BY DEE-ANN DURBIN
Two months after the
Berlin Wall fell, another powerful symbol opened its doors in the middle of
Moscow: a gleaming new McDonald’s.
It was the first American
fast-food restaurant to enter the Soviet Union, reflecting the new political
openness of the era. For Vlad Vexler,
who as a 9-year-old waited in a two-hour line to enter the restaurant near
Moscow’s Pushkin Square on its opening day in January
1990, it was a gateway to the utopia he imagined the West to be.
“We thought that life
there was magical and there were no problems,” Vexler
said.
So it was all the more
poignant for Vexler when McDonald’s announced it
would temporarily close that store and nearly 850 others in response to
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. McDonald’s Russian website on Monday read: “Due
to operational, technical and logistical difficulties, McDonald’s will
temporarily suspend service at its network enterprises from March 14.”
“That McDonald’s is a
sign of optimism that in the end didn’t materialize,” said Vexler,
a political philosopher and author who now lives in London. “Now that Russia is
entering the period of contraction, isolation and impoverishment, you look back
at these openings and think about what might have been.”