FOSTER … Russia’s economic thuggery hits McDonald’s.

The prospect of Vladimir Putin sending troops into Eastern Ukraine will inevitably take priority in the news this week over the case brought by Russian “food safety” authorities against McDonald’s, home of the “Beeg Mak.” While “Gentle Commerce” is a pacifier, and trading is always better than raiding, actual violence will always grab the headlines over mere bureaucratic thuggery. And how could accusations of e-coli in burgers compete for our interest with the death of 298 innocent airline passengers, or with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border for possible “humanitarian intervention?”

As far as the commercial side of the Ukrainian crisis grabs the headlines, it is all about tit for tat sanctions and import bans. Nevertheless, McDonald’s Russian operation — and the fact that it has been singled out by the state — indicate the chain’s significance in post-Soviet society.

Moscow McDonald’s is important to me personally not merely because I was the only Western journalist present for its first anniversary in 1991 (political turmoil had caused the cancellation of its birthday celebrations, but I turned up anyway). My experience during that two weeks in Moscow became one of the inspirations for a book that took me more than 20 years to write, and which I published this year: Why We bite the Invisible Hand: The Psychology of Anti-Capitalism.

Moscow McDonald’s represented a business marvel because it managed to manufacture founder Ray Kroc’s core values of “quality, service, cleanliness and value” out of the dross of the collapsing command economy’s congenital ineptitude.

It offered what post-Soviet society so desperately needed, not just food (Communism had guaranteed that there would never be enough of that), but a model of profit-motivated cooperative business enterprise. The young Russians who worked there were wildly enthusiastic about the place. It put the lie to the demonic image of capitalism that had loomed over the Russian landscape (and indeed that of the West too) for 70 years.

The latest charges about food quality are richly ironic because one of McDonald’s many contributions to Russia was to introduce standards of hygiene that had been almost totally absent under Communism, whatever the Five Year Plan said.

Equally fascinating in 1991 was how operating in Moscow brought home to McDonald’s Western employees everything they had taken for granted about operating in the relative

Just imagine, Vladimir Putin promoting fast food quality!

freedom of the West. They were, as was I, suddenly in a unique position to grasp the astonishing coordinating mechanism of

Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, which is based on market prices that promote and reward ingenuity, innovation, productive effort and the most efficient utilization of resources.

In the West, if a company like McDonald’s needed supplies, it just specified its wants and put the job out to tender. Suddenly, its Moscow managers found themselves operating in an environment where the Invisible Hand had been shackled, and personal initiative had been a crime, since the 1920s.

That in turn highlighted a more fundamental problem with capitalism. You only appreciate it when it isn’t there. When it is, you are inclined to take it entirely for granted. More than that, you are inclined to contribute to relentless criticism of it, criticism that is encouraged by governments of all stripes, because alleged capitalist shortcomings are the rationale for government expansion.

Fast food is hardly strategic to Vladimir Putin, but McDonald’s is such an obvious iconic symbol that it has from the first

been as hated by nationalist politicians as it has been enthusiastically received by Russian consumers (the chain now has around 400 outlets behind the former Iron Curtain).

When President Putin annexed Crimea earlier this year, McDonald’s was forced — temporarily, it said — to close three outlets there. Due to the prevailing paranoid style of Russian politics, and its difficulty in grasping the benefit — indeed the necessity — of separating business and the state to promote prosperity (the central message of the great Eighteenth Century economist Adam Smith, with whom the Invisible Hand is most associated), the chain’s action was treated as an affront

to Mother Russia.

Ultra-nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky — a clown as dangerous to Russian prosperity as Ronald McDonald was seen to be by Russian autocracy — called for a boycott. President Putin himself stepped into the fray, suggesting that what Russia needed was its own fast food chain that would,

according to press reports, “be based on different types of traditional Russian cuisine and compete in quality standards with restaurant chains such as McDonald’s.”

That last part was recognition that at least part of Ray Kroc’s vision had penetrated the Kremlin. Just imagine, Vladimir Putin promoting fast food quality!

Those Crimean closures in April allegedly “opened the market” to the Russian chain Rusburger, whose trademark offering is the Czar cheeseburger. Somehow that title seems a little more freighted than, say, Burger King. Which in turn reminds us that apart from political risk, the other constant challenges

to McDonald’s are those of competition and maintaining the quality and efficiency of its operations.

Last Friday the company announced disappointing results, partly due to challenges from rivals such as Burger King in the U.S., but also due to a meat supply scandal in China, another Communist country struggling to adopt capitalist standards.

Whatever the company’s success in coping with political risks and business challenges, the one thing I clearly learned in Moscow 23 years ago was that McDonald’s really represents much more than a hamburger.