McDonald’s is also leaving: 850 stores close in Russia

The end of Soviet communism began with the opening of the first McDonald’s at the time of the perestroika of Mikhail Gorbachev. The closure of the fast food restaurants with the yellow M, announced this morning as a sanction for the war in Ukraine, symbolizes the return of the dictatorship in Moscow: almost a span of thirty-five years that has gradually accompanied first the rise of a fragile democracy and then its inexorable decline in the era of Vladimir Putin.