The Golden Arches of History

From Republic.ru, Sept. 19, 2025, https://republic.ru/posts/116411. Condensed text:

Editors’ Note. – If one were to put together an alphabet book based on 20th century pop culture, competition would probably be toughest for the letter M: You have Madonna, McCartney, Matrix, Microsoft, etc. There are so many iconic people, phenomena and brands that start with an M. Still, McDonald’s is surely the biggest of them all. When the world suddenly turned unipolar in the early 1990s, Golden Arches restaurants were perceived as embassies of the American lifestyle. The story of McDonald’s in Russia, which ended in the chain being hijacked by wartime [i.e., the war in Ukraine – Trans.] profiteers, is a miniature version of the entire nation’s recent history. In this special for Republic Weekly, Aleksandr Urzhanov looks back on the highlights of the global brand’s journey in Russia. . . .

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From the start, it was crystal clear that McDonald’s was more than just a brand – it was a symbol.

This bloodless invasion of Western lifestyle into socialist reality could have happened much earlier, in 1980, when Moscow hosted the Summer Olympics. McDonald’s was ready to join Pepsi in venturing into this new market. But the Moscow authorities – grim men clad in bad suits – decided otherwise. We don’t know why they turned down the offer, but perhaps it had something to do with the perennial shortage of meat: They weren’t sure if the Soviet Union’s planned economy could provide enough beef to keep the hamburger conveyor belt running. But that would be too prosaic an explanation. You need something a bit loftier for a myth. So, a much simpler explanation seems only natural: In the days of Stagnation, the Soviet Union was not yet ready for such a brutal intervention. There was something ingrained very deeply, almost at a DNA level, that would never allow this to happen.

Conversely, it was a given that McDonald’s would come to Russia in 1990. The first restaurant next to Pushkin Square, with a huge number of people waiting to get in – the longest line in the company’s history – it was all preordained. Soviet people were desperate after years of staring at empty shelves, and as soon as Russia opened up, with [then-US president Ronald] Reagan and [then-Soviet premier Mikhail] Gorbachev smiling at each other, they rushed through the doors of McDonald’s – much like the Germans from East and West Germany rushed toward each other the moment the barriers of Checkpoint Charlie were lifted.

McDonald’s had always been perceived as America’s outpost, but America was no longer the enemy. Mr. Gorbachev had torn down that wall. Here come the Americans [Russian people thought], and they are going to lift us out of humiliating poverty, which was an integral part of the bipolar world. After all, the price of intimidating the rest of the world with missiles was brutal: Soviet people had to do without even the most basic goods. It wasn’t just meat or quality shoes; even tea had to be rationed.

Strictly speaking, 1990 was the most authoritarian year of Gorbachev’s rule. Perestroika was largely over. Gorbachev had become president and was running the country through executive orders, without the Supreme Council. He imposed an economic blockade on Lithuania. Dissident Valeria Novodvorskaya was giving interviews from prison. Riot police units had just been created – and used to break up rallies on Tverskoi Boulevard. But on the very same boulevard, the Lira café was being replaced by a new restaurant with a large yellow M towering over it – and it was this restaurant that became the symbol of the perestroikareforms – and is still remembered as such today, 35 years later.

Later, in the 1990s, the Golden Arches were no longer the symbol of change: They were now the symbol of capitalism – capitalism with a human (and often not-so-human) face.

The second McDonald’s that opened in Moscow on Gazetny Lane had a sign saying, “We accept payments in rubles only” – and this was not intended for foreign tourists visiting Moscow for the Olympics, as one might think. No, this was in 1993, when nobody kept their savings in rubles due to rampant inflation; people would immediately convert whatever money they had in their pockets into dollars.

Working shifts at your local McDonald’s for a meager wage still looked like a pretty good side hustle. If you were lucky, you might even win a promotion and become shift manager. In a world where many people spent their mornings looking for a one-day job so they could buy some dry pasta for their evening meal, having a regular job at McDonald’s did not look that bad. Those who were well off could afford to live large and throw a birthday party for their kid at McDonald’s. The wealth gap was very evident at school: There were kids whose parents could only afford to hand out a bag of candy for their birthday, and then there were others whose parents could throw a party where everybody got a Happy Meal. And everyone was happy, as long as you kept your eyes off Ronald McDonald – because he was too cringey. Also, when McDonald’s in Kiev reversed its open restroom policy, reserving the use of restrooms for paying customers only, local punks reportedly stole the plastic statue and started leaving Ronald’s severed ears and fingers on the porch of the restaurant.

By the time the oil boom started in the 2000s, a hamburger cost two rubles, and a cheeseburger three. But with economic conditions in major cities improving and poverty largely over, people’s perception of McDonald’s and its symbolic significance changed again. It was now viewed as a cheap joint serving junk food. Once people have more or less enough money for an order of French fries, they start paying attention to all the oil they are fried in. Pirated copies of “Super Size Me” were passed around on DVDs. In this American documentary, the author eats a Big Mac and drinks a Coke three times a day. By the end of the movie, predictably, he gains a lot of weight, and his liver is not in great shape.

