When Boris Yeltsin went grocery shopping in Clear Lake



See more photos of the foreign leader in an American grocery store... less In September 1989, Russian president Boris Yeltsin and a handful of Soviet companions made an unscheduled 20-minute visit to a Randall's Supermarket after touring the Johnson Space Center.

See more photos of the ... more In September 1989, Russian president Boris Yeltsin and a handful of Soviet companions made an unscheduled 20-minute visit to a Randall's Supermarket after touring the Johnson Space Center. Photo: © Houston Chronicle Photo: © Houston Chronicle Image 1 of / 15 Caption Close When Boris Yeltsin went grocery shopping in Clear Lake 1 / 15 Back to Gallery

In 1989 Russian president Boris Yeltsin's wide-eyed trip to a Clear Lake grocery store led to the downfall of communism.

It was Sept. 16, 1989, and Yeltsin, then newly-elected to the new Soviet parliament and the Supreme Soviet, had just visited Johnson Space Center.

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At JSC, Yeltsin visited mission control and a mock-up of a space station. According to Houston Chronicle reporter Stefanie Asin, it wasn't all the screens, dials, and wonder at NASA that blew up his skirt, it was the unscheduled trip inside a nearby Randall's location.

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."

Shoppers and employees stopped him to shake his hand and say hello. In 1989, not everyone was carrying a smart phone in their pocket so Yeltsin "selfies" weren't a thing yet.

Yeltsin asked customers about what they were buying and how much it cost, later asking the store manager if one needed a special education to manage a store. In the Chronicle photos, you can see him marveling at the produce section, the fresh fish market, and the checkout counter. He looked especially excited about frozen pudding pops.

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"Even the Politburo doesn't have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev," he said. When he was told through his interpreter that there were thousands of items in the store for sale he didn't believe it. He had even thought that the store was staged, a show for him. Little did he know there countless stores just like it all over the country, some with even more things than the Randall's he visited.

The fact that stores like these were on nearly every street corner in America amazed him. They even offered him free cheese samples.

By contrast, this is what a Russian grocery store looked like at the same time.

According to Asin, Yeltsin didn't leave empty-handed, as he was given a small bag of goodies to enjoy on the rest of his trip.

About a year after the Russian leader left office, a Yeltsin biographer later wrote that on the plane ride to Yeltsin's next destination, Miami, he was despondent. He couldn't stop thinking about the plentiful food at the grocery store and what his countrymen had to subsist on in Russia.

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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.

Maybe you can blame those frozen Jell-O Pudding pops he's seen marveling in those Chronicle photos.

"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 leader himself stepped down on the last day of 1999 after years of trying to bring a new system to Russia. The cronyism in place only managed to stifle Yeltsin's dream for his country. Corruption and perceived incompetence plague his final years in office. Leaving the Kremlin voluntarily is said to have kept him from criminal prosecution.

His successor was Prime Minister Vladimir Putin took over as acting president. Putin had been an aide to Yeltsin in the years previous.

Yeltsin died in 2007 at the age of 76.

The Randall's he visited, just off El Dorado Boulevard and Highway 3, is now a Food Town location.