When Rita Skimehorn was growing up in the 1970s, in Mascoutah, Illinois, it didn’t have a lot of options for entertainment. After high school football games and dances, there was really just one spot where everyone hung out: Pizza Hut.

Back then, pizza delivery wasn’t a big thing. Pizza Hut was a dine-in restaurant, with its red roof, red-checkered tablecloths, and red lights that hung over the tables. Skimehorn would make a Pizza Hut pilgrimage every Saturday, a habit she financed by cleaning her friend’s brother’s apartment for $5. “We could get a small pizza and two small sodas and still have 35 cents left for a tip,” she said.

For Skimehorn, Pizza Hut wasn’t just a restaurant—it was a second home. So, it was pretty much inevitable that she’d start working there when she turned 16. She started out as a waitress, and throughout the 1980s, she got promoted again and again. By her mid-20s, she was a training manager. That meant she was such a Pizza Hut superstar that other managers would learn from her.

Skimehorn was exactly where she wanted to be—in a job she loved, in her small Midwestern hometown. And then, on a Sunday morning in 1990, she got an unexpected call.

The man on the other end said he was from Pizza Hut’s human resources department. He told her that Pizza Hut headquarters had a new job for her—that corporate wanted to send her overseas. At first, she thought it was another manager playing a joke on her. But this offer was completely real. The HR guy told Skimehorn to pack her bags; Pizza Hut was going to Moscow, and so was she.

At the time, Skimehorn had no idea she was being drawn into an international caper with no parallel in recent history. As the Soviet Union contended with seismic political reforms and experimented with capitalism, Pizza Hut would be in the center of the action. There would be threats, vodka bribes, and incursions by tanks. There would be incredulous Muscovites who could not square the idea of a salad bar. And there would be people like Skimehorn, thrust onto the front lines of a restaurant opening unlike any other before or since.

Now, 35 years later, Pizza Hut isn’t what it used to be. Same-store sales have spiraled lower for eight quarters in a row, and its parent company Yum! Brands, also the steward of Taco Bell and KFC, is reportedly considering selling off the entire brand. But in 1990, the red roof was a cultural and economic force—a symbol of American ingenuity and deliciousness. And as the Cold War reached its climax, Pizza Hut would be on the front lines.

The first Pizza Hut opened in a converted tavern in Wichita, Kansas, in 1958. Eleven years later, the restaurant debuted its iconic red roof design. Another 10 years after that, in the late 1970s, Pizza Hut was America’s No. 1 pizza chain, with more than 3,100 locations.

Its ambitions didn’t stop there. Pizza Hut’s parent company, PepsiCo, felt certain it could win people over around the world. PepsiCo’s longtime CEO Don Kendall was extremely focused on international expansion, and there was one untapped market he was desperate to conquer: the USSR.

Kendall had made his name in the 1950s by shoving Pepsi into the hands of Nikita Khrushchev. The Soviet leader drank three cups of capitalist soda in front of news photographers and declared it “very refreshing.”

At a time when American blue jeans and rock ’n’ roll were officially banned in the Soviet Union, Pepsi became the first U.S. consumer product broadly available there. For Kendall, that wasn’t just a business success story. He believed that corporations were the best hope for international diplomacy. “In my opinion, you don’t change people by isolating them. You change people by having … commerce back and forth,” he said in 1975. “That’s how you develop trust.”

Kendall officially retired in 1986, but he didn’t really stop working—and didn’t let go of his biggest dream. He wanted to open a Pizza Hut in Moscow, making it the first American restaurant chain in the USSR. The man he tasked with doing it was Andy Rafalat.

Rafalat helped spearhead Pizza Hut’s international operations. By the 1980s, he’d opened restaurants across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Business was booming everywhere: There were nearly 7,000 Pizza Huts in 54 countries, with combined annual sales of $3.5 billion—more than $9 billion in today’s dollars.

Regardless of all that success, the idea of opening a Western fast-food place in the USSR was kind of absurd. After all, the whole concept of private business didn’t exist under the Communist system. “We all recognized that if this was ever going to happen, that this would be a miracle,” Rafalat said.

