Highlights
- Russians have been cut off from the world financially since payments companies Visa, Mastercard, Western Union and PayPal halted services
- With independent media outlets either blocked or closed, Russians face up to 15 years in jail for calling the war in Ukraine anything but a ‘special military operation’
- Vladimir Putin has ordered Russian nuclear forces to be put on high alert
“I have been standing up against the regime for two years now, actively joining in demonstrations. But it has come to the point where it is just too dangerous to stay,” the Russian national writes in a message correspondence with SBS Russian.
In light of new laws targeting the opposition, Arina made the difficult decision to leave the country.
Currently abroad, she has no access to her savings.
In response to the war in Ukraine, payments companies Mastercard, Visa, Western Union and PayPal have halted their operations with Russian banks.
Within Russia, Western sanctions have plunged the country into a new era of isolation that many are describing as a new Cold War.
With IKEA, H&M, Pepsi, Volkswagen, Siemens and many other international companies pulling out of the Russian market, Forbes Russia that at least 200,000 people will be left unemployed.
But it’s the closure of McDonald's that is seen by many as a symbol of Russia’s step back in time.
McDonald's sign with a hammer and sickle as seen in Moscow in 1991 Source: Elisabeth Agostino
‘It’s opening up, now is the time to go’
Elisabeth Agostino from Sydney travelled to Moscow a year after McDonald's opened its first restaurant in the USSR.
In mid-June 1991, she joined a camping tour across Europe. Part of the itinerary took her from Finland down to St Petersburg and then on to Moscow before she headed to Poland.
Elisabeth explains that, at the time of her visit, the rest of the world was "highly sceptical" about everything that was coming out of Russia.
“The main reason to go was just to see it for ourselves and experience it. Many people were wondering why I would want to go to Russia. I was explaining that it’s opening up and now is the time to go. Before it turns into any other country.”
As a vegetarian at the time, Elisabeth recalls eating only cucumbers and potatoes for the duration of her 10-day trip.
“I am a vegan now, but thank god I wasn’t vegan back then. They didn’t really understand vegetarianism, and it was hard to be given anything else. Also because of the food shortages. But even if I were a meat eater, I wouldn’t have eaten the meat we were given anyway.”
For this reason, Elisabeth says, the newly opened McDonald's in Moscow came as a saviour.
When we got to Moscow we all just headed to McDonald's. I think I ate five packets of fries or something.
Another big shock for Elisabeth were the queues she saw almost everywhere from the moment their bus crossed the border.
“When we were hitting towns we saw people queueing up almost everywhere. We couldn’t really see what they were queueing up for. But then it became obvious that it had to do with food. You wouldn’t find something like that here at home.
"Even when we went to see Lenin in his mausoleum, we were queueing for at least two hours."
"The queues were everywhere" recalls Elisabeth Source: Elisabeth Agostino
Elisabeth explains that her group soon picked up on invaluable techniques for getting by.
“My sister and I, as well as our friend Mary Ann, wanted to go to the Bolshoi theatre. But no taxis would stop for us. We were standing there for over half an hour. But then Mary Ann took out a pack of Marlboro Red. She heard that would work. And a taxi stopped straight away. We gave the driver the cigarettes and paid him to take us to the Bolshoi.”
According to Elisabeth, the interiors of museums and theatres felt like a parallel world - the Bolshoi's “absolute extravagance" or the artworks at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg stood in stark contrast to the reality outside.
A "Welcome to the USSR" brochure handed in to all the foreign tourists in Elisabeth's group Source: Elisabeth Agostino
‘It was bleaker than we had imagined’
John Watt and Beverley Gay from Perth travelled to the USSR in late April 1977. They were going to Great Britain to visit family, and decided to join a tour that took them from Bangkok to Taipei to Tokyo. From Japan they took a ferry to Nakhodka in the USSR and continued their journey via the Trans-Siberian railway.
John recalls their first moments in the USSR.
“We got off the boat in Nakhodka. All of our luggage was carried by 20-25 people like a conveyor belt. One person to the next. We remembered that Russia had zero unemployment, and we could see why. Everybody was employed doing something.”
Beverley adds that the country turned out to be bleaker than they had imagined.
“Open plains, not much growing, no trees, lots of ice and mud. You’d see a lot of ladies working on the train line. They’d be sitting down where it was all snow and ice. All wrapped up having their morning tea, sitting by the side of the railcar.”
Looking at the country from their train window, it soon became clear to John and Beverley that things were tough.
First glimpse of the USSR from the ferry. The port town of Nakhodka Source: Supplied by John Watt and Beverley Gay
“We had this little phrasebook. And one of the phrases in it that I thought was totally ridiculous: 'Please can you help me, my car is stuck in the mud’. We saw lots of trucks stuck in mud. So we realised that that phrase made sense.”
John and Beverley say their main takeaway from the trip was that people in the Soviet Union were very friendly, but were living under a lot of enforced rules and were very poor.
There were a lot of people trying to earn a living just with a little beer cart. And they looked as though they were doing it really hard.
The meals weren’t spectacular, Beverley says.
"We would go in a dining room in a hotel. First class passengers would be on one side, and we would be on the other side. I was always looking jealously at all the salad and fresh fruit that the first class was served.
"Once as I was leaving the dining room, I noticed that first class passengers had left a whole lot of orange quarters. The orange was never served whole, it was cut into little pieces. I waited for a convenient moment to snip some in the bag. One of the waiters saw me and yelled —‘Nyet! Nyet! Nyet!’ ['No' in Russian].
"Our guide solved everything by giving everyone in our group a quarter of an orange.”
John and Beverley explain that during their trip they had to keep all the receipts, so that when leaving the country they could prove that none of the items were purchased on the black market.
Women in front of a shop in the city of Khabarovsk Source: Supplied by John Watt and Beverley Gay
The Soviet guide was making sure that they also didn’t engage in any other black market activities, like giving foreign currency to the locals or selling anything to them.
However, one girl from their group did sell a pair of her jeans to a stranger in Moscow.
“Apparently there was a very high demand for jeans. It was just the thing to have in the Soviet Union. She sold her for the equivalent of $60. At that time you could buy jeans in Australia for $20 dollars or less,” Beverley says.
She adds that this was a lot of money and the woman then had to find ways of spending it.
“Because otherwise at the border she would have to show how she ended up with this amount of money. So we were going out with her and having meals trying to spend it all.”
Street cleaner in Novosibirsk Source: John Watt and Beverley Gay
Behind a closing curtain
On March 14, around 21:35 Moscow time, long-time editor and TV producer ran on camera during a live broadcast of the evening news bulletin. She was shouting “Stop the war” and holding a sign that read in Russian “No war. Don’t believe the propaganda”.
Ovsyannikova was detained and after 14 hours of questioning and a court hearing, she was fined for the on-air protest. She is now she might get a jail sentence.
This unprecedented act of dissent came as the Russian government continues its crackdown on free press in Russia.
A new law, signed into effect at the start of March, threatens journalists with up to 15 years of jail for covering the war in Ukraine in a way that does not align with the official position of the Russian government. In short — they are not allowed to use the word 'war' but rather must use the term ‘special military operation’.
In light of this law, some independent media outlets have closed, while others, like the prominent Novaya Gazeta, have decided to keep working under the new censorship by blanking out any mentions of the word ‘war’.
Some international news agencies have also decided to stop on-ground reporting from Russia in fear of prosecution of their journalists.
With McDonald’s closing its branches, international flights cancelled and the government curtailing remaining press freedoms, many Russians may feel like the past 30 years of progress have amounted to little.
