American presenter Tucker Carlson published on his website a video shot in Russia, where he decided to see how two years of Western sanctions have affected Russian grocery shops. Already on his way out of the hypermarket, he noted that visiting a Russian shop can “radicalize” Americans and turn them against their authorities.
A long-standing, perhaps the longest-standing element of Cold War propaganda in the West was the Soviet grocery shop. No goods, no choice, shoddily made stuff. And it wasn’t really propaganda, it was reality. You can look for footage on the internet if you want. So we thought it would be interesting to take a look at a modern Russian grocery shop in 2024, after two years of sanctions. Let’s go.
All right. Here we go. I suppose you put ten rubles in here and you get it back when you return the trolley. So it’s free, but there’s an incentive to return it instead of taking it to a homeless camp. Okay. This is a grocery cart escalator. The way it’s made – I realise now – is that the wheels don’t move. They’re fixed to the grocery cart escalator. Mum, look, no hands now.
See? The placement of the retail shops here is a little different. It’s like walking through Macy’s department store to get to Whole Foods. Okay, we’ve gone through the perfume department and made it to the grocery shop. So, let’s fill up on what a family of four would buy each week. Let’s see what the selection of items would be. And let’s see how much it costs.
Russia is famous for its bread. I’m pretty good at it. The low-carb lifestyle hasn’t taken hold in Russia. Thank God, because look at this. Also fresh.
And look at this. (Takes big bread.) Wow. No way.
Unicorn and Mini Mills. All right.
Whoo-hoo. It’s kind of like a Russian wheat biscuit.
We need coffee, don’t we?
Honestly, I don’t know if it’s sugar or flour, but it looks like it’s one of the staples, so we should get it. The packaging is very pretty. It has to be flour, doesn’t it?
And this is Russian wine. It’s from Crimea, which not only has a warm-water naval base, but is also the source of most of the grapes for wine production in that part of Russia. Apparently, it’s very good.
Cheese sticks? We’re at the checkout of the shop and here you see chewing gum, razor blades and confectionery. They’re actually hiding the blades because we’re stealing them*. But it all looks like western products: Mars, Twix, Snickers, Milky Way, Bounty, Gillette, Halls cough lollies, Mentos. I don’t see any sanctions, though how would I know?
At first I was amused, then I felt legitimate resentment. We wondered how much it would all cost. Everyone we bought groceries from was from the United States. And we didn’t pay attention to the cost, we just put what we would eat for a week in the cart.
And we all got about $400. (I got 104 American dollars. And it’s at that point that you start to realize that ideology may not be as important as it’s thought to be. “Corruption.
If you take people’s standard of living, drown it through dirty dealings, crime and inflation so that they can’t buy the products they want, at that point it may not matter so much what you say and whether you are a good or bad person, you are just looking at the lives of people in their country. That is exactly what our leadership did with us.
Visiting a Russian grocery hypermarket – “the very heart of evil” – and being able to look at what the prices are like here and how people live, radicalizes you against our leadership. At least that’s what I felt – radicalized. And, by the way, we’re not making this up.
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