March 29, 2023 • 29 mins
A starry eyed young wheeler-dealer from Toronto sets out on a mission. To get a coca cola can onto Sergei’s space station. But soon the idealism of post Communist Russia turns dark as Sergei’s new country is plunged into chaos.
Like what you hear? Follow us @kscope_nyc on Twitter and Instagram.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
In a Moscow TV studio. A thirty something guy with thick,
wavy hair leans forward in his chair. His name is
Artemy Troitzky, the barricade building journalist from the last episode.
He's about to invite you to something revolutionary from my
TV offices. I've made the last announcement alive, saying the
(00:33):
Gagart Party is starting very soon. You are welcome to
the first ever Rave in Moscow, the first ever Rave
in Moscow, a rager to end all ragers and named
after your Gagarin, the first human to journey into space.
And it will be techno music played all night, Russian,
(00:58):
Latvian and German and French DJs, and the location also
cosmonaut themed. The Space Pavilion a museum dedicated to the
glories of the space program. It was like Snayland. You
walk in, There's a curved ceiling made of glass. It's dark,
(01:21):
the music so loud you feel it in your chest.
All around you are models and relics from the Soviets
glorious space program, satellites, the capsule that sent Gagaren into space,
gagaren space suit from his flight. And the place is
packed bodies, sweating, bodies, dancing, throwing their heads up to
(01:46):
the sky, young people free at last to party. I
think that the whole of cool Moscow was there, artists, actors, models,
(02:10):
the new generation creating something beautiful from the ashes of
the old world. We felt like a brand new country
which is aiming at the bright future, which will be
totally different from what we've had before. But what would
(02:32):
that mean for the cosmonauts, the Soviet citizens who once
represented the future? What would happen to them in the
new Russia. I'm Lance bass And from Kaleidoscope Exile and
iHeart Podcasts. This is the last Soviet mingling with the
(02:58):
rush hour traffic, army armored personnel carriers on the streets
of Moscow. The August nineteen ninety one, a faction of
hardline communists just tried to take control of the Soviet
government tanks in Red Square. The official tanks rattled through
the streets of Moscow and hundreds of thousands of people
stood up to them. Three civilians had died last night
(03:19):
when light tanks tried to slam through a barricade. In
just three days, the coup felled, the hardliners were pushed out,
and the people won. Tonight n Caligorbatrophia is again president
of the Soviet Union, the man who tried to bring
him down or either under arrest or being hunted. But
as the dust settled and all of the old values
and structures of the Soviet world fell away, a brand
(03:41):
new system was beginning to take shape. As if to
harold this new dawn, something very unusual was about to happen.
On the Soviet space station, where our man Sarage is
still hard at work. The cosmonauts on Mirror were about
to become the face of one of the most famous
brands in the world, Coca Cola. If you taste it,
(04:02):
there's the burn and bite at the back of your
throat for a moment that then gives you the In
the summer of nineteen ninety, Craig Kohan was twenty seven
years old, newly single, and ready to take Moscow by storm,
one can of Coca Cola at a time. I was
(04:22):
sent to figure out how to build the cocola system
in the Sovietinia. That was the brief. Craig was the
new face of capitalism, the alternative to the old Soviet
way of doing things. Remember, in the USSR, private enterprise
had been banned completely for decades. So Craig was a
(04:44):
representative of a totally new mindset, a totally new way
of life. And you could say Craig was born to
do this job. He grew up in Toronto and what
he called a McDonald's family, all the panti, sat sauces,
cheez pickles, McDonald's big Man. When he was a kid,
his dad, George Cohan, brought the first ever McDonald's to Canada.
(05:08):
Canadians went crazy for it. Break today at McDonald's where
your dollar gets a break every day. George Cohan even
had a bus called the Big Mac Bus, used to
raise money for charity. And then in nineteen seventy six,
during the Montreal Olympics, the Canadian government came to Craig's
(05:29):
dad with a strange favor. Would he please let the
Soviet delegation use his bus to get around the city
And so we met all the Soviets in nineteen seventy six.
They rode the big backbus and in the evening they
went out to dinner and what did they eat, Yeah,
you guessed it, Big Max. And that's when Craig's dad
(05:51):
had an idea. Watching these big Russian guys tucking into
burghers and fries. He thought, I know what I'm gonna
make my life's mission to bring McDonald's to the Soviet Union.
It became from my father a fourteen year, amazing epic
(06:11):
odyssey to get the first McDonald's built in Pushkin Square.
Pushkin Square is a square in central Moscow, a stone's
throw from the Kremlin. And so that was fourteen years
of conversations at home, conversations in the car, conversations at
dinner about the Soviets. Year in and year out, they
(06:33):
would host a rotating cast of Soviets at the Kohen Residence,
anyone and everyone who could get a word back to
the Kremlin about the wonders of McDonald's, whether they're ambassadors
or ballet dancers, or artists or politicians. And then in
January nineteen ninety, well, it's been fourteen years in the making,
and today finally McDonald's threw open the doors to its
(06:56):
first restaurant in Moscow. Thirty thousand people stood in line
that day. They started lining up this morning at four o'clock.
This woman doesn't know what she just date, but she
says it was unusual and delicious. Clearly George Kohen had
been on to something ahead of McDonald's. Canada waxed the
lyric in this day and age, it's nice when the
people can come out and get meat, reputations and milk
(07:18):
of the highest quality. Craig watched in amazement at what
his dad had just done. Happiness today in Moscow lay
in the communal pursuit of a big mac, but he
wanted to do something even bigger. For Craig, it was
about more than just business. He was an idealist, and
he had this vision that capitalism could actually bring Russians
(07:39):
together with the rest of the world, that East and
West could unite under the banner of a big brand.
