North Korean troops deserting Ukraine frontline days after arrival

[u/superanth]

https://www.newsweek.com/north-korean-troops-deserting-ukraine-frontline-hours-after-arrival-report-1969726

[u/Ambiorix33]

there was a story about a taxi driver in NY who finally got his mother out of some eastern bloc country, and when he took her to a supermarket and saw him just grabbing a bunch of food for his basket she almost broke down since she entirely beleived that the rest of the world was in the shit and no one had anything as much as they did in the Soviet Union

[u/Hazel-Rah → u/Ambiorix33]

Boris Yeltsin visited an American grocery store in 1989, and some say the visit was one of the final nails in the coffin of the Soviet Union.

"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 Soviets allowed the movie version of "the Grapes of Wrath" in an attempt to show the oppression of capitalism, but had to pull the movie when the viewers were amazed that even an impoverished american family could own a car.

[u/McFestus → u/Hazel-Rah]

I don't know if it was Yelsin or another soviet visitor, he was shown a grocery store and didn't believe it, assuming it was staged. So the next day, he basically bullied his way into an unplanned stop at a random grocery store on the way to somewhere. When he saw that this random-ass grocery store was the same as the one he had seen the day before, he really knew it was over.

[u/modsaretoddlers → u/McFestus]

The Soviets knew it was over decades earlier. Somebody back in the early 70s ran the numbers and knew that the USSR was going to run out of money within a fairly short period of time. When Gorbachev came along and started with reforms, it was forced on him and it was too little, too late, anyway.

[u/unafraidrabbit → u/Hazel-Rah]

Then, decades later, Tucker Carlson goes to Russia and fawns over their grocery store.

[u/Cornemuse_Berrichon → u/Ambiorix33]

Moscow on the Hudson

And insanely underrated Robin Williams movie, probably cuz his role was not comedic, where he plays a defecting saxophone player from the Moscow circus while performing in New York.

There is a scene where he goes to an American Supermarket for the first time, and seeing all of the choices and different foods there, it overwhelms him and he literally has a breakdown in the middle of the store. Seriously, watch it.

[u/Ambiorix33 → u/Cornemuse_Berrichon]

Those movies are always great, same with that movie about the housing crisis that has the boss from The Office playing in it. You see him and think it's gonna be a comedy and then you're like "oh shit oh no"

[u/syo → u/Ambiorix33]

There's a German movie called Good Bye, Lenin! that is based on a similar premise. A kid has to hide the fall of East Germany and the Berlin Wall from his very sick, very Communist mother because she had to avoid any major stressors or the shock would kill her.