My grandmother participated in anti soviet espionage, going undercover in many Soviet block nations posing as a nurse to observe their (backasswards) medical standards
My father did missionary work helping Christians in TUSSR escape to America. I met one of the escapees the day after he arrived. We took him to a grocery store to get the basics. He had a headache from the variety and asked that we take him to a real grocery store instead of a "tourist one". In other words, he thought a regular, rural southern Harvest Foods was a propaganda store because it had so much stuff in it. Oh, and his grandparents died during Holodomor
I try to talk to commies and they always say that the horrors of communism are "CIA propaganda". I'm always like, "bitch, my family has been seeing this first hand since long before either of us were born"
But the one that I remember from the nineties was this:
There was a guy who came over to America after the end, who'd been a builder or carpenter by trade. He knew about grocery stores, those didn't phase him. What shocked him was a Menards. He was walking through the lumber yard just dumbstruck and asked a worker if everything there (pointing at the big, banded stacks of dimensional lumber) could be bought by just anyone.
The employee was like, sure, do you have a contractor account? And he's like "No", thinking that it's the same sort of situation as in Russia, that you needed connections and paperwork.
And the employee just cheerfully, like "Okay, well, we can go over to the service desk and set one up."
And that's when he broke down. The idea that just anyone, ANYONE can walk into a store and buy a truckload full of wood. A whole freaking truckload, delivered wherever you want it, and all you need is the money. No papers, no approvals, nothing, just slap the money on the table and done.
But the famous one was when Bush invited Yeltsin to visit Houston to see the progress on Space Station Freedom (what would become the ISS). After a tour of Houston, the delegation made a surprise stop at a Randall's grocery store.
Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs that it was that trip that broke his confidence in the Soviet Union.
The Yeltsin visit to Houston is well documented. The delegation was shocked at the level of sophistication in things as simple as checkout. Nobody in America in the 80's would blink at a credit card reader or a bar code scanner but they'd never seen anything like it.
My grandmother participated in anti soviet espionage, going undercover in many Soviet block nations posing as a nurse to observe their (backasswards) medical standards
My father did missionary work helping Christians in TUSSR escape to America. I met one of the escapees the day after he arrived. We took him to a grocery store to get the basics. He had a headache from the variety and asked that we take him to a real grocery store instead of a "tourist one". In other words, he thought a regular, rural southern Harvest Foods was a propaganda store because it had so much stuff in it. Oh, and his grandparents died during Holodomor
I try to talk to commies and they always say that the horrors of communism are "CIA propaganda". I'm always like, "bitch, my family has been seeing this first hand since long before either of us were born"
I recall stories like that.
But the one that I remember from the nineties was this:
There was a guy who came over to America after the end, who'd been a builder or carpenter by trade. He knew about grocery stores, those didn't phase him. What shocked him was a Menards. He was walking through the lumber yard just dumbstruck and asked a worker if everything there (pointing at the big, banded stacks of dimensional lumber) could be bought by just anyone.
The employee was like, sure, do you have a contractor account? And he's like "No", thinking that it's the same sort of situation as in Russia, that you needed connections and paperwork.
And the employee just cheerfully, like "Okay, well, we can go over to the service desk and set one up."
And that's when he broke down. The idea that just anyone, ANYONE can walk into a store and buy a truckload full of wood. A whole freaking truckload, delivered wherever you want it, and all you need is the money. No papers, no approvals, nothing, just slap the money on the table and done.
But the famous one was when Bush invited Yeltsin to visit Houston to see the progress on Space Station Freedom (what would become the ISS). After a tour of Houston, the delegation made a surprise stop at a Randall's grocery store.
Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs that it was that trip that broke his confidence in the Soviet Union.
Some soyboy in a Che shirt, probably.
Seriously though, great post. I'll have to look thos accounts up.
The Yeltsin visit to Houston is well documented. The delegation was shocked at the level of sophistication in things as simple as checkout. Nobody in America in the 80's would blink at a credit card reader or a bar code scanner but they'd never seen anything like it.
The other is a story I heard locally.
The Cold War to them only existed in parts of their history books they never got to...
They ran out of steam between the US Civil War and the First World War, but somehow managed to cover the Holocaust and Vietnam...