In December nineteen ninety, he flew to Moscow to attend
the opening of his dad's McDonald's, and while he was
there he bumped into the CEO of Coca Cola. He
was drunk one night at the Kremlin after the opening
(08:01):
of McDonald's. The CEO of Coca Cola looked at Craig
and had an idea, and he said, Craig, I'm thinking
of three things. You the Soviet Union and you and
the Soviet Union. Big companies like Coca Cola saw an
incredible opportunity in the Soviet Union. It was an open market.
Western products basically didn't exist, so the potential for profit
(08:23):
was mouthwatering. And now the CEO has the perfect man
for the job, Craig Cohan, the son of the guy
who got McDonald's into Moscow. But this was a very
different challenge. Craig's dad had opened a single McDonald's. The
CEO of Coke wanted cans in every corner shop in Russia,
total domination. Craig accepted the challenge stage one reconnaissance. For
(08:52):
the first six months June of nineteen ninety December of
nineteen ninety, I spent every day going to every single
metro stop in the city understanding how people drink beverages.
You know, they used to have these amazing vending machines,
or there was a single glass. Incidentally, just when you
expect hard frost, Moscow has a thirsty heat wave. So
(09:14):
buy yourself a cups. I'd think when you wash the
glass and you would get a cool beverage a cavass
out of that. Cavas not my favorite drink, but if
sour bread and liquid form floats your boat, you might
like it. And it's probably the second most popular drink
in Russia after vodka, which was definitely more my thing,
especially the infused ones. The pineapple very good. You would
(09:38):
wash the glass and put it back in the next
person and use the same glass, wash it and put
it back and put five copecks in. So that's how
people were experiencing beverages, very different to American vending machines,
and so Craig had a ton of questions he needed
to ask people lining up for their glass of cavas,
although he was careful not to tell them he worked
(09:59):
for Coca. No one really knew that I was working there.
I was this interested guy doing a study on beverages
in the Soviet Union. It was like he was an
undercover agent. People just opened their arms to me for
all the information, and that's how I got data. And
then I worked at a chokovskis a vote for two
(10:22):
and a half weeks. It was a champagne factory, and
so I saw exactly how they mixed the product. I
saw how they mixed the concentrate. I saw the rats
in the sugar. I saw the whole system, the whole
Soviet system. After a few months Craig felt like the
reconnaissance stage of his mission was complete. But for Craig
and Coca Cola to actually launch themselves in the Soviet Union,
(10:45):
they needed a way to get into the hearts, minds,
and eventually the mouths of Soviets. So they were going
to have to get creative. Cocola never been on the
North Pole, and so we got colas a North Pole.
The company sponsored a famous Russian Arctic explorer. He put
(11:05):
a Cocacola in his bag, and he took his husky,
bringing huskies, and he went up to the North Pole
and took a pictures the North Pole crank, and then
it was time to head to the Kremlin. I made
sure that when Bush met Gorbachov there was a Coca
Cola on that table. So Craig starts thinking, what's the
next frontier. If you could go to the North Pole
(11:28):
and you can get it on the table at the Kremlin,
you could certainly get it in space infiltrating the Soviet
space station. This was going to be the most spectacular
triumph for Coca Cola and good old fashioned American capitalism.
And so Coca Cola's engineers started working away in a
lab in Atlanta trying to create a coke can that
(11:52):
could survive on mirror, and after months of work, it
was ready, a little red can that looks a lot
like the ones we have here on Earth, except it
was fitted with a strange white nozzle and a metal
button on top. This was meant to stop it from
exploding in zero grabbing. On August twentieth, nineteen ninety one,
(12:17):
the Soviet Space Agency launched their M nine cargo spacecraft
from Bikanore in kazakh Stop. On board is a crate
of spaceproof Coca Cola cans, making their groundbreaking journey to
the space station. The next day, Sarage presses a button
on top of the can and it squirts the coke
into his mouth. Burn and bite at the back of
(12:38):
your throat. Even in space. It's a huge moment. Although
Serge wasn't really sure about the taste. His Ham radio
friend Maggie asked him, do you like Coca cola? What's
it taste like in space? And Sitgay said, It's all
right in space, he said, but insduce his better. No matter,
(13:02):
Coca Cola and capitalism had won the day. It was
like integration Finally, of these two opposing Cold War cultures
that have come together, and Coca Cola being a little
moment that brought people together. For idealists like Craig, it
seemed like the beginning of a new future for Russia,
Sergey and the space program. But there was a problem
(13:25):
lurking just around the corner. Not everyone in the New
Russia had such noble intentions as Craig. I think there's
two ways to approach this country, that's Gregg in an
NBC interview from the time. One is to be a
pioneer and the others to be a pirate and coming
here and try to courage the land. And it turns
(13:46):
out in the New Russia the line between pioneer and
pirate was extremely thin. Why did you put a rock
and propelled hand grenade through my office this morning? And
he said, I've been wanting to meet you, and I
really didn't know how else to get your attention. That's
(14:08):
after the break. Just a few months after Surge drank
the can of coke on the space station, the Soviet
flag came down for the very last time over the
Kremlin in Moscow. The hammer and sickle is lord for
(14:33):
the last time, the Soviet Union was over. The tricolor
banner of the Russian Republic now flies over the Kremlin.
