When Boris Yeltsin visited the United States in 1989, he made an unscheduled visit to a US grocery story called Randalls outside of Houston. Later, he wrote: “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…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.” When he asked the supermarket manager how many items they stocked, the man apologetically answered "Only 30,000 in this store."
“Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,”
He told a close associate “the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed” in
him and his "worldview changed" inside the Randalls that day.
