The first McDonald's ever to open in the Soviet Union welcomed 38,000 Russians on January 31, 1990 — a queue that snaked for kilometres through the freezing centre of Moscow and lasted up to 6 hours, 22 months before the country itself would cease to exist

The first McDonald’s in the Soviet Union was, by every available measure of Cold War-era symbolic significance, one of the more substantial single commercial events of the entire late-20th-century collapse of Soviet-bloc communism. The specific mechanism by which a Canadian franchisee of an American fast-food chain came to open the largest restaurant in the McDonald’s global system in the capital of a superpower with which the United States had, only a few years earlier, been in active military and ideological competition, is one that the subsequent historiography of the late Cold War period has repeatedly returned to. George Cohon, the American-born Canadian businessman who had built the Canadian McDonald’s franchise system across the 1970s and 1980s, had first pitched the idea of Soviet McDonald’s restaurants to Soviet officials at the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympics — where Cohon operated the McDonald’s concession at the Olympic Village and where the Soviet delegation, whose members had never previously encountered a Big Mac, had approached him with substantial curiosity about the specific business model that could produce food at that speed and consistency. Cohon’s initial proposal had been to open pop-up McDonald’s outlets near Luzhniki Stadium during the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics. Autumn 1979: Moscow’s mayor Vladimir Promyslov vetoed the pop-up plan. January 1980: the United States announced its boycott of the Moscow Olympics over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Olympics plan died.

The subsequent negotiation stretched for another decade. According to Voice of America’s 2020 coverage of the 30th anniversary of the McDonald’s Moscow opening, the specific political condition that made the eventual 1990 opening possible was the introduction of the perestroika (economic restructuring) and glasnost (political openness) reforms by Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev between 1985 and 1988. Under the specific ideological framework Gorbachev had established, Western commercial presence in the Soviet Union was no longer categorically incompatible with the broader Soviet political project — provided that the specific business arrangements did not threaten Soviet state control over the underlying economic infrastructure and provided that the Western partners were willing to accept substantial local ownership stakes and rouble-denominated (rather than convertible-currency) initial profitability. Cohon signed preliminary agreements with Moscow city officials in November 1987. The Soviet Communist Party formally approved the Moscow McDonald’s project in 1988. Construction began in 1989. On the morning of 31 January 1990, the doors opened.

What 38,000 customers actually looks like

The queues that formed outside the Pushkin Square McDonald’s in the pre-dawn hours of 31 January 1990 were, by essentially every available account of the day’s events, substantially larger than any commercial queue Moscow had previously produced for a Western business. As reported in CNN Business’s 2022 retrospective on the broader arc of McDonald’s presence in Russia and its eventual 2022 exit, approximately 5,000 people had gathered outside the restaurant by dawn. By the time the doors opened at 10:00 a.m., the queue extended for several kilometres through the surrounding central Moscow streets. Moscow police mobilised crowd-control forces of the scale usually reserved for football-match security. Individual customers reported wait times of six to eight hours from the back of the queue to the counter, in the -15°C ambient temperature that characterised late-January Moscow. Approximately 630 Soviet employees — selected from a pool of approximately 27,000 applicants for the initial hiring round — worked the counters, kitchens, and dining areas of the restaurant in maroon-and-white McDonald’s uniforms. Each employee had been specifically trained during the pre-opening period on the McDonald’s corporate procedure of continuous friendly customer engagement — an operational protocol that had, in the specific context of the standard Soviet public-sector customer-service culture of the 1980s, required substantial adjustment. Anna Patrunina, one of the original 1990 hires who subsequently became Vice President of Operations for McDonald’s Russia, later told Voice of America that the pre-opening interview process had included the specific question “Can you smile for eight hours straight?” — a capability that essentially none of the initial hires had previously been required to demonstrate in any Soviet retail context.

The prices were, by the standards of contemporary Soviet consumer income, substantial. A Big Mac cost 3.75 roubles — approximately half a day’s wages for the average Soviet worker, whose monthly salary was around 150 roubles. A full meal (Big Mac, fries, and shake) at 7 to 8 roubles was approximately a full day’s wages. The customers who queued for six hours in the January cold to eat the food knew this. As detailed in the Washington Post’s original 1 February 1990 coverage of the opening (subsequently republished in March 2022 following McDonald’s suspension of Russian operations), the substantive appeal of the McDonald’s opening was not the food itself but the broader symbolic access to Western consumer culture that eating at the restaurant provided. “I felt like I was eating America itself,” one 23-year-old Soviet customer subsequently told an interviewer about his first Big Mac. The specific act of consuming an American hamburger in central Moscow was, in the specific ideological context of the last full year of the Cold War, a form of substantive political statement that neither the American nor the Soviet governments had entirely anticipated the scale of.

The twenty-two months between

The Soviet Union that hosted the world’s largest McDonald’s on Pushkin Square in January 1990 no longer existed by December 1991. Per CBC Archives’ coverage of George Cohon’s role in bringing McDonald’s to Moscow and the subsequent 1990 opening, the 22 months between the 31 January 1990 opening and the 26 December 1991 formal dissolution of the USSR contained essentially every major geopolitical event of the endgame of Soviet communism: the March 1990 secession declarations by Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia; the May 1990 election of Boris Yeltsin as Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, followed by his June 1991 election as the first popularly-elected President of the RSFSR; the August 1991 attempted coup against Gorbachev by hardline Soviet generals; the Yeltsin-led resistance to the coup from the White House in Moscow; the successive December 1991 secession votes of Ukraine, Belarus, and the remaining Soviet republics; and the formal 25 December 1991 resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev as President of the Soviet Union. Across the same 22 months, the McDonald’s on Pushkin Square continued operating. Its queues did not shrink substantially across the summer of 1990 or the autumn of 1990 or the successive Soviet political crises of 1991. Approximately 30,000 customers per day continued arriving at the restaurant throughout the entire period between the January 1990 opening and the December 1991 Soviet dissolution — meaning that the Pushkin Square McDonald’s served approximately 20 million customers across the final 22 months of the existence of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The subsequent 32 years of McDonald’s operation in the successor Russian Federation produced approximately 850 additional locations across the country, of which the Pushkin Square original remained the symbolic anchor until March 2022, when McDonald’s Corporation formally suspended its Russian operations following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, sold its Russian subsidiary to a former Russian licensee named Alexander Govor, and watched the specific business it had spent 14 years negotiating into existence rebranded as the Russian-owned “Vkusno & tochka” (“Tasty. Full stop.”) — a name that, in the specific commercial context of a Russia that had substantially retreated from the international system its 1990 McDonald’s opening had once symbolised joining, essentially inverted the direction the 38,000 customers on Pushkin Square had originally been queueing for.