American Capitalism Smacks Boris In The Face

Bernie Sanders and every college student in America should have this tattooed on their butts.

Back in 1989, card-carrying Communist and Politburo member in the Soviet Union Boris Yeltsin visited Johnson Space Center, and then took a tour of a grocery store in Clear Lake, Texas. According to a Houston Chronicle reporter, Yeltsin was far more affected by the grocery store visit than he was the space center. He apparently was stunned by the aisles and aisles of supermarket products, and told the other Russians in his entourage that if Russians saw what American grocery stores looked like, when in their homeland they had to wait in line for most everything, “there would be a revolution.”

Yeltsin chit-chatted with customers about what their groceries cost, what they were buying, and was in absolute amazement at the whole experience, saying, “Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev.”

He was dazzled by the fact that grocery stores were everywhere, and that they even offered free samples. A year or so later, a biographer wrote that on the plane ride from Texas to Florida, Yeltsin couldn’t get the vision of the endless food supply out of his mind, and lamented how different things were for his own countrymen.

According to wikipedia, Leon Aron, quoting a Yeltsin associate, wrote in his biography, “Yeltsin, A Revolutionary Life” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000): “For a long time, on the plane to Miami, he sat motionless, his head in his hands. ‘What have they done to our poor people?’ he said after a long silence.” He added, “On his return to Moscow, Yeltsin would confess the pain he had felt after the Houston excursion: the ‘pain for all of us, for our country so rich, so talented and so exhausted by incessant experiments.’”

He wrote that Mr. Yeltsin added, “I think we have committed a crime against our people by making their standard of living so incomparably lower than that of the Americans.” And then, in his own autobiography, Yeltsin wrote about the experience at the grocery store himself, which reshaped his entire view on communism, ultimately leading to leaving the Communist party.

“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."

More here.

Putin's Panties In A Wad

The Rooskies are in a lather after the Poles decided to destroy a Soviet WWII memorial. BTW, it was on Polish soil.

Like my ex-wife, the Rooskies have a very convenient memory when it comes to events that they'd rather forget. Especially when it relates to massacres:

MOSCOW/WARSAW (Reuters) - Russia said on Saturday it was outraged by Poland's destruction of a Soviet war monument, warning Warsaw of the "most negative consequences" after what it said was a flagrant violation of an agreement between the two countries on protecting memorial sites.

Poland has been one of the most vocal critics of Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea peninsula in 2014. Russia and Poland share a history of conflicts and the disagreement over war memorials is likely to add to tensions.

[...]Authorities in the western Polish town of Nowa Sol took down the brotherhood-in-arms of Polish and Red Army soldiers memorial at the end of June, reducing it to a pile of rubble.

Apparently a little walk in the Katyn Forest for an estimated 22,000 Polish soldiers and civilian slipped the Rooskies' minds.

One of the earliest--and certainly the most infamous--mass shootings of prisoners of war during World War II did not occur in the heat of battle but was a cold-blooded act of political murder. The victims were Polish officers, soldiers, and civilians captured by the Red Army after it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939. Strictly speaking, even the Polish servicemen were not POWs. The USSR had not declared war, and the Polish commander in chief had ordered his troops not to engage Soviet forces

 

 So much for the celebrated "Brotherhood-in-Arms of Polish and Red Army Soldiers."

At the end of WWII, the Soviets were so embarrassed by their Katyn indiscretion that for the next 50 years they blamed it on the Nazis and forbade any mention of it in Poland.

Katyn was a forbidden topic in postwar Poland. Censors suppressed all references to it. Even mentioning the atrocity meant risking reprisal. While Katyn was erased from Poland's official history, it could not be erased from historical memory. In 1981, Solidarity erected a memorial with the simple inscription "Katyn, 1940." Even that was too much. The police confiscated it. Later, the Polish Government, on cue from Moscow, created another memorial. It read: "To the Polish soldiers--victims of Hitlerite fascism--reposing in the soil of Katyn."

Doesn't that remind you of Hillary's accusations against the maker of that infamous anti-Islam video after the Benghazi debacle?  Perhaps Hillary was channeling her inner Stalin.

In 2010 President Putin delivered a half-assed apology of kinds in a ceremony commemorating the victims but it fell far short of what the Poles wanted. Putin's words were:

“... it would also be a lie and manipulation to place the blame for these crimes on the Russian people.”

*cough***bullshit!***cough*

To this day the Russians have refused to release all Soviet era documents relating to the Katyn Forest massacre.

The Polish Foreign Ministry stated that their agreement only extended to cemeteries and did not include monuments; the Mayor of Nowa Sol had this to say:

“The monument was large (dozen tonnes of concrete), ugly, always dirty with rust leaking out of the abyss of its emptiness, like blood or tears,” Wadim Tyszkiewicz, Nowa Sol’s mayor said on his Facebook profile earlier this week.

FTR - The victims were transported from Soviet-occupied eastern Poland to Byelorussia where they were exterminated. It is estimated that over 300,000 Poles were seized by the Russians and relocated or murdered. Nowa Sol is in western Poland near the border with Germany.

 

source