In late 1990, a former British cabinet minister reflecting on the end of the Cold War picked an image of consumer goods companies’ inroads into the former Soviet Union to illustrate the transformations seen in what he called the “annus mirabilis”.
There had been longer queues outside the new McDonald’s in Moscow’s Pushkin Square than at Lenin’s tomb, Denis Healey marvelled in the Financial Times.
Russians’ embrace of western fast food, soft drinks an