It is very dishonest of you to dismis his impressions as if they were anything political. The shock and bewilderment of people from USSR when they first traveled abroad is well known; I know people who touched fruits as they walked through aisles at a supermarket thinking that "it can't be real, they must be plastic" when they visited Finland for the first time. The constant shortage of goods was such an established fact of everyday life in the USSR that a regular western supermarket looked like something out of a fairy tale, and not only to regular citizens, but also to party elite who had their own luxury stores, which were also much much crappier than any Walmart.
There's nothing "very dishonest" about being skeptical of Yeltsin's anecdotes. The guy was a tool that was instrumental in the ultimate dissolution of the USSR.
USA undoubtedly had better access to a wide variety of groceries due to its geography and agrarian economy. Russia doesn't have a California or Mexico (the best candidate, Turkey, was part of NATO).
That doesn't mean USA also didn't have a vastly superior propaganda ecosystem, from Hollywood to the NYT.
> USA undoubtedly had better access to a wide variety of groceries due to its geography and agrarian economy. Russia doesn't have a California or Mexico (the best candidate, Turkey, was part of NATO).
Basic goods like sausages, stockings and toilet paper - which had constant shortages - aren't some high tech that only a selection of countries are able to produce, geography permitting. It was USSR's choice to focus so much and so wastefully on the military that western stores looked like an unbelievable dream to Soviet citizens who lived their entire lives deprived of most mundane consumer goods.
Who even needs a propaganda ecosystem, when western plastic bags with graphic prints were such a luxury item in 1980s USSR that people proudly paraded them around in the public, then came home, carefully folded them (some even ironed with a cold iron to get rid of wrinkles), and put away for the next time - until the bags became completely faded.
Nobody in the west would've believed the sheer absurdity of everyday life in the USSR.
> The guy was a tool that was instrumental in the ultimate dissolution of the USSR.
As I've said elsewhere in this thread, the people who tore apart the USSR did so because the USSR didn't work. That he went on to be instrumental in the ultimate dissolution of the USSR is not evidence that his shock and awe at the abundance in the US was staged.
> USA undoubtedly had better access to a wide variety of groceries due to its geography and agrarian economy. Russia doesn't have a California or Mexico (the best candidate, Turkey, was part of NATO).
Your parent commenter is talking about the reactions they got from people visiting Finland.
> That doesn't mean USA also didn't have a vastly superior propaganda ecosystem, from Hollywood to the NYT.
The USA had a better propaganda system if you include the facts they had at their disposal as part of that system. If we instead look at how well each country did with the facts that they had, you are living proof that the USSR's propaganda system was incredible.
Faced with the fact that people in the USSR starved by the millions while people next door in Finland had abundance, you somehow manage to place the blame on geography instead of on the human systems that the Soviets put in place.
You think my nuanced understanding of the world is based mainly on Soviet/Russian propaganda, while yours is mainly objective. This is an impossible local minimum to escape from.
Yes, it is, though I'd add to the problem that you think that "taking a controversial opinion" is equivalent to "nuance". Some opinions are controversial because they're flat-out wrong, and "the Soviet Union wasn't that much worse a place to live than the West" is one of those opinions.
But I agree that there's nothing more to be gained by continuing this conversation.
