You're probably familiar with this famous photo.

In 1989, Boris Yeltsin (then one of the Soviet Union's top politicians and later Russia's first president) visited an ordinary supermarket in Texas. And no, the look on his face wasn't because of the alcohol. It was the abundance. The variety. The fact that ordinary Americans could simply walk in and buy whatever they wanted.

The story goes that seeing a supermarket like this helped convince him the Soviet system had failed.

What many people don't realize is just how poor the Soviet republics really were. I mean, they really have no idea. Sub-Saharan poor.

I was born and raised in the Lithuanian SSR. And Lithuania was considered one of the wealthiest republics in the Soviet Union.

Yet by the early 1990s, the average monthly wage was roughly $30–35. About a dollar a day. That's Sub-Saharan poor.

Potatoes were a staple. Meat was a luxury. If you could afford a herring and a carton of eggs each week, you were doing alright. (Traveling to the West, by the way, wasn't even something ordinary people dreamed about. You pretty much had to be a KGB operative, a high-ranking official, or an athlete competing abroad.)

The “upside” was that you never found yourself standing in the supermarket staring at twenty different brands of cereal wondering which one to buy. Well... first of all, there wasn't any cereal. You were probably after bread and milk. So you'd walk up to an angry lady in a fur vest, ask for bread and milk, she'd hand you bread and milk, and that was it. Next.

That's what socialism actually looked like where I grew up.

So when I watch politicians like Zohran Mamdani launching city-owned grocery stores and openly advocating other bona fide socialist policies, all I can think is:

"Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do."

Or do they?