Six hours in line and 30,000 menus in one day: when the capitalist McDonalds 'delicatessen' arrived in the Soviet Union

For Andy Warhol, the most beautiful thing about cities like Tokyo, Florence or Stockholm was its McDonald's.

“Moscow and Beijing, on the other hand”, opined the apostle of consumption elevated to an aesthetic category, “they still don't have anything really beautiful”.

Warhol wrote this ode to the world's most famous fast food chain in 1975, in a context in which the Cold War was beginning to rage again after the short period of détente that the early seventies represented.

At the time, in the opinion of then

correspondent in the Soviet Union, Michael Dobbs, Moscow was a city of “solemn, old-fashioned and questionable hygiene” restaurants, with impolite and negligent waiters, “intimidating-looking thugs guarding their doors”, lousy musicians “deafening the guests”.

Restaurants in which “more than half of the dishes on the menu were never available and reserving a table was a pipe dream, because no one answered the phone”.

In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and in the midst of perestroika, the first McDonald's would end up arriving in that Moscow, that (alleged) islet of beauty and capitalist excellence that Warhol was so enthusiastic about.

His landing on the banks of the Moskva River, in the very central Pushkin Square, just four blocks from the Kremlin Palace, was one of the great local events in that year of decisive changes.

Panoramic view of the queue to enter Russia's first McDonald's, opened in Moscow on January 31, 1990. VITALY ARMAND (AFP via Getty Images)

A guard displays flags bearing the McDonalds's logo during the opening of the chain's first store in Moscow in 1990. VITALY ARMAND (AFP via Getty Images)

Today, 32 years later, the first Moscow subsidiary, like the 850 establishments of the chain scattered throughout the country, locks the door.

McDonald's decided in March to follow the example of Starbucks, Coca-Cola and the rest of the US-based multinationals that have stopped operating in the territory of the Russian Federation in response to the invasion of Ukraine.

For the company, "continuing our activities in Russia is no longer sustainable from a business point of view and would not be consistent with McDonald's values."

Bolshoi spinach

These days, the

has recovered the colorful and enthusiastic article with which Michael Dobbs celebrated the opening of the pioneering restaurant, now recently closed.

It was first published on February 1, 1990, one day after the event.

It starts with the testimony of a certain Mikhail Negilko, an industrial worker, one of the "thousands" of Russian citizens who attended the inauguration of the premises, in some cases queuing for hours outside on a freezing winter morning.

According to Dobbs's account, Negilko was approached by the crowd as soon as he left the premises, after gobbling down an entire menu washed down with the mandatory cola in record time.

He had just seen the future, and he had found it very "tasty".

The worker shared with the "comrades" who were waiting outside his first impressions of the star dish on the restaurant's menu, baptized Bolshoi Mak.

A masterpiece of instant-consume culinary engineering that Negilko described as “a bun stuffed with excellent grilled beef with some cheese, lots of vitamins [he was probably referring to the abundant sauces and toppings] and a layer of raw spinach leaves”.

As Dobbs recounts, Soviet citizens in that final decade of the 20th century very rarely ate lettuce.

McDonald's arrived in the Russian metropolis after 14 years of arduous negotiations.

In 1976, just a year after Warhol declared that the world is divided into cities with and without McDonald's, the chain contacted the Soviet authorities.

They wanted to establish themselves in the country, but they aspired to do so with full guarantees, in suitable locations and without restrictions on the normal development of their business model.

A Russian McDonald's truck photographed in 1990. Sergei Guneyev (Getty Images)

The first customers of the first McDonald's that opened in Moscow in 1990 began queuing at dawn the day before.Bernard Bisson (Sygma via Getty Images)

George Cohon, president of McDonald's Canada, took the reins of a negotiation that at times was "tense, complex and daunting", as he explains in his autobiographical essay

"

The The Soviets did not quite understand the logistical and geopolitical challenge that settling in their country represented for us.

They told us: 'Come, bring your hamburgers and then we'll see', as if they didn't understand that, for a large company from the first capitalist world, it was jumping into the lion's den.

For years our conversations to guarantee ourselves a minimum legal certainty and make the operation viable were a frustrating dialogue of the deaf”.

Starting in 1985, Cohon and company began to find interlocutors on the other end of the telephone who were increasingly receptive to their demands.

A 54-year-old reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev, had just snatched the post of general secretary of the Communist Party from the old guard.

From the beginning, the new tenant of the Kremlin promoted a process of social liberalization and opening (

) and another of political restructuring (

).

In this new context of gradual demolition of the stagnant Soviet scaffolding and commitment to a growing cosmopolitanism, companies like McDonald's were finally welcome.

For Grace Dean, editor of

, "Russian youth greeted the arrival of that first McDonald's as a symptom of the country's opening to international capitalism and American popular culture."

Supporters of the old order interpreted it rather as "an ominous omen, proof that the collapse of the system was imminent."

But those most predisposed to change did not miss the opportunity to "leave behind the insularity and forced austerity of Soviet-style socialism and peek into the Western way of eating, hanging out and spending money."

Queues before sunrise

On January 31, 1990, according to the CBC, dozens of Muscovites began to gather at the door of the premises around four in the morning.

Six hours later, when the restaurant was about to open its doors, an orderly and compact queue about 500 meters long had already formed.

Michael Dobbs had the opportunity to interview one of the first clients, a middle-aged man who predicted that the business would only last a couple of weeks: "In this country we will never be able to make something like this work."

A woman displays a T-shirt that mixes Lenin's name with the McDonald's logo in Moscow in 1994. HECTOR MATA (AFP via Getty Images)

People sitting on the terrace of the first Russian McDonald's in 2014.ALEXANDER NEMENOV (AFP via Getty Images)

By midday, the spontaneous gathering had already taken on a markedly festive tone.

Politicians, soldiers, people from the Soviet show business and journalists had their pictures taken in front of the premises displaying their recently purchased hamburgers and the colorful red and white McDonald's pennants.

On its first day, the restaurant served around 30,000 customers, a success that exceeded the most optimistic forecasts.

The one on Pushkin Square was for years the largest McDonald's in the world, with capacity for more than 900 people.

On the day of its inauguration, it had a workforce of 630 workers, recruited in an exhaustive selection process among the more than 27,000 job applications received.

Its cheapest burgers, Dobbs noted, cost the equivalent of just under a US dollar.

They were expensive in relation to the average salary, but not prohibitive.

Consuming them from time to time became a discreet luxury and, in some cases, an act of cultural resistance.

As the famous slogan of the establishment said, “if you can't go to the United States, come to McDonald's in Moscow”.

In Dobbs's words, for the generation that watched with hope the collapse of the old regime,

As the journalist Masha Gessen explains in her influential essay

(Turner, 2017), Russia in the 1990s was embarking on a journey to democracy that ultimately turned out to be a two-way trip.

After a short parenthesis, the totalitarian temptation returned with renewed forcefulness at the hands of Vladimir Putin, a "nostalgic for the decades of iron", not so much for the Soviet regime as for "the proverbial Russian tendency to govern from terror and arbitrariness" .

The years of democratizing effort ended up being, as Gessen describes them, "a rather dim flash of light between two oceans of darkness."

The McDonald's in Pushkin Square was a substantial part of that flash, of that frustrated hope.

Today it no longer exists.

Moscow is once again a substantially different city from Tokyo, Florence or Stockholm.

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