But then, in the ’80s, a new leader came to power in the USSR. And under Mikhail Gorbachev, everything started to change.

Gorbachev’s push for reform, known as perestroika, came when the Soviet economy looked close to collapse, with shortages of everything from shoes to onions. Under perestroika, the USSR would at least experiment with capitalism, including partnerships with foreign businesses. In early 1989, a group of Soviet bureaucrats gave Pizza Hut their blessing: They could open a restaurant in Moscow.

It had taken years to get that handshake agreement, but for Rafalat, the real work was just beginning. To pull this off, he’d have to move to Moscow—and figure out how the Soviet Union worked.

When he got there, he saw right away that the country was struggling. “The food-supply situation was pretty dire,” he said. “It was pretty obvious, just walking the streets, what they wanted. They wanted to be fed. It was as simple as that.”

Rafalat hoped that Pizza Hut could help with that. The first step was finding a location. And officials in Moscow were pretty much useless. Rafalat said they suggested “places in the middle of a forest somewhere, because their argument was, it doesn’t matter where you put it, people are going to come anyway.”

These Moscow officials were going to be a problem. To get Pizza Hut off the ground, Rafalat would need someone who could help him navigate the Soviet system. He saw a bunch of potential candidates, but none of them had a clue about the restaurant world. Then, he met Alex Antoniadi.

I spoke with Antoniadi with the help of a translator. He told me that he got started in the hospitality business in the early 1970s, shortly after moving to Moscow from the Soviet republic of Georgia. He worked his way up from the bottom, and soon was running a hip place near the Kremlin. “It was a popular restaurant,” he said. “The grandson of Khrushchev, the grandsons of [Soviet leader Leonid] Brezhnev, his daughters—all of them came.”

Antoniadi started managing more places, and developed a knack for navigating the Soviet bureaucracy. He was a savvy operator—someone who knew how to get things done unofficially. When I asked if he had to pay bribes, he said, “Yes—everything happened.”

Antoniadi was initially skeptical about how these new joint ventures with Western companies would actually work. But the world was changing very quickly. In November 1989, the Berlin Wall came crashing down, and Antoniadi knew that all throughout the Eastern Bloc, business as usual was no longer a viable option. “The country couldn’t rely on its former successes,” he said. “I understood that the West should help the Soviet Union, with new technologies, new ways to run a business, new financial institutions. Everything had to change.”

Antoniadi agreed to join the Pizza Hut joint venture. And his partnership with Rafalat started to pay dividends right away. They convinced the city of Moscow that Pizza Hut should be downtown, not in the forest. They’d actually get locations for two restaurants: one on bustling Kutuzovsky Prospekt and the other on the main road leading to Red Square.

Turning those spaces into Pizza Huts would take a huge amount of labor and building materials. When the construction workers would run out of supplies, they would ask Rafalat for money to buy … vodka. With the alcohol in hand, they would hang out on the side of a main highway. “If they saw a truck with cement or something coming, they would just wave a couple of bottles of vodka and the guys would stop and would arrive at our restaurant,” Rafalat said.

This vodka-for-cement plan worked sometimes, but it wasn’t reliable. Rafalat and Antoniadi needed to move more quickly. So, they decided to buy all their materials—everything from nails and screws to knives and forks—outside of Russia, at an extraordinary price.

It cost them $3 million to build the two Pizza Huts—about eight times the usual cost. Rafalat could swallow that expense. The bigger issue was the currency itself. In Moscow, he was swimming in Soviet rubles, which had almost no value overseas. Pizza Hut’s suppliers wanted dollars, which were basically illegal in the USSR.

Rafalat needed to hack the system—to find some sneaky way to turn rubles into dollars.

Thankfully, his bosses had solved this exact problem. In 1990, PepsiCo and the USSR had made a deal to swap cola for Soviet vodka and ships. To pay for the Pizza Huts, Rafalat’s corporate allies acquired more submarines and tankers, and this time sold them for American cash. “Suddenly I’m being told that we have millions of dollars that have arrived on our accounts,” Rafalat said.

