Yeltsin stops at a Texas supermarket and asks what it costs to feed a family
Boris Yeltsin had just toured the Johnson Space Center in Houston when his motorcade made an unscheduled stop at Randalls #30, a grocery store in Webster, Texas, on September 16, 1989. He walked the aisles for about twenty minutes, sampling free cheese and produce, lingering at the frozen food case, and asking shoppers what they paid for groceries. The store manager, given fifteen minutes' warning by phone, watched him leave with a goodie bag. On the flight to Miami, Yeltsin went quiet, then said, "What have they done to our people?"
A Houston suburb's ordinary supermarket became the place where Yeltsin's faith in the Soviet system broke: Yeltsin's aide Lev Sukhanov later said "the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed inside" him during the flight afterward. The 30,000 products stacked on Randalls' shelves did more to discredit the Soviet economic model in Yeltsin's mind than any official report, feeding directly into the reform politics that made him Russia's first elected president in 1991.
QHow did Yeltsin win the Moscow seat that made him a national figure just months before the Texas trip?
In the 1989 Soviet legislative election, Yeltsin ran for a seat in the newly created Congress of People's Deputies representing a Moscow district and won with about 92 percent of the vote. The landslide made him the most visible face of the reform movement challenging the Communist Party establishment, well before his name meant anything to Americans. That mandate is part of why the Esalen Institute wanted him for a paid speaking tour of the United States in the first place. Without that election result behind him, Yeltsin would have arrived in Texas as an obscure Soviet official rather than a rising figure already positioned to lead the democratic opposition to Gorbachev within three months.
QWhat did Yeltsin say about New York City that had nothing to do with groceries?
Before Texas ever entered the picture, Yeltsin had already formed a blunt opinion of American housing after passing through New York City on the same tour. He remarked that some New York slums would pass for decent housing back in the Soviet Union, a comment that reads almost as a counterweight to the grocery store shock that came later in Houston. It shows his impressions of the United States were not uniformly glowing before he ever set foot in Randalls #30. The abundance he found in a Texas supermarket stood out precisely because it followed a stretch of the trip where his takeaways about America had been far less flattering.
QWhat happened to Yeltsin's political career in the years right after the Randalls stop?
By December 1989, three months after the supermarket visit, Yeltsin had emerged as the leader of the democratic opposition to Mikhail Gorbachev. He broke formally with the Communist Party in 1991 and that same year became the first president of Russia, steering the country toward a market-based economy. His aide Lev Sukhanov's line about Bolshevism collapsing inside him dates from that same period. Decades later, in 2020, the episode resurfaced as a comic opera titled 'Yeltsin in Texas,' turning twenty minutes in a Webster grocery aisle into a stage production, a stop that was never on any official itinerary to begin with.
