McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in the Soviet Union in Moscow in 1990.
The restaurant opened on January 31, 1990, near Pushkin Square. Its launch attracted enormous attention and long queues, making the opening a major international branding event as well as a business milestone. McDonald’s presented a familiar American restaurant experience while operating in a country that had previously been largely closed to Western fast-food chains.
The Moscow opening followed years of preparation, including efforts to develop reliable local food supplies and meet McDonald’s quality standards. The restaurant became one of the company’s most widely reported international openings.
Moscow is the correct city rather than Leningrad, the former name commonly associated with Saint Petersburg. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, but the Moscow restaurant had already become an important symbol of the late-Cold-War opening to Western consumer brands.