I went to the first McDonald’s in Russia for the bathroom
As the Soviet Union crumbled, the West sent French fries.
In 1991, when I was a student in Russia, the recently opened McDonald’s in Moscow served as a symbol, as a tourist attraction, and as the only place—and I mean the only one—with a clean public bathroom. The whole idea of clean public bathrooms was foreign in Russia at that time. We marveled as our Russian friends took us on long excursions and never needed to use the restroom. It seemed nothing shy of miraculous, and we worked on training our bladders so that we wouldn’t have to use the bathroom either.
But during our time in Moscow, the fresh, bright, clean McDonald’s was respite and beacon. The lines were legendary. Rumor was that it could take hours to go in and order a hamburger. But the bathroom: now there was capitalism I could get on board with.
At home in the United States, I never went to a McDonald’s. I considered the food poor and the atmosphere ridiculous. McDonald’s represented what my 19-year-old self saw as the worst of American culture. At the very moment when I was standing in line at the Moscow McDonald’s, waiting for the Soviet Union to finish collapsing, I considered McDonald’s itself to be potentially responsible for the downfall of Western civilization.
