Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This month marks 28 years since one of the great but little known turning points of world history. It happened in September 1989, when Boris Yeltsin, the then newly elected member of the Soviet parliament and Supreme Soviet, was visiting Houston in the USA as part of the US and Russia's planned joint International Space Station. After he made his visit to the space station facilities, he made an unplanned stop at a small grocery store called Randall's. The rumour goes that he was there because he wanted to buy a bottle of vodka. It being an unplanned stop, he knew that this couldn't be a set-up—he knew that he would be walking into a typical American supermarket. What he saw, as someone who was used to the breadlines and queues of the Soviet Union, changed his perspective on life.

In his autobiography, he wrote about the experience, which shattered his views of socialism. He wrote:

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. That such a potentially super-rich country as ours—

that being Russia—

has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.

One of Yeltsin's aides later said that at that grocery store the last vestiges of bolshevism collapsed inside his boss. Leon Aron, quoting a Yeltsin associate, said of Yeltsin after his visit:

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 … 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.'

Yeltsin later wrote:

I think we have committed a crime against our people by making their standard of living so incomparably lower than that of the Americans.

It was two years later that Yeltsin famously climbed on top of a Red Army tank and faced down reactionary forces that were threatening to overthrow Mr Gorbachev. No-one knows what would have happened to history if Boris Yeltsin hadn't had the bravery that was obviously installed by his visit to that US supermarket where he realised both the collapse of the Soviet system and the differences between a capitalist system and a socialist system in their effects on the lives of people. This is a historic day that we should remember. I am holding the actual photograph of that event. It is a very historic photograph that should be known and taught in our schools.

Luke Howarth (Petrie, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

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