Svetlana Shapovaliants vividly remembers visiting the first Ikea store in Russia, shortly after it opened in 2000.
At the time, she and her husband were in their twenties and living in a “terrible” apartment on Ryazanskiy Prospekt in Moscow. She spent Rbs4,000 — “something like a third of my salary” — on a bunch of items including “some awful blue plates” that she still has.
Later, when the couple were able to buy their own house, they filled it completely with Ikea furniture in what she describes as a “Moscow-Paris-New York design”.
“People would come round and say ‘wow!’” she recalls.
Now a 47-year-old therapist and business coach still living in Moscow, she returned to Ikea last week. This time it was to say goodbye.
When the Swedish company announced that it was shutting down its stores in Russia in response to the invasion of Ukraine, she and her husband jumped in their car. On arrival, they found an Ikea employee with a loudspeaker telling a large crowd that the store was already closed. A young couple walked past carrying some plants.
“We were laughing so as not to descend into depression,” she says. “We understood that we were witnessing an epoch-defining event. And we have no idea what it will be like, going forward.”
Just as the 30,000 people who queued outside the first McDonald’s in Pushkin Square in 1990 symbolised the start of something new in Russia at the end of the cold war, she says, the huge crowds that made one final trip to Ikea’s stores last week “mark the end of an era”.
For the past three decades, multinational companies have played an outsized role in Russian society, bringing a slice of the good life to a middle class that had grown up with the drabness of the Soviet era.
Yet over the past two weeks, since President Vladimir Putin launched an invasion of Ukraine, there has been a dramatic exodus of those same foreign companies as 30 years of economic and busines