Communism was dead, and while men like Craig Cohan saw
this as a moment of hope for the future, the
lives of ordinary Russians were plunged into uncertainty. I mean,
when you lose the system that you've grown up in
(14:55):
and you have no idea wor else to go. A
lot of people went out and planting potatoes at their dotches.
That's Serge Schmimon, the former New York Times correspondent in Moscow.
We've been hearing from throughout this series. Our office car
was a Volvo station wagon. So some of these people
would ask us to go with them to their dotch
(15:15):
and bring back their potatoes because you know, big bags
to bring them back to Moscow. They were planting potatoes
because at that point in time, potatoes were the safest
way to make sure you had food. The ruble was collapsing,
the shops filled up, but the number of people who
could afford anything plummeted. People's life savings were suddenly worthless.
(15:38):
So he went into a period of kind of an
elemental primitive economy where factories traded with each other. You know,
I'll give you a window if you give me a banana.
Remember hearing about the Russian black market. It always sounded
so spylike, so covert, so underground. Well here it is
(15:58):
at its lowest level, and strange things gained value. This
man stripped down a TV set, hoping to make enough
money just to buy milk or bread a peck of Marlboroughs.
Marlborough's cigarettes was roughly the equivalent of a dollar. You' Barnert,
who was a barter economy and never went anywhere without
(16:20):
four or five cartons of Marlborough's. A cigarette was better
value than cash. Because when communism collapsed, the new government
made a drastic decision. With the help of economic advisors
from America, they decided the best way to transition the
economy from a communist to a capitalist system was to
(16:41):
do it all at once. In the old Soviet Union,
the government controlled prices. Overnight, those price controls were removed,
which meant that the candy that used to cost one
rouble now cost two thousand. Shoppers stead in disbelief at
what they now have to pay for the most basic goods.
Ham for example, pull at more than a thousand roubles
(17:01):
a kilo. That's two months worth of wages for most people.
The economists called it shock therapy. You had to let
the system go, and it had to find its own bottom,
and it had to start rebuilding. Overnight the cash economy collapsed.
The problem for shoppers here these days isn't the long
lines Russians are used to waiting in line. Their concern
(17:24):
is what happens when they reached the end of that line.
There they'll find either bread or milk three or four
times higher than they were just weeks ago, or worse,
no food at all. This also led to a wave
of crime sweeping through Moscow. You had a lot of theft.
The streets became dangerous. They say that some people belong
to the mafia here. Do you know anything about that? No? No, no,
(17:48):
for us, you know, I mean we were a dressed
in Western closing in Western cars. Our car was stolen twice.
This man's parting shot my favorite. The mafia is forever.
Organized crime was emerging from the ruins of the Soviet Empire.
A period of straight up banitry set in. In order
to get by in the new Russia, you had to
(18:09):
do things that you would never have dreamt of just
a few months earlier. By early nineteen ninety two, Craig
Khan is setting up his Coca Cola factory in Moscow,
but he's beginning to realize this is not the friendly,
hopeful Russia he arrived in back in nineteen ninety. Things
have changed so quickly, and if he's going to succeed,
(18:31):
it's becoming clear he's going to have to change too.
I'm on the way to the office at five thirty
in the morning to try to start up all the equipment,
et cetera, etc. And I get a note from our
security that a Rocca propelled hand grenate just went through
my office. No one's hurt, but Craig is shaken. This
is a far cry from the quiet streets of Toronto,
(18:53):
and I said, oh, that's good. I'm glad it wasn't there.
So I asked the security where was it? Shot? From
otoshop from the big apartment block across the street. I
have this very clearly in my head, so I said, okay,
let's go find out who it is. So hard thumping
Craig climbs into one of those old Soviet elevators, about
the size of a porta potty and smelling like one too.
(19:16):
He's got no clue what he'll find at the top.
I go to the twelfth floor and I meet with
the head of the San Suski Simia, the san Subski family.
It's like a local racketeering group that started rough enough people.
I sat down with him, just one on one, and
I said, why did you put a rock and propelled
(19:37):
hand grenade through my office this morning? And he said,
I've been wanting to meet you, And I really didn't
know how else to get your attention, because I'd like
my guys just to be your drivers. And I said, perfect,
you didn't have to do that, and so I hired
a bunch of the guys. So now these grenade throwing
(19:59):
mobster are working for Craig and Coca Cola. The man
who'd come to the Soviet Union as a pioneer started
looking more and more like a pirate. A new breed
of person began to take control in Russia. While most
(20:19):
people lost their life savings after the Soviet Union collapsed,
a handful saw an opportunity, an opportunity to buy entire industries, oil, gas,
raw materials for peanuts. These people, you might know them
as oligarchs, became the rulers of the new capitalist Russia.
(20:40):
And that meant that people who used to be valued
in Soviet society, teachers, doctors, cosmonauts, no longer were. That's
when I remember long lines of really well dressed people selling,
you know, sweaters and whatever they could choose. It was
terribly said. Everything had turned topsy turvy. Those who had
(21:06):
been up were now down. University professors selling socks in
the subway, criminals working for Coca Cola, and cosmonauts now
making less money than taxi drivers. In early nineteen ninety two,
Serge was making five hundred rubles a month, just two
dollars and fifty cents at the new exchange rate. He
(21:26):
was a highly trained engineer, a national hero, still up
in space, risking his life for his country, and now
struggling to support his wife and baby daughter. And that's
when rumors started going around that things had gotten so
bad the cosmonauts were actually going on strike. There was
a silence from Citigay at that point. He's quite a voluble,
(21:52):
garrylous type of man. He always has something interesting to say.
