It's as if someone had turned the clock back forty years, to the time before glasnost and perestroika, when the Soviet Union still seemed immutable, forever.

Now, because of the Russian attack on Ukraine, one Western company after another is withdrawing from the Russian market.

With them disappears the feeling that Russia, despite political differences and rivalries, somehow belonged to the West, at least materially.

And culinary.

Frederick Smith

Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS in Moscow.

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Since Tuesday, McDonald's, the American fast-food restaurant chain, has been among those reacting to the war, which Russia is supposed to call a "special military operation", and is closing all 850 branches in the country for the time being.

A picture circulated on Twitter of people queuing outside the McDonald's branch on Pushkin Square in central Moscow for a last burger before closing time.

It is an image with symbolic power.

The branch on the ground floor of a bright clinker building opened at the end of January 1990 as the first McDonald's restaurant not only in Russia but in the entire Soviet Union;

At that time, the Moscow city government still held 51 percent of the company.

30,000 people are said to have come on the first day alone, queuing for hours before, as the FAZ reported at the time, "gained admission to the bright restaurant, whose walls were painted with motifs from 'Surfing USA' and a Cadillac from the 1950s are.

Typically American, but seems to please the thousands of Muscovites.”

"The End of the Empire"

Back then, freedom tasted like ketchup and frying fat.

Video footage from those days shows men in jeans and leather jackets.

"This is the end of the empire," one of them said into a camera, meaning the Soviet Union.

In the “Russian Spring” proclaimed in neo-imperialist exuberance after the annexation of Ukraine's Crimea, a campaign against “McDonald's” emerged in 2014 as part of an “asymmetric” Moscow response to the initial US sanctions against Russia.

At the time, the consumer protection agency Rospotrebnadzor launched a case against the company for alleged violations of food safety and quality, which was taken as a threat to the then more than 420 branches in the country.

But the Russians were just as undeterred by this as “McDonald's”, which has since more than doubled the number of its restaurants in Russia.

The company now employs more than 60,000 people (who will initially continue to receive their salaries), and tens of thousands more jobs in supplier companies depend on "McDonald's".

According to its own statements, the company stands for two and a half billion dollars in direct investments in the Russian economy and seven percent of the gastronomy market.

In the 2014 campaign, riot politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky called for all McDonald's restaurants in Russia to be closed, and President Vladimir Putin said "national fast food" could oust McDonald's.

Now Zhirinovsky, who is said to be seriously ill with Covid-19, has not been heard from for a long time, while Putin, if he appears at all, is busy with allegations against Ukrainian "Nazis" and their alleged Western clients.

Only the spokeswoman for the State Department countered the decision by "McDonald's" with criticism of a "dictatorship of liberalism" that had led to "dehumanization".