To Russia with Fries

Duncan McDowall is a professor of history at Carleton University and the
author of Quick to the Frontier: Canada’s Royal Bank.

This is a tale of American entrepreneurial chutz-pah carrying a Canadian
passport. In 1967, a young Chicago lawyer, George Cohon, arrived in
Toronto with $60,000 in borrowed capital and a marvelous opportunity—a
perpetual license on the McDonald’s hamburger concept in Canada.
Operating from a rented cubicle in the TD Centre, Cohon hustled his
product and soon opened Canada’s first “golden arches” franchise,
in London, Ontario. Hundreds more followed. Cohon then decided to “go
global” and after 14 years of arduous negotiation opened the first
Russian McDonald’s on Moscow’s Pushkin Square in 1990. To Russia
with Fries is the well-told chronicle of this bold journey.

“As-told-to” autobiographies of businessmen can be bombastic and
superficial, but With Fries succeeds for two reasons. It is superbly
written, and it fascinates by combining details of McDonald’s renowned
corporate culture (the mantra of quality, service, cleanliness, and
value matched with commitment to community) with an exciting account of
Cohon’s adventures in the shadow of the Kremlin (it took 14 years to
gain approval from the Soviet government to open in Russia, a telling
comment on the sclerotic ways of communism).

Interestingly, the book’s foreword is written by Mikhail Gorbachev,
under whose reforms the Yankee hamburger finally came to Russia.
McDonald’s, Cohon suggests, was “a dove of perestroika,” a force
of economic liberation as communism crumbled. Cohon concludes by holding
out hope for a “triumph of small business” in the new Russia. Amid
all the talk of economic gangsterism in the new Russia, this is hopeful
news.