But there was silence at that point. That's after the break.
(22:19):
It's a sunny morning on the other side of the
world from Moscow. Ham radio operator Maggie I Quinto is
out running errands in Colak, her little town in western Australia.
She parks her car on the wide, flat highway that
cuts through the middle of the town and gets her
shopping bags out of the trunk. She's heading towards the
bakery when a battered farm truck pulls up next to her.
(22:42):
I would be stopped in the street and people who
my heart they knew, would say, how are our cosmonauts?
Our cosmonauts. It turns out, in the months that Maggie
had been talking to Mirror, the whole town of Colak
had fallen in love with these Soviet spacemen too. These
guys would pass me. I've never seen these farmers before,
(23:03):
and they look at me and point to the sky
and go are they okay? But today the farmer driving
the truck looks worried. He's heard things about the cosmonauts.
The cosmonauts salaries are worthless. Their families can barely afford groceries,
so they're gonna stop working. They're going on strike. Maggie
(23:27):
tries to dismiss the stories as rumors, but soon newspapers
or publishing stuff that's even more wild. Not only are
the cosmonauts on strike, they're actually stuck in space. These
newspaper stories have terrifying headlines like junked in space and
stuck in endless orbit. They're being stranded there, They're being punished.
(23:50):
That's what the rumors said, that they were left there deliberately,
no one was going to bring them down. They even
say Serage is ill. The journalists rang up Sigh his
wife and asked her about his illness, which is must
have been rather devastating for her to listen to. All
this time, Maggie's thinking, what's going on here? She's been
(24:11):
talking to Sergee nearly every day and he seems fine,
chatting to her about their kids, his spacewalks, Newham radio technology,
but she can't shake this doubt. Are they okay? Is
there something they aren't telling me? And then one day
(24:33):
Maggie gets a call. A radio station in Melbourne rang
me and said, please, can you find out is it
true about all of these things? Now? In the past,
Maggie has stayed clear of asking Sarage about politics, not
wanting to put him on edge. But today, with the
world's press writing these strange stories and people stopping her
in the street, Maggie decides she's going to be direct
(24:55):
with Sarage. She's going to ask for the truth. What
is really happening to her friends, her cosmonauts? So is
it okay? I'll send them a message again electronically, and
I'll ask them these questions. But there's no guarantee. They're very,
very busy up there. They have much work to do,
and I don't know if they'll answer. Her fingers shaking
a little, Maggie started typing. So the questions. I asked them,
(25:19):
where are you hungry? Is it true that you're on strike?
Has your supply ship docked? Do you like being on strike?
And they say, Segay, that you have fallen ill? Is
that true? And those were the questions. Maggie hits send
and she waits on mirror. Sarah Gay sees the question
(25:41):
flood in. He's taken aback for months. Speaking to Maggie
had just been a bit of light relief, a bit
of fun, But between the lines of her anxious questions,
he can see her concern for him. He knows he
has to respond straight away. Minutes Maggie's old Tshiba is
(26:02):
flashing with a new message, Greetings Rita, which is my name,
he said. Australia is located at the other side of
the Earth from Moscow. It's very far so news is
greatly changed when it reaches you. People in Australia and
Moscow wok upside down from each other. Maybe this is
the reason your news arrives reversed. But what about the
(26:25):
strike everyone's talking about. We're Sergey and his colleagues refusing
to work, and he said that there was a threatened
strike at flight Control. But it's impossible, he said, for
him to go on strike. And as you can imagine,
they have to keep things running on the space station
and if they were to go on strike, they would die.
Maggie is relieved, but then she gets another call from
(26:48):
a journalist. Listen, I've got this tip off. You're not
going to believe this, but apparently the Russians are thinking
of selling the space station. Maggie thinks fake news. She
knows things are changing over there, but the Russians would
never put their space station up for sale. This is
(27:09):
the crowning glory of Soviet space technology. But the journalist
says to her, look, the next time you're talking to
these fellows, asked them about the selling of Mirror the
space station, and so I did. There was a silence
from Sergey at that point. He's quite a voluble, garrulous
(27:31):
type of man. He always has something interesting to say.
But there was silence at that point, and he said, look,
I'll talk with mission control. And at that point I'm
going to guess, and I don't really know, but I'm
going to guess at that news had not reached them.
After everything Sarage has been through archologically, it must have
been devastating. Look, I reckon it would have been to
(27:58):
hear from someone in Australia that the country he'd sacrificed
everything for might sell his home from under his feet.
That's next time on The Last Soviet. The Last Soviet
(28:25):
is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with iHeart Podcast and
Exile Media, produced by Sama's Dad Audio and hosted by
me Lance Bass Executive produced by Kate Osbourne and Mangesh
had a Kador with Oz Wallashan and Kostas Linos from
iHeart executive produced by Katrina Norvelle and Nikki Ettore from
(28:49):
Sama's Dad Audio are Executive producers are Joe Sikes and
Dasha Lissina. Produced by Asia Fuchs, Dasha Litzitzina and Joe Sikes.
Writing by Lydia Marchant, Research by Mika Golobovski and Molly Schwartz,
music by Will Epstein, Themed by Martin Orstrin, Mixing and
(29:09):
sound design by Richard Ward and special thanks to Nando
Via Welissa Pollock, Will Pearson, Connel Byrne, Bob Pittman, and
Isaac Lee. If you want to hear more shows like this,
nothing is more important to the creators here at Kaleidoscope
than subscribers, ratings, and reviews, so please spread the love
wherever you listen.
