



A fter a September 1989 tour of Houston's Johnson Space Center,

Boris Yeltsin -freshly elected to the new Soviet Politburo- made

an impromptu visit to a typical American grocery store -'Randalls'- in Clear Lake, Texas,

to have himself a look around...





And more than anything he'd seen at the advanced NASA facility, what really blew Yeltsin away was the sheer variety of goods at the supermarket. The fact that such stores where to be found in just about any town in America was said to be beyond comprehension for the Soviet politician- the pictures tell a thousand words-









A mesmerized Yeltsin wandered the aisles, marveled at price-scanning registers he had no idea even existed -while taking his free in-store samples of cheese, etc and remarking how if ordinary Russians knew about America's horn-of-plenty 'there would be a revolution'. He added that the Soviet Politburo

-with their special import shops/privileges- and not even Gorbachev have access to such variety as the average American did.



