Were 1990s Russians dumbfounded when they first visited capitalist grocery stores?

Yes it is true. There is a rare video of Boris Yeltsin, after visiting the Johnson Flight Center, making an unscheduled visit to a grocery store in Houston, in 1989.

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.”

In Yeltsin’s own autobiography, he wrote about the experience at Randall’s, which shattered his view of communism, according to pundits. Two years later, he left the Communist Party and began making reforms to turn the economic tide in Russia. You can blame those frozen Jell-O Pudding pops.
“When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people,” Yeltsin wrote. “That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.”

The problem was not lack of production or corruption , it was the mismanagement of the goods to the store. Simply put, communism just didn’t work properly.

Leon Aron, quoting a Yeltsin associate, wrote in his biography, “Yeltsin, A Revolutionary Life” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000): “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.’ ”

Yes, they were.

Our factory in Montréal hosted three Russian nuclear valve manufacturing engineers and ONE KGB minder on a state supported exchange in 1988. (The secret police KGB officer was there to make sure that all returned to USSR at the end of the visit. They all did.)

My wife and I showed them our ‘kapitaliski’ suburban home with indoor garages, and all the usual paraphernalia. They went gaga over the heating/cooling system. I walked them through all the details.

My wife had her own large car, AND SHE DROVE it herself? They had to see how well by themselves, and insisted in riding with her to our dinner appointment. I and my colleague used my car.

One guy wanted to buy a camera. I took them all to a large camera store. The saleslady started her technical spiel, and our English/Russian translator, who was an avid amateur photographer did an amazing job translating.

The sales lady put a couple of cameras on the counter. The shopping Russian literally threw his full body over the first one. “I want this one.”

At dinner they all got a bit tipsy, Canadian Rye whisky does that, and I asked, “Why did you specifically want that one camera?

“It was on the counter. I didn’t know if there were any more for sale, If I hadn’t taken this one, the others may all have been for display only. If hadn’t bought it in that moment, it might have been put away.”

He was a a product of shortages in USSR, I presume.

We had an amazing time, and I learned a lot about Russian manufacturing economy in those seven days.

Firstly, every Soviet citizen knew well what rynok рынок is.

Photos from different decades and different cities.

This one maybe Tbilisi, Georgia. But I don’t remember.

Riga market, Rizhsky rynok. Moscow.

Ulyanovsk (former Simbirsk), 1970–1975. I was in Ulyanovsk in late 80s.

Petrozavodsk, Karelia. 07.08.1991

It’s still Soviet Union.

Secondly, I’d like to show Central rynok in my hometown, but I only found a photo when they only started to build it. My city is new.

Anyway, it was good, but I preferred going to bazaar with my grandmother in Uzbekistan. Because capitalist grocery stores have melons, watermelons, peaches, etc. But the quality of Central Asian fruits was much better. Especially melons. You come to bazaaar and there’s that divine aroma.

Modern photo, but just as I remember from 1980s.

A photo from Oloy Bozori. Someone may recognize the guy in front 🙂

I don’t know who was dumbfounded, me and my family were only curious when we did some shopping in a German (FRG) supermarket. And we hated the soapy taste of avocado. That came as a shock.

If anything, I was dumbfounded when I saw many homeless people in New York. I had thought that down-and-out bums in the USA was nothing but Soviet propaganda 😉

Edit to add:

Georgians selling flowers, I believe in some Russian city/town.