In a Moscow TV studio. A thirty something guy with thick,
wavy hair leans forward in his chair. His name is
Artemy Troitzky, the barricade building journalist from the last episode.
He's about to invite you to something revolutionary from my
TV offices. I've made the last announcement alive, saying the
(00:33):
Gagart Party is starting very soon. You are welcome to
the first ever Rave in Moscow, the first ever Rave
in Moscow, a rager to end all ragers and named
after your Gagarin, the first human to journey into space.
And it will be techno music played all night, Russian,
(00:58):
Latvian and German and French DJs, and the location also
cosmonaut themed. The Space Pavilion a museum dedicated to the
glories of the space program. It was like Snayland. You
walk in, There's a curved ceiling made of glass. It's dark,
(01:21):
the music so loud you feel it in your chest.
All around you are models and relics from the Soviets
glorious space program, satellites, the capsule that sent Gagaren into space,
gagaren space suit from his flight. And the place is
packed bodies, sweating, bodies, dancing, throwing their heads up to
(01:46):
the sky, young people free at last to party. I
think that the whole of cool Moscow was there, artists, actors, models,
(02:10):
the new generation creating something beautiful from the ashes of
the old world. We felt like a brand new country
which is aiming at the bright future, which will be
totally different from what we've had before. But what would
(02:32):
that mean for the cosmonauts, the Soviet citizens who once
represented the future? What would happen to them in the
new Russia. I'm Lance bass And from Kaleidoscope Exile and
iHeart Podcasts. This is the last Soviet mingling with the
(02:58):
rush hour traffic, army armored personnel carriers on the streets
of Moscow. The August nineteen ninety one, a faction of
hardline communists just tried to take control of the Soviet
government tanks in Red Square. The official tanks rattled through
the streets of Moscow and hundreds of thousands of people
stood up to them. Three civilians had died last night
(03:19):
when light tanks tried to slam through a barricade. In
just three days, the coup felled, the hardliners were pushed out,
and the people won. Tonight n Caligorbatrophia is again president
of the Soviet Union, the man who tried to bring
him down or either under arrest or being hunted. But
as the dust settled and all of the old values
and structures of the Soviet world fell away, a brand
(03:41):
new system was beginning to take shape. As if to
harold this new dawn, something very unusual was about to happen.
On the Soviet space station, where our man Sarage is
still hard at work. The cosmonauts on Mirror were about
to become the face of one of the most famous
brands in the world, Coca Cola. If you taste it,
(04:02):
there's the burn and bite at the back of your
throat for a moment that then gives you the In
the summer of nineteen ninety, Craig Kohan was twenty seven
years old, newly single, and ready to take Moscow by storm,
one can of Coca Cola at a time. I was
(04:22):
sent to figure out how to build the cocola system
in the Sovietinia. That was the brief. Craig was the
new face of capitalism, the alternative to the old Soviet
way of doing things. Remember, in the USSR, private enterprise
had been banned completely for decades. So Craig was a
(04:44):
representative of a totally new mindset, a totally new way
of life. And you could say Craig was born to
do this job. He grew up in Toronto and what
he called a McDonald's family, all the panti, sat sauces,
cheez pickles, McDonald's big Man. When he was a kid,
his dad, George Cohan, brought the first ever McDonald's to Canada.
(05:08):
Canadians went crazy for it. Break today at McDonald's where
your dollar gets a break every day. George Cohan even
had a bus called the Big Mac Bus, used to
raise money for charity. And then in nineteen seventy six,
during the Montreal Olympics, the Canadian government came to Craig's
(05:29):
dad with a strange favor. Would he please let the
Soviet delegation use his bus to get around the city
And so we met all the Soviets in nineteen seventy six.
They rode the big backbus and in the evening they
went out to dinner and what did they eat, Yeah,
you guessed it, Big Max. And that's when Craig's dad
(05:51):
had an idea. Watching these big Russian guys tucking into
burghers and fries. He thought, I know what I'm gonna
make my life's mission to bring McDonald's to the Soviet Union.
It became from my father a fourteen year, amazing epic
(06:11):
odyssey to get the first McDonald's built in Pushkin Square.
Pushkin Square is a square in central Moscow, a stone's
throw from the Kremlin. And so that was fourteen years
of conversations at home, conversations in the car, conversations at
dinner about the Soviets. Year in and year out, they
(06:33):
would host a rotating cast of Soviets at the Kohen Residence,
anyone and everyone who could get a word back to
the Kremlin about the wonders of McDonald's, whether they're ambassadors
or ballet dancers, or artists or politicians. And then in
January nineteen ninety, well, it's been fourteen years in the making,
and today finally McDonald's threw open the doors to its
(06:56):
first restaurant in Moscow. Thirty thousand people stood in line
that day. They started lining up this morning at four o'clock.
This woman doesn't know what she just date, but she
says it was unusual and delicious. Clearly George Kohen had
been on to something ahead of McDonald's. Canada waxed the
lyric in this day and age, it's nice when the
people can come out and get meat, reputations and milk
(07:18):
of the highest quality. Craig watched in amazement at what
his dad had just done. Happiness today in Moscow lay
in the communal pursuit of a big mac, but he
wanted to do something even bigger. For Craig, it was
about more than just business. He was an idealist, and
he had this vision that capitalism could actually bring Russians
(07:39):
together with the rest of the world, that East and
West could unite under the banner of a big brand.