If you counted up all of the submarines and ships that PepsiCo bought and sold around this time, they technically managed the world’s seventh-largest navy. Thanks to this maritime strategy, the Pizza Hut cash-flow problem was solved. And for Rafalat and Antoniadi, success was close enough to taste.

Pizza Hut was now on the verge of making history. But there was more than one restaurant chain in this race. And the pizza guys were going to finish in second place.

When the world’s largest McDonald’s flung open its doors in Pushkin Square in January 1990, the people of Moscow were ready. ABC News reported that “30,000 of them, twice what anyone expected, crammed through the golden arches before the day was done.” One customer, a Canadian TV crew reported, said that “she doesn’t know what she just ate. But she says it was unusual and delicious.”

McDonald’s, not Pizza Hut, had made history, becoming the first U.S. restaurant chain in the USSR. But the truth was, these two American exports were doing very different things. McDonald’s was selling Big Macs and fries. Pizza Hut wanted to sell a whole American lifestyle. Because for most people in the USSR, dining out wasn’t a thing.

“It was sort of a closed society in Moscow,” Antoniadi said. “Workers couldn’t afford to go to cafés and restaurants because of the prices. The elites did go, the ones that had money.”

Pizza Hut was importing something totally new: a casual, sit-down restaurant that served a quality meal for a reasonable price. There were loads of people in Moscow hungry for that kind of experience. Boris Paikin ran a small restaurant in downtown Moscow, and he saw these new Western businesses as powerful symbols of political and social change. “We were happy because a couple of my friends also [were managers] of McDonald’s,” Paikin said. “They had the possibility to see another life.”

Paikin was one of Pizza Hut’s first big hires. He was brought on as a manager, and by Soviet standards he got paid very well. “My salary was $5,000,” he said. “It was like a millionaire in those times.”

To fill out the rest of the staff, Pizza Hut placed an ad in the Moscow Communist Youth newspaper. It said, “We invite young people, 18 to 25 years old, who are ready to work with enthusiasm.”

Applications poured in right away, many from very highly educated people. Pizza Hut would hire 300 all told. Every one of the cashiers had a banking degree, and some of the kitchen workers had engineering Ph.D.s. But almost no one had experience with Western restaurant service. So, as opening day drew closer, Pizza Hut flew in its best trainers from all over the world. One of them was Rita Skimehorn, the woman from Mascoutah, Illinois, who thought she was being pranked when Pizza Hut HR told her to pack her bags for the USSR.

Once the shock wore off, Skimehorn was excited to go to Moscow—the furthest she’d traveled before was Alabama. Pizza Hut headquarters provided her with a Russian language guide, a camera, and a journal. Her first surprise came when she got off the plane and saw armed men patrolling the airport. But a lot of what she experienced in Moscow felt familiar, including her very modest hotel. “It reminded me of band camp in the seventh grade,” she told me years later. “We called it the Moscow Country Club.”

At night, she slept on a pullout couch. During the day, she teamed up with trainers from Canada, Egypt, and Australia. Their job was to teach the new Russian employees the Pizza Hut way: greeting every customer at the door, using a tray to carry drinks and plates, and serving the first slice of pizza to each guest.

Preparing the staff was just one part of their job. They also needed to prepare the pizza. The biggest challenge was finding suppliers for the toppings, due to shortages and the Soviet bureaucracy. “The Pizza Hut warehouse is now filled with imported cheese,” ABC News reported in 1990. “When they tried to buy cheese locally, state-run cheese makers said no, because this year’s state-set production quota had already been filled.”

The first pizza that came out of the oven was supposed to be a classic Pizza Hut Supreme, but they couldn’t source any mushrooms. It did have cheese, though, and pepperoni, sausage, hamburger, onion, and green peppers. “They cut it all into little bite-sized pieces. And we all got to take a bite of the very first pizza made in Russia,” Skimehorn said.

