somewhere else is a breeze.

dmix3• 7 years 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

rayiner3• 7 years 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.

dmix3• 7 years ago

It's basically people with good intentions volunteering themselves into poverty during the greatest time of abundance of food in human history.

Of course it comes with plenty of western/foreign capitalist sabotage conspiracies thrown in to justify why their grand economic experiment didn't work. Then it devolves into basically purposefully underfeeding your population because of a giant lingering sunk-cost fallacy and, most importantly, an ideology to defend - on which the current power structures were built on.

areoform4• 7 years 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?

duxup2• 7 years ago

My understanding was that East Germany actually had a better standard of living generally than your average Russian at that time.

So their thoughts that they were doing alright compared to Russia at that time was probably right.

4ntonius8lock• 7 years ago

Just curious as to how you think fire fighting services should be priced by the market?

I'm generally very conservative and against regulation, so no need to preach Adam smith to me (I actually read Wealth of Nations... not the synopsis). Though I will say, by ycombinator standards, I'm a centrist (way too left for the right, way too right for the left).

thaumasiotes6• 7 years ago

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.”

This is a pretty striking echo of Kipling's verse commentary:

In the Carboniferous Epoch, we were promised abundance for all

by robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul

But though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy

and the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

(The Gods of the Copybook Headings, 1919)

depa• 7 years 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/97837502295490969...

el_don_almighty• 7 years 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

Animats2• 7 years 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.

keketi2• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

I know people who genuinely believe that people in countries with socialized medicine have to wait months to see a doctor

asdf214• 7 years ago

... Because that's true, depending on the situation.

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.

luckydata4• 7 years ago

I scheduled in February to see an ENT in July. I live in California, Bay Area, and seeing a specialist in this area SUCKS. Socialized medicine?

SpaceRaccoon• 7 years ago

It's true. I needed to get an MRI in Canada. The doctor said it wasn't necessary and even if I was put on the queue, it would be 9 months. I asked to see a neurologist. The wait? At least 6 months, absolute minimum.

I moved to the US. When the doctor told me the wait would be a couple weeks and to call back if I was having issues, I laughed. I was amazed. And the MRI was absolutely necessary.

ryguytilidie• 7 years ago

I had a super weird one. I worked for a startup with a British CTO who was very Republican and would constantly rail against poor people and talk about how the NHS killed people and made them wait months.

I was like, wait, you lived there, experienced the opposite of what you're saying and STILL manage to make up lies to make it sound bad? WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!?!

markdog12• 7 years ago

That's because it is genuine. Take it from a Canadian who has had to wait many months multiple times for MRIs. Right now I have a tear in my hip joint that needs an MRI, been waiting since November, still nothing. Meanwhile I'm yelping in pain when I try to stand up from sitting down.

Here's a Canadian woman with cancer that went undiagnosed for 2 years because she couldn't access a family doctor: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/health-care-plea-...

Note that she also tried to get access to mental health services to cope, in January, and has to wait until the summer.

Health care access is one of the major issues in Canada right now.

protomyth• 7 years ago

I’ll believe in socialized medicine in the US when they fix Indian Health Service. Until that day, if the politicians cannot come up with a decent system for a small part of the population then they cannot for everyone.

Heck, it only took three operations to fix a botched root canal, and I considered myself lucky.

jdietrich2• 7 years ago

Here in the UK, I have to wait about three weeks for a GP appointment. The NHS target for routine appointments with a specialist is 18 weeks, but that target is habitually missed. Routine surgeries are frequently postponed due to a lack of capacity. Many treatments are unavailable due to a lack of funding.

We do spend less than half as much on healthcare per capita than the US and we have better health outcomes by most measures, but it's very much a no-frills system.

wtdata• 7 years ago

But we actually do as long is it's not a life treatning disease.

As an example, I am now waiting 2 months to see my family doctor (I just need prescriptions for simple anti histamines, since it's cheaper that way), and 3 years to see a dermatologist for a routine check.

On the other side, a member of my family unfortunately was diagnosed cancer about 3 weeks ago, and she had several medical appointments every week since then.

keiferski• 7 years ago

I'd argue that we have the opposite problem today - there are too many simple facts unacknowledged, too many truths unspoken, too much information, so much that our reaction is to shut down and look for simplicity and easy answers where there are none. To quote Nietzsche (albeit from a different context):

You trip over truths. You even crush some to death, there are too many of them.

georgeecollins2• 7 years ago

In the US, if people could see each other's tax filings a lot of things would become awkward.

gwbas1c• 7 years ago

Already many home and property prices are public record. Just google "[town / city name] gis" and you can look a lot of that up.

(It's kind of useful when negotiating... "Public record valued your land at $200,000, and you paid $180,000 three years ago, but you want $750,000?")

You can also see a lot of this on Zillow and Redfin.

mistermann2• 7 years ago

what are some simple facts that would cause revolutions nowadays if made widely known

One example I would suggest is how incredibly simplified (very often to the point of being objectively not true) the various hot button topics of the world are described in the media (official and social), if they are reported on at all.

One of the main reasons "fake" news is so successful is that it's so easy to find untruths to exploit in the official or status quo descriptions of reality.

jtr12• 7 years ago

This. The level of discourse in mainstream news is gobsmacking in its simplicity. This recent "capitalism v socialism" debate revolves around a limited set of widely accepted aphorisms, happily tossed back and forth like handfuls of sand on a playground. No one bothers to disaggregate these words, examine their premises, or fit together different components to see what shakes out. Or, god forbid, ask whether they are even useful abstractions.

gameswithgo• 7 years ago

if you could just broadcast trump's actual thoughts to the public we might get one here.

philwelch• 7 years ago

Isn’t that what Twitter is for?

keketi2• 7 years ago

Isn't he doing that himself every day on Twitter?

lowdose• 7 years ago

The fact we are sure we live in a simulation.