In December nineteen ninety, he flew to Moscow to attend
the opening of his dad's McDonald's, and while he was
there he bumped into the CEO of Coca Cola. He
was drunk one night at the Kremlin after the opening
(08:01):
of McDonald's. The CEO of Coca Cola looked at Craig
and had an idea, and he said, Craig, I'm thinking
of three things. You the Soviet Union and you and
the Soviet Union. Big companies like Coca Cola saw an
incredible opportunity in the Soviet Union. It was an open market.
Western products basically didn't exist, so the potential for profit
(08:23):
was mouthwatering. And now the CEO has the perfect man
for the job, Craig Cohan, the son of the guy
who got McDonald's into Moscow. But this was a very
different challenge. Craig's dad had opened a single McDonald's. The
CEO of Coke wanted cans in every corner shop in Russia,
total domination. Craig accepted the challenge stage one reconnaissance. For
(08:52):
the first six months June of nineteen ninety December of
nineteen ninety, I spent every day going to every single
metro stop in the city understanding how people drink beverages.
You know, they used to have these amazing vending machines,
or there was a single glass. Incidentally, just when you
expect hard frost, Moscow has a thirsty heat wave. So
(09:14):
buy yourself a cups. I'd think when you wash the
glass and you would get a cool beverage a cavass
out of that. Cavas not my favorite drink, but if
sour bread and liquid form floats your boat, you might
like it. And it's probably the second most popular drink
in Russia after vodka, which was definitely more my thing,
especially the infused ones. The pineapple very good. You would
(09:38):
wash the glass and put it back in the next
person and use the same glass, wash it and put
it back and put five copecks in. So that's how
people were experiencing beverages, very different to American vending machines,
and so Craig had a ton of questions he needed
to ask people lining up for their glass of cavas,
although he was careful not to tell them he worked
(09:59):
for Coca. No one really knew that I was working there.
I was this interested guy doing a study on beverages
in the Soviet Union. It was like he was an
undercover agent. People just opened their arms to me for
all the information, and that's how I got data. And
then I worked at a chokovskis a vote for two
(10:22):
and a half weeks. It was a champagne factory, and
so I saw exactly how they mixed the product. I
saw how they mixed the concentrate. I saw the rats
in the sugar. I saw the whole system, the whole
Soviet system. After a few months Craig felt like the
reconnaissance stage of his mission was complete. But for Craig
and Coca Cola to actually launch themselves in the Soviet Union,
(10:45):
they needed a way to get into the hearts, minds,
and eventually the mouths of Soviets. So they were going
to have to get creative. Cocola never been on the
North Pole, and so we got colas a North Pole.
The company sponsored a famous Russian Arctic explorer. He put
(11:05):
a Cocacola in his bag, and he took his husky,
bringing huskies, and he went up to the North Pole
and took a pictures the North Pole crank, and then
it was time to head to the Kremlin. I made
sure that when Bush met Gorbachov there was a Coca
Cola on that table. So Craig starts thinking, what's the
next frontier. If you could go to the North Pole
(11:28):
and you can get it on the table at the Kremlin,
you could certainly get it in space infiltrating the Soviet
space station. This was going to be the most spectacular
triumph for Coca Cola and good old fashioned American capitalism.
And so Coca Cola's engineers started working away in a
lab in Atlanta trying to create a coke can that
(11:52):
could survive on mirror, and after months of work, it
was ready, a little red can that looks a lot
like the ones we have here on Earth, except it
was fitted with a strange white nozzle and a metal
button on top. This was meant to stop it from
exploding in zero grabbing. On August twentieth, nineteen ninety one,
(12:17):
the Soviet Space Agency launched their M nine cargo spacecraft
from Bikanore in kazakh Stop. On board is a crate
of spaceproof Coca Cola cans, making their groundbreaking journey to
the space station. The next day, Sarage presses a button
on top of the can and it squirts the coke
into his mouth. Burn and bite at the back of
(12:38):
your throat. Even in space. It's a huge moment. Although
Serge wasn't really sure about the taste. His Ham radio
friend Maggie asked him, do you like Coca cola? What's
it taste like in space? And Sitgay said, It's all
right in space, he said, but insduce his better. No matter,
(13:02):
Coca Cola and capitalism had won the day. It was
like integration Finally, of these two opposing Cold War cultures
that have come together, and Coca Cola being a little
moment that brought people together. For idealists like Craig, it
seemed like the beginning of a new future for Russia,
Sergey and the space program. But there was a problem
(13:25):
lurking just around the corner. Not everyone in the New
Russia had such noble intentions as Craig. I think there's
two ways to approach this country, that's Gregg in an
NBC interview from the time. One is to be a
pioneer and the others to be a pirate and coming
here and try to courage the land. And it turns
(13:46):
out in the New Russia the line between pioneer and
pirate was extremely thin. Why did you put a rock
and propelled hand grenade through my office this morning? And
he said, I've been wanting to meet you, and I
really didn't know how else to get your attention. That's
(14:08):
after the break. Just a few months after Surge drank
the can of coke on the space station, the Soviet
flag came down for the very last time over the
Kremlin in Moscow. The hammer and sickle is lord for
(14:33):
the last time, the Soviet Union was over. The tricolor
banner of the Russian Republic now flies over the Kremlin.
Communism was dead, and while men like Craig Cohan saw
this as a moment of hope for the future, the
lives of ordinary Russians were plunged into uncertainty. I mean,
when you lose the system that you've grown up in
(14:55):
and you have no idea wor else to go. A
lot of people went out and planting potatoes at their dotches.
