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.

This story was adapted from an episode of the One Year podcast. Evan Chung and Kelly Jones were the lead producers. There was additional production from Olivia Briley. Listen to the full version:

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........

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