Pizzastroika
November 20, 2025 at 01:23AMMy favorite detail from Kelly Jones and Josh Levin’s fascinating history of the Soviet Union’s first Pizza Hut arrives in the middle. Faced with urgent construction costs and unable to pay in anything but rubles, PepsiCo (which owned Pizza Hut at the time) got into the watercraft business to raise some American dollars. “If you counted up all of the submarines and ships that PepsiCo bought and sold around this time,” Jones and Levin write, “they technically managed the world’s seventh-largest navy.” It’s a salty, juicy morsel—a slice of pepperoni right at the center of the pie, surrounded by other tasty bits in this strange history.
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.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/11/19/moscow-pizza-hut-ussr/
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