The places that don’t have their own McDonald’s yet – major cities like Kaliningrad and Vladivostok don’t, and have no plans for any – take pride in the fact. “We would never allow that junk here,” they say. “Here, try our Klopse [Prussian meatballs] (or our scallops) instead.” When McDonald’s decided to build a new restaurant in Novogireyevo, the Moscow neighborhood where I live, their contractor cut down quite a few lilac bushes to clear the area. Local residents were extremely angry. “Well, what else would you expect from a company like McDonald’s?” they said.

By the 2010s, McDonald’s finally became ubiquitous – and perceptions changed once again. By now, McDonald’s was often the only “third place” available in your small town (or your neighborhood, if you were living in a big city). For example, it was a place where a young woman could feel safe if she was out alone after dark. But that’s not all: McDonald’s has free Wi-Fi, so people with laptops often used it as a free coworking space. McDonald’s was often used as a convenient meeting place whenever you needed to pick up something you had bought on Avito [the Russian version of Craigslist – Trans.]. McDonald’s was a place people used for dates and job interviews. The FSB used McDonald’s for entrapping young people in the case of the Novoye Velichiye [New Greatness] movement.¹

McDonald’s was no longer a place where preteens had their birthday parties. It was a place where high school students liked to hang around. In 2014, when Russia was hit with sanctions after shooting down the Malaysian Airlines Boeing [see Vol. 66, No. 30, pp. 3‑6], it retaliated by banning certain imported foods, like Parmesan cheese. Many people remember how remaining stocks of Western delicacies were often bulldozed into the ground. But that was not all. The very first McDonald’s in Russia, the one next to Pushkin Square, was shut the same day after it supposedly failed to pass a sanitary inspection. In a weird coincidence, the only other McDonald’s that was closed at that time in Russia was the one in Novogireyevo.

“Lines at this McDonald’s are as long as they used to be back in 1990. But it’s not because people can’t find food in other places; it’s because students from nearby schools spend their entire day hanging out at this McDonald’s. By closing this restaurant, the regime signed its own death sentence. It will probably be carried out a little later – perhaps 10 or 20 years from now, but it will definitely happen. These young people will never forgive the Kremlin for taking away their milkshakes,” I wrote back then. But I was wrong all around – I was wrong about the regime’s future, about the school kids and even about McDonald’s itself.

On Feb. 2, 2022, as the whole world was speculating about the future and people were saying that Russia was bluffing and would never attack Ukraine, the Russian division of McDonald’s suddenly got a new CEO. For no obvious reason, Swiss national Marc Carena was replaced with a Russian executive, Oleg Paroyev.

Six months later, I went to Moscow for the last time. The Novogireyevo McDonald’s had been rebranded as Vkusno i tochka [“Tasty, Period”] – the name that teenagers later shortened to Vkus ochka [tastes like ass]. Of course, there was a crowd of school kids loitering around, loudly discussing the latest TikTok videos. There was a large sign at the entrance saying, “Some things come and go, but a stable job will always be there.”

The war has been going on for over three years, and we still don’t know who the owners of Vkusno i tochka are. It seems that a businessman [named Aleksandr Govor] who used to own franchise restaurants in Siberia before the war – and who does his best to maintain a low profile – controls about 50% of the company, while a former senator from Kabardino-Balkaria [sic; a current one, Arsen Kanokov – Trans.] controls the remaining 50%.

McDonald’s withdrew from Russia, hoping to come back in a few years and leaving Oleg Paroyev to hold down the fort while they are gone. Three years later, in May 2025, Paroyev was invited to a meeting with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin. When he was offered the opportunity to address Putin, Paroyev complained that Vkusno i tochka had to invest a lot of money “to come up with its own IT solutions and achieve technological sovereignty.” If McDonald’s is ever allowed back, Paroyev told Putin, all these achievements will be lost. Soon afterward, Russia passed a law banning former owners from buying their shares back. The law applies to all the Western companies that left Russia, not just McDonald’s.

A friend of mine who emigrated [after the war started] recently visited Moscow for a few days. When he came to Vkusno i tochka, he asked them sarcastically, “So, what do you call a Big Mac these days?” (It turns out that it’s called a Big Hit). In a word, wartime rebranding causes strong reactions on both sides of the border. Today, McDonald’s is a symbol of how the war has changed everything – and yet for many people, their daily lives remain largely unchanged.

Kaliningrad, which used to be so proud that it did not have a McDonald’s, has a Vkusno i tochka restaurant today. It is common to see a platoon of soldiers taking part in the Zapad [West] military exercises (which follows an imaginary – but not impossible – scenario of a military conflict with Poland) marching in and enjoying some Big Hits.

If you don’t want to wait in line with a bunch of men in military fatigues, you can have your burgers delivered to your door by a migrant worker from Central Asia – as long as he has been fingerprinted and has installed a special app for migrants on his phone, which enables immigration officers to track him 24/7.

Thirty-five years later, McDonald’s is ours in the same sense that the Crimea is ours.

This series of forceful takeovers (the military takes the Crimea, Oleg Paroyev takes the Big Macs and Vladimir Putin invariably gets some of the take) stands in stark contrast to that initial discovery of the Gorbachev era. It turns out we don’t need to give up creature comforts for missiles that spook the whole world. And if we can have our cake and eat it too, why not go all the way?

¹An extremist movement created in 2017 that allegedly aimed to overthrow the Russian government, although journalists and human rights advocates consider this a case of entrapment. – Trans.