On opening day, Sept. 11, 1990, crowds of Muscovites gathered outside Pizza Hut waving tiny white flags—souvenirs decorated with the chain’s red roof logo, the Stars and Stripes, and the hammer and sickle. It felt like a national holiday. And at noon, the celebration officially began.

“There were a shitload of people there,” Rafalat said. The line was “hundreds of meters, 150 meters. And there were policemen there to patrol it.”

Pizza Hut was so popular on opening day that the doors had to be locked in between seatings, with customers let in and out a few at a time. Once they did get inside, the main Moscow restaurant felt like pretty much every other Pizza Hut, complete with brass trim and fake tropical plants.

“Everything was the highest standard,” Antoniadi said. “All the floors were covered with beautiful carpeting. There were comfortable sofas; red, soft beautiful chairs. People came in and looked around, and it surprised them.”

One customer said the restaurant looked “like a museum.” Another called it “a piece of America.” Pizza Hut, though, did make one concession to local taste: a seafood special pie. “It had sardines, I believe, anchovy, tuna, and prawns on it,” Skimehorn said. Her review: “It was … OK.”

The pizza, seafood and otherwise, got all the headlines, but it wasn’t the biggest drawing card. The salad bar, a Pizza Hut staple around the world, was a totally new concept in the Soviet Union. And in the face of continuous shortages, the bounty of fresh produce seemed too good to be true. Paikin remembered incredulous customers asking the waitstaff if they could really just help themselves, and not quite believing it when they heard, “Yes, you can get whatever you want.”

The salad bar wasn’t identical to what you’d find in an American Pizza Hut. There was cabbage instead of lettuce, and the buffet in Moscow wasn’t all-you-can-eat. Although customers couldn’t go back for seconds, they did come up with an ingenious workaround—a way to fill their salad bowls beyond the rim. The key was using breadsticks as edible support columns to make the walls of the bowl taller. Paikin told me that breadstick trick allowed hungry Moscow diners to eat twice as much salad for the same price.

The Soviets clearly wanted what Pizza Hut was dishing up. After opening day, it was hard not to feel optimistic about the future of the business. But just a few days later, Soviet officials showed up at the main restaurant near Red Square. They were there to deliver an alarming message: Pizza Hut was getting shut down.

In his 20 years working in Soviet restaurants, Alex Antoniadi had developed a routine with the government health inspectors. When they showed up, he’d give them a little something to make them go away. Usually, that’s all it took. The inspectors didn’t actually want to inspect anything. “Everything was worked out in advance. They would come, inspect the place, take, and leave. That’s it,” Antoniadi said.

That’s how it went in the old Soviet Union. But Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms were supposed to signal the start of a new era. So this time, when the health inspectors showed up at Pizza Hut, Antoniadi didn’t offer them any bribes. Instead, he told them to do their jobs. “I was sick and tired of all of them,” he said. “The system had changed, and they had to change too.”

It turned out the inspectors weren’t looking to change. When Antoniadi failed to give them anything, they declared that this spotless Pizza Hut was unsanitary. That was it: The restaurants got shut down.

It had taken an enormous international effort for Pizza Hut to make it to the USSR. Now, just like that, some corrupt officials had put the entire project in danger. But Antoniadi refused to be intimidated. He reopened the restaurant, against their orders. He was defying the inspectors’ authority—and risking imprisonment.

“Three days later, I was invited to the district prosecutor’s office,” he said. “I came there and the officer told me: ‘You violated that law, you’re incriminated with such-and-such criminal article, and you can face one to three years in jail.’ ”

Antoniadi had only one move left: He pleaded with one of the officers to come with him to Pizza Hut, for a personal tour. “I convinced him to come,” he said, “and I showed him everything: the storage, the production facilities. He was stunned when he saw all of it.”

A week later, Antoniadi received a notice: The case against him had been dropped. But after that whole ordeal, he didn’t want any more trouble. From then on, whenever the inspectors came, he immediately handed them four boxes of pizza. He never failed inspection again.

