Beyond the diplomacy and imposed or threatened sanctions by the United States and Europe, it was the American giant hamburgers to go directly to the facts in the Ukraine crisis.
Even before Western leaders could agree on how to deal with the annexation of the Crimea, McDonald’s had already closed its fast food restaurants, leaving the inhabitants of the peninsula without Big Mac and McChicken. The Kremlin now wants the same to happen to all the McDonald’s in Russia, but this has little to do with Crimea.
RusBuger wasted no time. McDonald’s had just pulled down the shutters that already the 100% made in Russia chain of burger had hoisted their signs in the place of the “golden arches”. In the same place where, in Sevastopol, the inhabitants of the Crimea have ordered for years Big Macs and other American calorie bombs, they can satisfy their appetite with the same calorie but definitely more patriotic “Tsar Burger”. In early July, about three months after the Russian tricolor had begun to wave on the Ukrainian peninsula, a new and no less significant change of symbols took place before the eyes of crimeans. A better decision maker than the government of the United States, faster than the sanctions and more effective than the European countermoves, the American company had closed his fast food restaurants in Crimea in April. The inhabitants of Sevastopol, Simferopol and Yalta saw the placid clown Ronald McDonald to pack up, and right after arrive a muscular superhero with a hamburger in one hand and a weight in the other, the mascot of RusBurger. In the antagonism between Big Mac and Tsar Burger there is something more than just a competition between brands. Are Russia and the West that are challenging.
The burger war
“McDonald’s has closed its restaurants in the Crimea – this is very good,” said Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the ultranationalist politician who, in defiance of definitions, is the leader of the Russian Liberal Democratic Party LDPR. “Now it needs to close all restaurants in Russia. I ordered the teams of municipal organizations of LDPR to put pickets in front of all McDonald’s restaurants in Moscow and across the country. They should get out of the country as soon as possible, and then proceed to Pepsi.” Of course, the story wasn’t at the end. There were no pickets, but last Friday, the Federal Agency for Consumer Protection announced that it has filed a lawsuit to a Moscow court, asking the withdrawal from the market of some products. The same agency that blocked the import of wines from Chisinau and Poroshenko’s chocolates when Moldova and Ukraine were deciding the rapprochement with the EU. According to the director of the agency Anna Popova, cheeseburger, chickenburger and milkshake do not comply with the rules on the nutritional values and some salads even contain coliform bacteria. If it is obvious to suspect a political decision agaist McDonald’s and the U.S., the Crimean issue could only have offered the chance.
A bit of “Russian taste”
When, in 1990, the first McDonald’s of the Soviet Union opened in Moscow, the emergence of the golden arches near the Red Square and Lenin Mausoleum was the most tangible sign that the October Revolution had ended. Just a year later, the Soviet Union dissolved and the burgers invaded the former Soviet republics along with a thousand other symbols of the “American dream”. McDonald’s now operates more than 400 fast food restaurants in the whole of Russia, which is one of its richest markets outside the United States. More than 20 years later, many things have changed. The American soft power is no longer taking on the Russians and a wave of chauvinism is accompanying the Putin era. After the president has publicly expressed a desire that the Russian children come back to watch Russians cartoons like “Vini Puh” (the Soviet copy of Disney’s “Winnie the Pooh”), the planned rebuilding of Russian pride is also in a burger. In this RusBurger is perfect. With its restaurants and brand colors similar to McDonald’s, with its photocopy menu and with its famous Burger Tsar that has nothing Russian but the name, is the ideal autocratic answer to the desire of Russian for burgers. They look like the American ones, without being Americans. Just like imperialism.
Beyond the diplomacy and imposed or threatened sanctions by the United States and Europe, it was the American giant hamburgers to go directly to the facts in the Ukraine crisis.
