When McDonald’s opened its doors in Moscow for the first time, it was a big deal.
It was the dead of winter — January 31, in 1990 — but still people came out in droves. Grainy CNN television footage shows lines snaking out the door, and throngs of people inside, trying Big Macs for the first time. The Pushkin Square location was massive, with the capacity to seat hundreds of people. It was the largest McDonald’s restaurant in the world at the time. Inside, the fast food joint was bustling. In most ways, it looked like any other McDonald’s from the era. But there was a hammer-and-sickle flag under the golden arches and an international theme inside, featuring a model of London’s Big Ben in the dining room. Bright-eyed McDonald’s employees wearing maroon branded visors and big smiles took customer orders. They were the chosen ones — about 630 employees made the cut out of 27,000 applicants, according to a 1990 Washington Post article. They underwent a month of training before the store opened for business. The golden arches were an immediate success. On the first day,30,000 people were served, a McDonald’s record for an opening day, the CBC reported at the time. The location even had to stay open for hours later than planned because of the crowds. McDonald’s arrival in Moscow was about more than just Big Macs and fries, noted Darra Goldstein, Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit professor of Russian, emerita, at Williams College. It was the most prominent example of glasnost in action, Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbechev’s attempt to open up his crumbling country to international relations. «There was a really visible crack in the Iron Curtain,» she said. «It was very symbolic about the changes that were taking place.» About two years later, the Soviet Union would collapse. After that first spot opened up, McDonald’s expanded its reach within the country. As of last week, there were about 850 locations operating in Russia. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine prompted McDonald’s to change course, at least temporarily. On Tuesday, the company announced that it would pause operations at those restaurants, following similar decisions by other Western firms and pressure from critics. For Goldstein, this moment is just as symbolic, but far less hopeful. «If the opening of McDonald’s in 1990 symbolized the beginning of a new era in Soviet life, one with greater freedoms, then the company’s current exit represents not just a closing down of business, but of society as a whole,» she said. How McDonald’s got to Moscow Opening McDonald’s up in Russia wasn’t easy. George Cohon, who oversaw McDonald’s business in Canada from the early 1970s and into the 1990s, led the campaign to bring McDonald’s to life in Moscow. It took 14 years to make that happen. In his book, To Russia With Fries (with an introduction by none other than Gorbachev) Cohon detailed the difficult process of opening up that first location. «On the Soviet side, there was very little real understanding of what was involved in establishing or operating a chain of McDonald’s restaurants,» he wrote.
