Ukraine war: Pepsi penetrated the Iron Curtain five decades ago - but has now joined the exodus from Russia

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With Heineken and L’Oreal announcing the effective closure of their Russian operations today, the number of Western companies shunning the country continues to grow.

Unilever – the Magnum, Domestos and Dove consumer goods titan – has also called a halt on exports to the country.

The announcements in Europe came on the back of last night’s news that a host of big US names, including McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Yum Brands – the owner of KFC and Pizza Hut – and PepsiCo, are shutting up shop in Russia too.

Of these, perhaps the most symbolic of these is PepsiCo, for it was the very first Western brand to be produced and sold in the old Soviet Union.

The story of how Pepsi penetrated the Iron Curtain is fascinating and a tribute to the tenacity of Donald Kendall, a former bomber pilot in the US Navy, whose career at the company took him from a production line on a bottling plant just outside New York, and later driving a delivery truck, all the way to the boardroom.

It all started on 24 July 1959 at an American National Exhibition at Moscow’s Sokolniki Park that had been organised at the behest of the then president, Dwight Eisenhower, to showcase the attraction of American products.

Mr Kendall was there as director of Pepsi’s international operations.

Leading the push and being hosted by the then Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was the then vice president, Richard Nixon, an old friend of Mr Kendall.

Mr Kendall recalled to the New York Times in 1999: “I went to Nixon the night before, at the embassy, and told him I was in a lot of trouble at home because people thought I was wasting Pepsi’s money coming to a communist country.