There were other challenges. Pizza Hut had split its main restaurant on Kutuzovsky Prospekt into two sides. One of them, for international customers, accepted dollars. The other, for Muscovites, only took rubles. “There was a lot more traffic on the ruble side,” Rafalat said. “When the ruble customers get in, I find out it’s about the only place in town where beer is sold freely, and available. Secondly, they all light up their cigarettes and create a fog that sets off all the fire alarms.”

Rafalat decided to ban beer and smoking on the ruble side. With that, Pizza Hut became more of a family restaurant—and the lines outside got a bit shorter.

Even so, the two restaurants in Moscow served as many customers as 10 American Pizza Huts combined. In the Western media, this wasn’t just celebrated as a corporate success story. The Pizza Huts were changing lives.

In 1990, the NBC Nightly News featured a couple named Dimitri and Nadia. He worked at Pizza Hut and she was a cashier at McDonald’s, and they were both extremely happy with their new lifestyles and salaries. The story’s conclusion: “Promotion. Profit. Ideas so alien to most Soviets are now a way of life for Dimitri and Nadia, a couple of fast-food kids with big dreams for the future.”

Those fast-food kids were becoming Americanized, in all kinds of ways. That seafood pizza with tuna and prawns wasn’t a huge seller, it turned out. Soviet customers wanted pepperoni.

Now that everything was humming in Moscow, Pizza Hut’s international trainers could head back home. When Rita Skimehorn and the rest of the crew left the USSR at the end of September 1990, they gave their trainees a gift: a song they’d written to celebrate Pizza Hut’s arrival in Moscow. “Now, all of you take heed to what we tell you,” the lyrics went. “The future of success is in your hands. So remember all the things that we have taught you and you’ll make the greatest pizza in the land.” The ballad ended with a promise for the future: “You all worked very hard. You’re held in high regard. You’re the pride of the USSR.”

Going into 1991, the Moscow Pizza Huts were still drawing big crowds. But the country itself was struggling. Food and medicine were scarce. Inflation soared. Pizza Hut was forced to raise its prices by 40 percent.

“We knew at some stage or other this whole pack of cards on the Soviet system was going to collapse,” Andy Rafalat told me, reflecting. “The only question was, would this experiment ride through it or would we close up shop?”

The cards started to collapse in the summer of 1991. By this point, Rafalat had moved away from Moscow, leaving the operation of both Pizza Huts to his partner, Alex Antoniadi. But Rafalat would still pop back over every few months to check in. On the morning of Aug. 19, he was about to board a plane to the USSR when he got a phone call from Antoniadi with some urgent news: There were tanks parked outside one of their restaurants.

That show of military power was coming from communist hard-liners inside the Soviet Union. It was a coup—an attempt to oust the country’s reformist leaders. And it looked like they’d get their way.

Gorbachev, who was on vacation, was placed under house arrest at his dacha. The coup’s leaders also wanted to arrest Boris Yeltsin, the new, progressive leader of Soviet Russia. But Yeltsin managed to take refuge inside the parliament building in Moscow. In the streets, his supporters cheered him on. An encouraged Yeltsin went outside, stood on a tank, and called on the Soviet people to make their voices heard.

Antoniadi kept Pizza Hut closed and bunkered down in the restaurant for three days. Holed up just feet away from all the tanks, he decided to seize the moment. He sent for the restaurant’s staff and got the ovens back up and running. “We prepared boxes of pizza—50 to 60, I don’t remember how many exactly,” he said. “Then I called for a manager in a Pizza Hut uniform.”

In those days, Pizza Hut was not typically a delivery chain. But this was a special occasion. The Moscow crew shipped off all those pizzas and 20 cases of Pepsi to the parliament building, to fortify Yeltsin and his supporters against the coup. Antoniadi had inserted Pizza Hut into a political crisis. And thanks to wall-to-wall coverage on CNN, everyone around the world knew about it.

“And just like that, all of America, the whole world saw ads: Pizza Hut helped the government of Russia,” Antoniadi said.

He had bet on the winning side: The coup lasted just a few days, and Gorbachev regained his position as head of the USSR. But ultimately, he lost much of his power and influence to the guy who got all that pizza: Yeltsin, the public face of the anti-coup resistance. Just four months later, Gorbachev stepped down.

