McDonald’s in Russia: departure is about a lot more than burgers
When the first McDonald’s in Moscow opened 32 years ago, the line of Russians waiting outside was hundreds of metres long, and there were long queues again this week for a last Happy Meal and a slice of history, as the fast-food giant closes its doors in Russia.
The shuttering of 850 McDonald’s franchises around the country is supposed to be temporary, but nothing about the war in Ukraine and the consequent exodus of western companies suggests the rift will be healed any time soon.
McDonald’s’ departure, like its arrival, is about a lot more than burgers. The golden arches of history, that once seemed to be bounding forward, now appear to be turning full circle and threatening to take Russia back in time.
An urban consumer culture built around Visa and Mastercard, Ikea, Nike, Apple, Zara and Netflix has evaporated in a few days.
“There’s just this sickening feeling that they’re going to go back, not to the 1990s, but to the 1970s when you didn’t have access to these things, and when you were living isolated from the rest of the world,” said Prof Angela Stent, a former national intelligence officer for Russia on the National Intelligence Council, now at Georgetown University.
The looped trajectory of the past three decades has been driven by a lot of disparate forces, inside and outside Russia, economic and political, and ultimately very personal: the ambitions, fears and impulses of Vladimir Putin.
When the first McDonald’s opened in Russia, the Soviet Union still existed. “We didn’t know what fast food was,” wrote Mitya Kushelevich, a photographer, in a recollection in the Guardian. “We thought it probably tasted like freedom and we wanted to sample it.”
To many people, it tasted like the end of the cold war, if not the end of
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