The promise made by McDonald’s was also fulfilled: Moscow eventually filled with cafes, coffee shops, restaurants and clubs. The young man ended up launching a successful organization and becoming a prominent public educator in his field. The man and the fast-food restaurant were both emissaries from the future, and they both promised the same thing: a public sphere, which had not and could not have existed in a totalitarian society. McDonald’s, with its vast and brightly lit space, was equally new. By starting an activist organization with no connections to the government, he was trying to do something entirely new to Russia. The young man’s choice of venue was perfect. Public spaces of the sort Westerners take for granted simply did not exist.
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I realized that every interview I had ever conducted in Russia before that day had taken place in one of two settings: a musty bureaucrat’s office or a cramped kitchen in someone’s apartment. I spent 20 minutes in line in a gray drizzle because a young man who was trying to start a nongovernmental organization suggested we talk there. The few other existing cafes and restaurants in the city offered either an exorbitantly priced experience or a humiliating one. The country was still called the Soviet Union, and that McDonald’s on Pushkin Square, though it had been open for a year, was still a unique place in several ways: It was a public space where ordinary people could have a private conversation while eating food they could afford, sold to them by polite staff. The first time I stood in line to enter Moscow’s first McDonald’s - then the largest McDonald’s in the world - was in the spring of 1991.