Under the newish young Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, Russia was feeling its way through the policies of Glasnost (openness) and Perestrioka (restructuring) when I made my first visit to Moscow in 1986. Despite the stirrings of change, it was still quite the Soviet Union, with hard currency stores (which didn't accept roubles) called Berioska shops full of caviar and Cuban cigars and chocolates, broadsheet newspapers spread open behind glass for people to read in the public parks, and a drink called kvass - kind of a Soviet Tang - served from a communal glass.
There was a vending machine back on the side of the Kremlin near the eternal flame which had a nozzle for dispensing kvass, and then a nozzle for rinsing the cup. You'd drink your kvass, rinse the cup and then put it back in place for the next customer.
The Soviet Union wasn't known for the variety of its cuisine, so we were excited to find Pizza Restaurant. It had a menu which we puzzled through with our Russian-English dictionaries, and everything we tried to order was met with a deadpan "nyet." After all, menu be damned, it turned out that on that night, Pizza Restaurant had one kind of pizza.
Now comes word that just 23 years later the Soviet Union's latter day comrades, in fact pretty much their only remaining direct descendants, the North Koreans, have gone on a pizza jag:
BBC: First North Korean pizzeria opens.
(Photo of St. Basil's Cathedral and Red Square from the Russia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)
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