QSR History | Pushkin Square — Thirty Thousand People and a Ruble Price List

A brass plaque inside this restaurant announced the thing that mattered more than the menu: it took rubles. McDonald's opened on Pushkin Square on 31 January 1990, in what was still the Soviet Union, where Western goods were generally sold in hard-currency shops that ordinary Soviet wages could not reach. This one priced in rubles, and the sign said so in two languages — РЕСТОРАН ОБСЛУЖИВАЕТ ЗА РУБЛИ, ROUBLES ONLY RESTAURANT. Getting there took roughly fourteen years of negotiation, led not by the American parent but by George Cohon of McDonald's Canada. People began queuing before dawn in the January cold. By opening time the line ran for kilometres through central Moscow, and police turned out in numbers usually reserved for football matches. The restaurant was the largest McDonald's in the world at the time, seating hundreds, and it stayed open past its scheduled closing hour because the queue would not end. Accounts of the first day's count differ, and both figures are in wide circulation. Contemporary Western reporting gives about 30,000 customers, described as a company opening-day record against Budapest's 9,100; the figure of 38,000 also appears in reference sources. Staff were selected by competition rather than assignment — period reporting put it at roughly 630 people hired from about 27,000 applicants. Customers found the smiling unnerving. One employee told reporters that day that people kept asking what was wrong, assuming they were being laughed at. The Soviet Union had less than two years left. The arches came down on 8 March 2022, when McDonald's suspended operations across roughly 850 Russian restaurants employing about 62,000 people, after the invasion of Ukraine. The company announced full withdrawal that May and sold the business to Alexander Govor, a licensee who already ran franchises in Siberia. This site reopened on 12 June 2022 under a new name, Вкусно — и точка, roughly "Tasty, and that's it", with a logo of a circle and two yellow shapes that stops just short of an M. The photograph here was taken in 2013, arches lit, snow on the ground. They are not there now. Photo: Artem Svetlov, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons