Today in 1990 marked the first opening of a McDonald’s restaurant in the Soviet Union. It was a major event, with a horde of people waiting to pay exorbitant prices for fast food.
The arrival of McDonald’s was symptomatic of the increased receptivity to the West in the USSR. Soviet citizens forked over many days’ wages for a taste of McDonald’s hamburgers.
The restaurant was in Moscow. It was a major event in public life, and a new experience for Soviets. An American reporter said of the people’s attitude towards the restaurant that they were astonished by the “simple sight of polite shop workers… in this nation of commercial boorishness.”
A Soviet journalist offered slightly ambiguous praise of McDonald’s, calling it “the expression of America’s rationalism and pragmatism towards food…. [That it stands in] contrast with our own unrealized pretensions is both sad and challenging.”
Two years after McDonald’s first opened its doors in Russia, the Soviet Union crumbled. Gorbachev resigned, Soviet client states announced independence and the formerly Communist world opened itself to Western Capitalism. Francis Fukuyama announced the “End of History” and soon there were many, many McDonald’s locations across Russia.
As we have plowed through multiple economic crises, the prevailing sense of trust in the market to guide us towards a world that provides the maximum quality of life for the most people has ailed. Now, in Russia, there is a very strong nostalgic tendency, with many Russians even lionizing Stalin as a hero of the people. There is also a revitalized interest in Communist philosophy and history in the West.
Many people saw the advent of Russian McDonald’s as a blessing, and others as a portend of an encroaching degradation of culture. Whoever was right, the golden arches still stand in Moscow.