When McDonald’s opened its doors in Soviet Moscow in 1990, the US fast- food group received a welcome fit for The Beatles.
On the first day of operations, customers lined up outside in frigid February temperatures and waited up to four hours just to enter the Pushkin Square restaurant. A total of 30,000 people went on the first day.
Two decades later its fast-food competitors are trying to re-create the magic of the initial success of McDonald’s in Moscow, piling into Russia and setting up outposts as far afield as Irkutsk in Siberia and Vladivostok on the edge of the Pacific Ocean.