Mountain_Skies2• 7 years ago

What I found crazy about this is that the leader of such a large country had no clue how western countries operate. The Soviets and their allies had plenty of spies in the West and yet their senior leadership didn't even understand the basics of everyday life for the citizens of the countries they were prepared to launch nuclear missiles at. The west was likewise ignorant of much of the details of life behind the Iron Curtain though that's a bit more understandable given the secretive nature of the Soviets.

stcredzero8• 7 years ago

What I found crazy about this is that the leader of such a large country had no clue how western countries operate.

All large organizations are subject to the "Thermocline of Truth."

http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-t...

asark• 7 years ago

We ensure this won't be a problem again by educating all modern autocrats in the US or Britain. Or sometimes France. That way they all know.

asveikau3• 7 years ago

What struck me is that we don't know if the Soviets are being accurately quoted in this article. They could write a lot of exaggerations and not be called on them.

mynegation• 7 years ago

It was 1989, Yeltsin was not a president of Russia. At the time he was a regional Communist Party leader just elected to the (kind of a) parliament of Russian Soviet Federative Socialistic Republic - RSFSR, then still a member of USSR. He would be elected a President of RSFSR in 1990, and in 1991, after dissolution of USSR, Russia became an independent country. Unless one was a diplomat or KGB or shown a special interest in learning the way of life in "the West", there was not too much exposure even for people at his level.

Fins3• 7 years ago

From some family experiences, whatever intelligence services reported to Party bosses, if it did not agree with the Party dogma, it would be ignored.

Besides, they lived much better than the average Soviet citizen (degree of inequality was far greater than that between a ghetto dweller and Zuck), and that's what they wanted to preserve.

m0zg• 7 years ago

Yeltsin by that time hadn't bought any groceries for close to 30 years as was (and still is) common for the ruling elite in Russia. He probably didn't even fully understand the extent of the scarcity his people were experiencing while he was letting his oligarch friends pillage and burn the remains of the USSR. This is kind of like when Ellen DeGeneres asked Bill Gates how much a banana costs, and his guess was $10.

So the extent of Yeltsin being "amazed" is likely vastly exaggerated here. He was a charismatic hick from the boonies, and being treated as a semi-equal by his peers in the US went to his head quite quickly and hard. He was eager to please. But no one in the West was ever confused about what he was.

JeremyBanks• 7 years ago

That was a scene from the fictional TV show Arrested Development.

Lucille: Don’t you judge me. You’re the selfish one. You’re the one who charged his own brother for a Bluth frozen banana. I mean, it’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, ten dollars?

Gates' actual guesses were pretty reasonable: https://youtu.be/ad_higXixRA

dandare• 7 years ago

I offer you a contra thought. We have unparalleled access to information, we have Wikipedia, free online courses, video documentaries, books, you name it. Yet 1/10 people believe the earth is flat, 1/5 does not understand that homeopathy is a fraud, 1/3 believes different races have different levels of intelligence, 1/2 believe in some religion, 3/4 are proud to be born in the given nation and 4/5 never heard of the law of comparative advantages (aka why import taxes hurt economy).

My point is society has already gained all value that can be extracted from free knowledge and information. What we see today is the base level of human dumbness.

yellowapple• 7 years ago

My point is society has already gained all value that can be extracted from free knowledge and information.

This doesn't really follow. Just because the information is available doesn't necessarily mean society will instantly absorb it or trust it.

Right now we're in the early stages of the information boom, where there's a lot of information floating around, but it's difficult to validate that information and determine whether or not it's accurate. Hopefully in the coming decades we as a society will figure out better means of such validation and start to actually address the problems around "fake news" and other sources of misinformation.

njepa• 7 years ago

what are some simple facts that would cause revolutions nowadays if made widely known?

I don't know about revolution, but most Americans tend to be pretty shocked about the rapid development of China. Even those who have some understanding get surprised seeing it for themselves.

fit2rule• 7 years ago

If Americans saw the results of their wars nightly on TV, there'd be no more military-industrial complex within days.

bazooka_penguin• 7 years ago

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

kumarski• 7 years 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.

smogcutter2• 7 years 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_10• 7 years 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).

afro88• 7 years ago

I read the joke as making fun of anti-semites, not being anti-semitic.

okusername• 7 years ago

How's this anti-semitic? I doesn't portray jews in a negative way. If anything, it points out antisemitism.

sb057• 7 years ago

A toddler being torn apart by fascists several years before fascism was first espoused is rather remarkable.

serf• 7 years ago

Did you read the joke before commenting?

If you did, did you think that you understood it fully?

If you didn't, what compelled you to comment? The way the punch-line was written?

cobbzilla• 7 years ago

There is a board game called Kolejka [1] from a non-profit in Poland that simulates the adventure of waiting in line for staples. It’s actually quite fun, and you get a taste of life under such a regime.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolejka_(game)

antonpirker• 7 years ago

"451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons" - Sorry, this content is not available in your region.

Oh come on! Seriously?

Mugwort• 7 years ago

He looks skinny.

jbarham• 7 years 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

stcredzero8• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

Any other Clear Lakers here?

bawigga• 7 years ago

Here! Always fun seeing Clear Lake mentioned on HN!

aasasd• 7 years 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

igivanov• 7 years 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.

wastenaut• 7 years 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.

KozmoNau73• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

baybal2• 7 years 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• 7 years 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

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_Unio...

When Boris Yeltsin Went Grocery Shopping in Clear Lake

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