He didn't according to his biographer, and it definitely wasn't staged. The bafflement of his hosts is well recorded, as were his questions and his expressions as he explored the shop, see the photo on this page:
https://www.cato.org/blog/happy-yeltsin-supermarket-day
Soviet supermarkets were drastically more impoverished at that time. No comparison.
Censorship is a problem because it affects everyone, especially the higher ups. That's why he'd got into the habit of demanding surprise inspections. As a factory manager he'd accepted that everyone was always hiding the truth from him. In systems like that there isn't any point in the hierarchy where you your boss takes you to one side and says Boris, listen, there's a vault with all our secrets and truths, let me show you. It never happens. The people at the top have to believe in the system the most of all.
> The bafflement of his hosts is well recorded, as were his questions and his expressions as he explored the shop,
This isn’t really evidence that it wasn’t staged by him though. That is, he doesn’t need to tell the host that he’s going to react strongly. He was a political operator, I’m sure he’d be happy to dupe some supermarket owner.
> Soviet supermarkets were drastically more impoverished at that time. No comparison.
> Censorship is a problem because it affects everyone, especially the higher ups. That's why he'd got into the habit of demanding surprise inspections. As a factory manager he'd accepted that everyone was always hiding the truth from him. In systems like that there isn't any point in the hierarchy where you your boss takes you to one side and says Boris, listen, there's a vault with all our secrets and truths, let me show you. It never happens. The people at the top have to believe in the system the most of all.
Sure, but this wasn’t secret information. America was broadcasting information about our wealth around the world. I guess we probably have people on this site who were in the Soviet Union during the 80’s. Maybe they can recall what they thought was going on over here.
Even if the information about our wealth was available; it was likely discounted and ignored; even North Korea can make charade supermarkets as necessary.
There's a difference between hearing something and seeing it everywhere.
North Koreans watch smuggled South Korean videos. These show cars, shops and so on, and the northerners assume the videos are showing the best of South Korea, not normal life.
> Sure, but this wasn’t secret information
Of course it was! All information about the true state of the west was censored and controlled. Today North Korea does the same thing for the same reason.
"Censorship in the Soviet Union was pervasive and strictly enforced":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_Soviet_Union
"Due to the appearance of foreign radio stations broadcasting in Russian territory and their immunity from censorship, as well as the appearance of a large number of shortwave receivers, massive jamming of these stations was applied in the USSR using high-power radio-electronic equipment. It continued for almost 60 years until the end of the Cold War. The Soviet radio censorship network was the most extensive in the world."
> Censorship in the Soviet Union was pervasive and strictly enforced
Do you suppose Yeltsin didn't have access to the uncensored information before his visit? Or that Soviet spies who sent in hyper-accurate maps of US city infrastructure wouldn't be asked to report on the booming economic success of American retail?
Russian intelligence hiding bad news entirely from Russian leadership is a long standing tradition.
It's how we get three-day special operations in Ukraine.
Case in point: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/ukraine-war-russia-genera...
I think that is a different issue. There’s an incentive to not report problems upwards if there’s a tradition of shooting the messenger.
Yeltsin was purged from the party because he gave a "secret speech" calling for more aggressive economic reforms, and then placed under so much pressure he tried to commit suicide. The tradition of shooting messengers was alive and well in the USSR.
> Do you suppose Yeltsin didn't have access to the uncensored information before his visit?
That was the case yes. I don't understand this insistence that he was faking anything. Why would he do that? The whole episode just made him and his delegation look stupid to the Americans, would not have been reported in the USSR itself, and he stated clearly that he was shocked by what he saw.
The way all far left regimes work whether the USSR, North Korea, Cuba or China is that due to pervasive censorship information can only flow top down, not organically as it does in societies with freedom of speech. But information is also progressively hidden and distorted as it gets passed up the chain from the underlings who discover it originally. The result is that people at the top aren't really more informed than people at the bottom. They think they are because they have access to secret reports, but they're being fed whatever they want to hear. This is why nobody trusts Chinese GDP numbers.
Yeltsin especially wouldn't have known anything. In the 1980s he wasn't the leader of the USSR, that was Gorbachev. Gorbachev did understand the weakness in abstract terms, but probably didn't realize the true extent of the differences for people on the ground. Yeltsin was a member of the nomenklatura in Moscow in charge of city construction projects, so high ranking but not high enough to be given foreign intelligence. Moreover just a year before his trip to Randalls (the supermarket) he was in a bitter fight with the party and had just been purged. The pressure was so intense he resigned from the Politburo - something nobody had ever done before - and then tried to kill himself.
But Yeltsin recovered and his criticism of the party was popular. In May 1989 he was elected to a seat on the Supreme Soviet, the fake Soviet parliament. He still didn't matter and still wouldn't have had any exemption from censorship, or access to sensitive foreign intelligence. He visited NASA in September 1989, just a few months later. At no point in his career up to that point would he have ever been trusted with sensitive information.
Leon Aron, quoting a Yeltsin associate, wrote in his 2000 biography, Yeltsin, A Revolutionary Life (St. Martin's Press): "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 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.[95]