That's Serge Schmimon, the former New York Times correspondent in Moscow.
We've been hearing from throughout this series. Our office car
was a Volvo station wagon. So some of these people
would ask us to go with them to their dotch
(15:15):
and bring back their potatoes because you know, big bags
to bring them back to Moscow. They were planting potatoes
because at that point in time, potatoes were the safest
way to make sure you had food. The ruble was collapsing,
the shops filled up, but the number of people who
could afford anything plummeted. People's life savings were suddenly worthless.
(15:38):
So he went into a period of kind of an
elemental primitive economy where factories traded with each other. You know,
I'll give you a window if you give me a banana.
Remember hearing about the Russian black market. It always sounded
so spylike, so covert, so underground. Well here it is
(15:58):
at its lowest level, and strange things gained value. This
man stripped down a TV set, hoping to make enough
money just to buy milk or bread a peck of Marlboroughs.
Marlborough's cigarettes was roughly the equivalent of a dollar. You' Barnert,
who was a barter economy and never went anywhere without
(16:20):
four or five cartons of Marlborough's. A cigarette was better
value than cash. Because when communism collapsed, the new government
made a drastic decision. With the help of economic advisors
from America, they decided the best way to transition the
economy from a communist to a capitalist system was to
(16:41):
do it all at once. In the old Soviet Union,
the government controlled prices. Overnight, those price controls were removed,
which meant that the candy that used to cost one
rouble now cost two thousand. Shoppers stead in disbelief at
what they now have to pay for the most basic goods.
Ham for example, pull at more than a thousand roubles
(17:01):
a kilo. That's two months worth of wages for most people.
The economists called it shock therapy. You had to let
the system go, and it had to find its own bottom,
and it had to start rebuilding. Overnight the cash economy collapsed.
The problem for shoppers here these days isn't the long
lines Russians are used to waiting in line. Their concern
(17:24):
is what happens when they reached the end of that line.
There they'll find either bread or milk three or four
times higher than they were just weeks ago, or worse,
no food at all. This also led to a wave
of crime sweeping through Moscow. You had a lot of theft.
The streets became dangerous. They say that some people belong
to the mafia here. Do you know anything about that? No? No, no,
(17:48):
for us, you know, I mean we were a dressed
in Western closing in Western cars. Our car was stolen twice.
This man's parting shot my favorite. The mafia is forever.
Organized crime was emerging from the ruins of the Soviet Empire.
A period of straight up banitry set in. In order
to get by in the new Russia, you had to
(18:09):
do things that you would never have dreamt of just
a few months earlier. By early nineteen ninety two, Craig
Khan is setting up his Coca Cola factory in Moscow,
but he's beginning to realize this is not the friendly,
hopeful Russia he arrived in back in nineteen ninety. Things
have changed so quickly, and if he's going to succeed,
(18:31):
it's becoming clear he's going to have to change too.
I'm on the way to the office at five thirty
in the morning to try to start up all the equipment,
et cetera, etc. And I get a note from our
security that a Rocca propelled hand grenate just went through
my office. No one's hurt, but Craig is shaken. This
is a far cry from the quiet streets of Toronto,
(18:53):
and I said, oh, that's good. I'm glad it wasn't there.
So I asked the security where was it? Shot? From
otoshop from the big apartment block across the street. I
have this very clearly in my head, so I said, okay,
let's go find out who it is. So hard thumping
Craig climbs into one of those old Soviet elevators, about
the size of a porta potty and smelling like one too.
(19:16):
He's got no clue what he'll find at the top.
I go to the twelfth floor and I meet with
the head of the San Suski Simia, the san Subski family.
It's like a local racketeering group that started rough enough people.
I sat down with him, just one on one, and
I said, why did you put a rock and propelled
(19:37):
hand grenade through my office this morning? And he said,
I've been wanting to meet you, And I really didn't
know how else to get your attention, because I'd like
my guys just to be your drivers. And I said, perfect,
you didn't have to do that, and so I hired
a bunch of the guys. So now these grenade throwing
(19:59):
mobster are working for Craig and Coca Cola. The man
who'd come to the Soviet Union as a pioneer started
looking more and more like a pirate. A new breed
of person began to take control in Russia. While most
(20:19):
people lost their life savings after the Soviet Union collapsed,
a handful saw an opportunity, an opportunity to buy entire industries, oil, gas,
raw materials for peanuts. These people, you might know them
as oligarchs, became the rulers of the new capitalist Russia.
(20:40):
And that meant that people who used to be valued
in Soviet society, teachers, doctors, cosmonauts, no longer were. That's
when I remember long lines of really well dressed people selling,
you know, sweaters and whatever they could choose. It was
terribly said. Everything had turned topsy turvy. Those who had
(21:06):
been up were now down. University professors selling socks in
the subway, criminals working for Coca Cola, and cosmonauts now
making less money than taxi drivers. In early nineteen ninety two,
Serge was making five hundred rubles a month, just two
dollars and fifty cents at the new exchange rate. He
(21:26):
was a highly trained engineer, a national hero, still up
in space, risking his life for his country, and now
struggling to support his wife and baby daughter. And that's
when rumors started going around that things had gotten so
bad the cosmonauts were actually going on strike. There was
a silence from Citigay at that point. He's quite a voluble,
(21:52):
garrylous type of man. He always has something interesting to say.