The next day, Dec. 26, 1991, the Soviet Union officially dissolved. In an instant, the Soviet Union became 15 independent nations. In the years that followed, the economy collapsed in those post-Soviet states and political instability became the rule. And it wasn’t long before tanks rolled in front of the Moscow Pizza Huts again. “That’s when I understood that it would last forever,” said Antoniadi.

This was the chaos that Gorbachev had left behind. His economic reform plan, perestroika, had opened up the USSR, but also destabilized it. In the end, maybe it was all too much, too quickly.

For Pizza Hut’s owner PepsiCo, the fall of the Soviet Union had made everything more complicated. Remember all those Soviet ships that Pepsi was buying and selling? That fleet now belonged to the newly independent Ukraine, and the Ukrainian government wanted in on the deal. And in Russia, the promise of a new era of international collaboration started to evaporate. “Bear in mind, this is when mafia was starting to take shape in Moscow,” Rafalat told me.

By the mid-1990s, Rafalat was mostly watching from afar. But he saw enough to realize that the project he’d helped build was teetering. “My positive picture was always: The people are great, the system sucks, basically,” he said.

The local manager, Boris Paikin, stayed at Pizza Hut and tried to hold it all together. But one day, around 1998, someone walked in and demanded money. “You must pay rent for me because the building belongs to me. I bought it,” Paikin remembered the man saying.

The City of Moscow had owned the buildings, and never charged the Pizza Huts rent. That had apparently changed, without any warning. Paikin had hired the enthusiastic young Russians who were desperate to work at an American restaurant. He’d seen customers build mega salad bowls out of breadsticks. And now, he watched both of the Moscow Pizza Huts shut down, unceremoniously. “That’s it,” he said. “Nobody can do nothing.”

Paikin went on to run a Great Canadian Bagel franchise in Moscow. But his heart remained with Pizza Hut. When we spoke on Zoom, he showed me a corporate award he’d won back in the ’90s: a silver plaque with an image of a Pizza Hut etched in the center.

Antoniadi told me that he has no regrets about his experience. He’d joined up with Pizza Hut because he wanted the Soviet Union to modernize and embrace the rest of the world. Now, he’s living in Spain, and when he looks back at the Gorbachev era, he sees an enormous missed opportunity. “Nobody in Russia knew how to do business before,” he said. “All of us had our guesses, but they showed us that it can be done. Now, it’s changed for the worse.”

After the Soviet Union ceased to exist, Gorbachev himself didn’t disappear right away. In 1997, he defended his legacy in one of the strangest ways possible: He made a Pizza Hut commercial.

That ad opens with Gorbachev standing beside his granddaughter. They’re walking through the snow in Moscow, with St. Basil’s Cathedral as the backdrop. After a few moments, they step out of the street, and into the warm embrace of a Pizza Hut.

“It’s Gorbachev!” says a young man. His father growls, “Because of him we have economic confusion.” The son retorts: “Because of him, we have opportunity!” They argue back and forth until the matriarch of the family says her piece: “Because of him we have many things—like Pizza Hut!”

Everyone in the restaurant rises from their seats, their slices in hand, to salute the former Soviet leader, and Gorbachev beams in appreciation. The closing line: “Sometimes nothing brings people together like a nice hot pizza from Pizza Hut.”

For Gorbachev and Pizza Hut, that commercial was a fantasy. The ad didn’t air in Russia, where the architect of perestroika was widely hated. And the Pizza Huts themselves wouldn’t even last a decade.

Pizza Hut’s parent company, which got spun off as Yum! Brands in 1997, did make another run at the Russian market. This time, most of its restaurants were KFCs. But after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Yum! announced it was leaving Russia entirely.

American casual dining ultimately didn’t alter the course of history—it succumbed to it. But the people who worked and ate at the Moscow Pizza Huts still remember the pepperoni and the red-checkered tablecloths and what they represented: In Russia, change wasn’t always an empty promise. Sometimes, if you waited in line, you could grab a slice of it.