Big Mac With a Soviet Aftertaste

Meanwhile, I have always thought it absolutely easy to spell out one. For ideology is concretely embodied in ourselves, our customs, mores, behavioral standards, and life stereotypes.

Last night, guided by a natural feeling of hunger and hiding from the damp weather, I dropped in at the gaudy McDonald's on Khreshchatyk. In there, I came across two friends, as cold and homeless as I, who were gulping down their international Big Macs. We were sipping coffee and babbling unhurriedly about things with what amounts to delight, as if we were somewhere in Paris, the more so that each of us had already had the misfortune to taste the discreet charm of European life. By the way, one of the advantages of the latter is that you never stand in the way of somebody else, especially in a place where you pay.

But in our McDonald's, where parents take their children on Sundays as if it were an excursion, our cozy idyll was upset by an energetic girl who got down to feverishly mopping the floor around our feet exactly the way furious old women did in Soviet-era cafes. Of course, she was clad in a uniform rather than battered overalls, and looked undoubtedly better than those unforgettable charwomen.

When this McDonald's was still under construction, a friend of mine let out a high-blown utterance to the effect that the opening of this snack-bar would drive the last nail into the coffin of Soviet ways, meaning that from now on we are going to stick to the Western life-style irreversibly. What also inspired hope was the fact that McDonald's exclusively employed young people uninfected to the fingertips by the Soviet habits. And it may be true that these outrageously expensive and bland sandwiches with a thin slice of ground beef inside were treated almost like a bulwark of democracy. Something deep in my heart prompts: this bulwark has tumbled down, too. Incidentally, my enthusiastic friend, a champion of Western values, recently diddled me out of a handsome amount of money in a most swinish way without batting an eye.

But, given our ideology, you might not bat an eye, either.