When Burger Diplomacy Seemed Like a Breakthrough for World Peace

Or, how I ended up at the 1990 opening of the first McDonald's in Russia

Early in my novel Red Bottom Line, the protagonist, Jeff, is hanging out at a bar in the Washington, DC, area with his hockey teammates after a game. Jeff at this point in the book is pretty self-centered and clueless about the world. As he and his friend Turk chat over a beer, a news report from Moscow appears on the television:

The report cuts to shots of Russians marveling at Moscow's Pizza Hut and dining at the famed Moscow McDonald's. The correspondent expands into an analysis of why U.S. fast-food companies are finding Moscow so attractive. While he talks, another shot catches a stout old woman wearing a scarf tied over her head as she eats a Big Mac one layer at a time, starting with the top of the bun, moving on to the pickle, the onions, lettuce, hamburger patty. Turk cracks up laughing.

"That's hilarious!"

"That's the first time those people are seeing fast food?" Jeff says.

"Yeah. Where have you been? This story's been all over every kind of news for two years. It's the biggest thing that's happened to Moscow since Stalin croaked."

I actually witnessed that woman eating her Big Mac from the top-down. In 1990, thanks to a chance meeting on a flight to Moscow, I got to be a special guest at an enormous geopolitical and cultural event: the opening of the first McDonald’s in Russia. I wrote a lengthy story for the magazine USA Weekend about the crazy details behind that McDonald’s.

It can be hard for people today to imagine, but in 1990, the vast majority of Russians had no experience with anything from the U.S. Levi jeans and Marlboro cigarettes were hallowed fantasy items there. Few Russians had ever seen CNN. But as the Soviet Union disintegrated, the nation slowly opened to the West. I started traveling to Moscow to write about it.

On one of my flights over, I got talking to my rather chatty seatmate, who turned out to be George Cohon, who ran McDonald’s Canada, one of the biggest McDonald’s franchisees in the world. At that point, he’d been negotiating with the Soviets for more than a decade to bring McDonald’s to Moscow, and he was just starting to develop the building that would house it on Pushkin Square. Cohon invited me to come by and hear his story. This is maybe two years before the actual opening.

So I went to the site and saw a huge older building that had been gutted, ready for construction of the restaurant inside. I remember Cohon saying his crew thought the building had been previously used by the KGB, and when they knocked down some walls, they found what they believed were human bones. I think he told me at the time to keep that off the record.

Some of the other details I learned from him then and until the 1990 opening still seem amazing. His team had to bring in Russet Burbank potatoes for french fries and teach Soviet farmers how to grow them. Homegrown Russian potatoes might’ve been staples for millions in that country, but apparently they were crap for making fries.

Cohon’s team also had to hire and train Muscovites to work in a setting unlike any they’d ever experienced. As I wrote in the story: “McDonald’s one-day help-wanted ad in the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets was a shocker for Muscovites. For starters, they had never seen a help-wanted ad – much less one that called for ‘individuals who are not afraid to work hard.’ Yet by the next morning, paper sacks bulging with applications piled up in McDonald’s offices in the nearby Minsk hotel.”

The McDonalds’ team made plans for how to train customers, too, by showing videos outside the restaurant of how to order and eat the food. “We had to explain what a milkshake is,” I quoted Cohon as telling me.

After seeing the construction site, I kept in touch with Cohon, and he promised to invite me to the opening on January 31, 1990. Thinking back on the scene that day, I’m struck by how much the Russians craved anything American – how fascinated they were by the U.S., and how it seemed possible our two nations might actually come together. The line outside the restaurant was blocks and blocks long. Cohon estimated that 38,000 people were there. Some waited hours in the winter cold. The scene inside looked like a McDonald’s but not like any McDonald’s I’d ever been in. It was at the time the world’s largest McDonald’s, and it was cavernous and of course utterly packed. Menus were in Cyrillic. And a lot of people were a little bewildered by the both the construction and taste of the burgers.

After the opening, McDonald’s exploded in Russia. In 1997, the company had 21 restaurants in Russia. By 2020, there were 800, employing 62,000 people. And then Vladimir Putin’s government decided to invade Ukraine. In May 2022, McDonald’s announced it was exiting Russia and sold its stores to Alexander Govor, an oligarch invested in mining, construction, oil refining and forestry. There is no indication he ever knew anything about restaurants. He renamed all the McDonald’s as Vkusno-i Tochka, which translates as "Tasty and that's it." (Which, now that I think about it, is kind of an appropriate description of McDonald’s food.)

George Cohon died in November 2023 in Toronto at 86 years old. He wrote a book about his Moscow experience, To Russia With Fries.  

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I wrote a few stories about the Moscow McDonald’s for USA Today and USA Weekend. Unfortunately none were digitized by either publication. One story, about the upcoming opening of the restaurant, was published through Gannett News Service in The Republic in Columbus, Indiana, on January 27, 1990 – thankfully preserved on Newspapers.com. The Republic didn’t run all of what I wrote, but here is the version that was in the paper that day.