[driftless2]

Many Russians in high gov. places knew the score. Members of the Soviet Union foreign embassies and high-ranking diplomats and their wives used a lot of their rubles on shopping trips to ritzy stores in large western cities.

Obviously, they couldn't relay that info and what life was really like outside the SU to the average soviet citizen.

[dfwgator]

One of the reasons Stalin sent a lot of former Red Army soldiers to the Gulags when they returned from the war was because they had a chance to see the West, and he was afraid they would talk about what they saw.