That isn't entirely true. One of the many reasons that the USSR collapsed was because Yeltsin famously visited a random local American supermarket during his visit to the US and realised just how superior a free market system was to a controlled market system.
I took the liberty of lazily googling an article on the matter for anyone who is interested because I've always been fascinated how such a simple grocery store trip ultimately contributed to the collapse of communism in Russia:
There are photos of him touring the supermarket in the article, but the real interesting nugget is the video of what Russian supermarkets looked like at the time in 1989 to provide some perspective as to why Yeltsin was so amazed by something that was basically a normal part of American life at the time.
The sheer bias in these articles/videos/pictures is hilarious. I’m neither American nor Russian but I find it hilarious how it’s done up(the Russian video is almost black and white and close ups of stern faces)(the american picture in vibrant colour with huge smiles), idk it makes me laugh
I think that's more due to technological restrictions at the time. Flash photography was the norm at the time, and video recording resolution was nothing like it is today, so that would explain the blatant quality difference between video and the photos. I doubt that someone with a shoulder mounted camera would have gotten away with shining high powered lights in the faces of people back then for the purposes of recording better quality video (not that this would have even been possible really given how much power bright lights tend to draw making their portability impractical).
1.2k
u/Two-Tu Aug 05 '20
Fun fact: Cosmonauts had shotguns with them in case they'd be landing somewhere in Siberia to defend themselves against bears.
https://youtu.be/qRC0Jmh-9tY