The anecdote is fascinating. Not currently endorsing the essay as a whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
(quoted in the essay, original source NYT)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nDuring a\u00a0visit to the United States in 1989 [Yeltsin] became more convinced than ever that Russia had been ruinously damaged by its centralized, state\u2010run economic system, where people stood in long lines to buy the most basic needs of life and more often than not found the shelves bare. He was overwhelmed by what he saw at a\u00a0Houston supermarket, by the kaleidoscopic variety of meats and vegetables available to ordinary Americans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Leon Aron, quoting a Yeltsin associate, wrote in his biography, \u201cYeltsin, A Revolutionary Life\u201d\u2026: \u201cFor a long time, on the plane to Miami, he sat motionless, his head in his hands. \u2018What have they done to our poor people?\u2019 he said after a long silence.\u201d He added, \u201cOn his return to Moscow, Yeltsin would confess the pain he had felt after the Houston excursion: the \u2018pain for all of us, for our country so rich, so talented and so exhausted by incessant experiments.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He wrote that Mr. Yeltsin added, \u201cI think we have committed a crime against our people by making their standard of living so incomparably lower than that of the Americans.\u201d An aide, Lev Sukhanov was reported to have said that it was at that moment that \u201cthe last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed\u201d inside his boss.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n