> 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]