Yeltsin’s Supermarket Shock
26. Boris Yeltsin’s first visit to a Texas grocery store in 1988 destroyed his faith in communism. He told the other Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often have to stand in line for most goods, saw the U.S. supermarkets, “there would be a revolution.”
27. To apply for Communist Party membership in China, you must write periodic “thought reports” for two years, describing your views on society and about your personal life. In addition, you must attend classes once a week for three months and pass a final exam.
28. In 1950, people in Mosinee, Wisconsin staged a fake Communist invasion that included concentration camps, a purged library, and inflated prices. The mayor, apparently unaware of the plan, died from the excitement.
29. The Khmer Rouge, the genocidal Communist regime in Cambodia, was overthrown by Vietnam, but because of Cold War politics, many Western powers backed Khmer Rouge’s claim to be a government in exile and gave them a seat in the United Nations.
30. The North Korean Worker’s Party condemned China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s as a “Great Madness, having nothing in common with either culture or a revolution” and described Mao as “an old fool who has gone out of his mind”, which caused relations between the two countries to worsen.
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