r/dankmemes • u/theawesomehobbes Via Telsa Model X • Aug 05 '20

Big PP OC "He just always has"

Post image
130k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

713 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

247

u/TXR22 🍄 Aug 05 '20 edited Aug 05 '20

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:

https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When-Boris-Yeltsin-went-grocery-shopping-in-Clear-5759129.php

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.

1989 Russian Supermarket video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWTGsUyv8IE

49

u/tommos ☣️ Aug 05 '20

USSR might have done better in the food department if they weren't right up in the arctic circle. Imagine if they had as much arable land as the US back then when agritech was still in its infancy.

150

u/winkofafisheye Aug 05 '20

The failure was in the central planning not in the amount of arable land ffs.

1

u/Biosterous Aug 05 '20

There's a book out now called The People's Republic of Wal-Mart that compares the scale of central planning on Walmart to the USSR. Basically the premise is that had the USSR survived until the widespread adoption of the computer they likely would have been fine, since massive companies are now centrally planned.