This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Randalls, a run-of-the-mill supermarket in Texas.

The year is 1989, and this Randalls, in a Houston strip mall, is like thousands of other chain grocery stores across America.

There's an in-house bakery that makes bad bagels and good donuts, a meat counter, seafood, dairy, and, of course, a produce section.

There's quite a selection.

Alongside Texas-grown peaches and peppers

are potatoes from Idaho,

avocados from Mexico,

and bananas from South America.

Stacks of lettuce and rows of upright celery glisten with beads of water.

There are six types of apples, three kinds of grapes, and tomatoes in every shape and size.

That's what American shoppers expect when they walk into a grocery store.

And that was true in 1989.

But imagine for a minute that you've never seen an American grocery store before.

Imagine that you've grown up in the Soviet Union, behind the proverbial iron curtain,

where food shopping means lines, really long lines for just about

everything. In Soviet grocery stores, there is only one type of flour, one type of milk,

and for most people, bananas only exist in movies. Imagine, for the sake of today's

story, that you are Boris Yeltsin. You remember Boris Yeltsin, right? The Soviet politician who became

a joke on late-night TV after a few too many vodka-induced Pratt falls.

What you might not remember is that Yeltsin was once a brash young politician.

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