Boris Yeltsin's visit to a suburban Houston supermarket in 1989 (2016)
Few years into our emigration to USA, my family brought my grandfather over to USA.  He was a blue collar worker, electrician at the cement factory, entering that profession right after the war, which he spent under the occupation and mostly I think as a shepherd for cows and pigs in what is now Belarus. He has built several houses in his life and was always incredibly handy with tools. We took him to Home Depot. He looked around, stood silently for a while, and then cried. His words were &quot;we have wasted so much our lives&quot;. Trading for nails and building materials, scrounging and scratching out a living, while the country spent all the money on weapons (currently being burned out in Ukraine, and good riddance)<p>As my father told my then girlfriend and now wife, Soviet Union was okay for us growing up there because we didn&#x27;t know any better.