But there was silence at that point. That's after the break.
(22:19):
It's a sunny morning on the other side of the
world from Moscow. Ham radio operator Maggie I Quinto is
out running errands in Colak, her little town in western Australia.
She parks her car on the wide, flat highway that
cuts through the middle of the town and gets her
shopping bags out of the trunk. She's heading towards the
bakery when a battered farm truck pulls up next to her.
(22:42):
I would be stopped in the street and people who
my heart they knew, would say, how are our cosmonauts?
Our cosmonauts. It turns out, in the months that Maggie
had been talking to Mirror, the whole town of Colak
had fallen in love with these Soviet spacemen too. These
guys would pass me. I've never seen these farmers before,
(23:03):
and they look at me and point to the sky
and go are they okay? But today the farmer driving
the truck looks worried. He's heard things about the cosmonauts.
The cosmonauts salaries are worthless. Their families can barely afford groceries,
so they're gonna stop working. They're going on strike. Maggie
(23:27):
tries to dismiss the stories as rumors, but soon newspapers
or publishing stuff that's even more wild. Not only are
the cosmonauts on strike, they're actually stuck in space. These
newspaper stories have terrifying headlines like junked in space and
stuck in endless orbit. They're being stranded there, They're being punished.
(23:50):
That's what the rumors said, that they were left there deliberately,
no one was going to bring them down. They even
say Serage is ill. The journalists rang up Sigh his
wife and asked her about his illness, which is must
have been rather devastating for her to listen to. All
this time, Maggie's thinking, what's going on here? She's been
(24:11):
talking to Sergee nearly every day and he seems fine,
chatting to her about their kids, his spacewalks, Newham radio technology,
but she can't shake this doubt. Are they okay? Is
there something they aren't telling me? And then one day
(24:33):
Maggie gets a call. A radio station in Melbourne rang
me and said, please, can you find out is it
true about all of these things? Now? In the past,
Maggie has stayed clear of asking Sarage about politics, not
wanting to put him on edge. But today, with the
world's press writing these strange stories and people stopping her
in the street, Maggie decides she's going to be direct
(24:55):
with Sarage. She's going to ask for the truth. What
is really happening to her friends, her cosmonauts? So is
it okay? I'll send them a message again electronically, and
I'll ask them these questions. But there's no guarantee. They're very,
very busy up there. They have much work to do,
and I don't know if they'll answer. Her fingers shaking
a little, Maggie started typing. So the questions. I asked them,
(25:19):
where are you hungry? Is it true that you're on strike?
Has your supply ship docked? Do you like being on strike?
And they say, Segay, that you have fallen ill? Is
that true? And those were the questions. Maggie hits send
and she waits on mirror. Sarah Gay sees the question
(25:41):
flood in. He's taken aback for months. Speaking to Maggie
had just been a bit of light relief, a bit
of fun, But between the lines of her anxious questions,
he can see her concern for him. He knows he
has to respond straight away. Minutes Maggie's old Tshiba is
(26:02):
flashing with a new message, Greetings Rita, which is my name,
he said. Australia is located at the other side of
the Earth from Moscow. It's very far so news is
greatly changed when it reaches you. People in Australia and
Moscow wok upside down from each other. Maybe this is
the reason your news arrives reversed. But what about the
(26:25):
strike everyone's talking about. We're Sergey and his colleagues refusing
to work, and he said that there was a threatened
strike at flight Control. But it's impossible, he said, for
him to go on strike. And as you can imagine,
they have to keep things running on the space station
and if they were to go on strike, they would die.
Maggie is relieved, but then she gets another call from
(26:48):
a journalist. Listen, I've got this tip off. You're not
going to believe this, but apparently the Russians are thinking
of selling the space station. Maggie thinks fake news. She
knows things are changing over there, but the Russians would
never put their space station up for sale. This is
(27:09):
the crowning glory of Soviet space technology. But the journalist
says to her, look, the next time you're talking to
these fellows, asked them about the selling of Mirror the
space station, and so I did. There was a silence
from Sergey at that point. He's quite a voluble, garrulous
(27:31):
type of man. He always has something interesting to say.
But there was silence at that point, and he said, look,
I'll talk with mission control. And at that point I'm
going to guess, and I don't really know, but I'm
going to guess at that news had not reached them.
After everything Sarage has been through archologically, it must have
been devastating. Look, I reckon it would have been to
(27:58):
hear from someone in Australia that the country he'd sacrificed
everything for might sell his home from under his feet.
That's next time on The Last Soviet. The Last Soviet
(28:25):
is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with iHeart Podcast and
Exile Media, produced by Sama's Dad Audio and hosted by
me Lance Bass Executive produced by Kate Osbourne and Mangesh
had a Kador with Oz Wallashan and Kostas Linos from
iHeart executive produced by Katrina Norvelle and Nikki Ettore from
(28:49):
Sama's Dad Audio are Executive producers are Joe Sikes and
Dasha Lissina. Produced by Asia Fuchs, Dasha Litzitzina and Joe Sikes.
Writing by Lydia Marchant, Research by Mika Golobovski and Molly Schwartz,
music by Will Epstein, Themed by Martin Orstrin, Mixing and
(29:09):
sound design by Richard Ward and special thanks to Nando
Via Welissa Pollock, Will Pearson, Connel Byrne, Bob Pittman, and
Isaac Lee. If you want to hear more shows like this,
nothing is more important to the creators here at Kaleidoscope
than subscribers, ratings, and reviews, so please spread the love
wherever you listen.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!