![]() ![]() The rusting submarines were one way in which Soviet leaders and Western corporations could establish world peace and a new, post-communist prosperity led by business.Īmerican leaders hoped that exposure to Western business could transform the Soviet Union into a country just like theirs. It’s from the brief moment right before, when the Soviet Union looked likely to survive even though the Cold War had ended. ![]() The Pepsi navy isn’t a story from the era of Soviet collapse. PepsiCo acquired the rusting fleet as part of a multibillion-dollar bet on the long-term stability of the Soviet Union, an enormous market that had little to trade immediately besides raw material and the promise of future profits. The multinational firm and the country founded by Vladimir Lenin were business partners, and in 1989 Pepsi executives were bullish on Soviet prospects. The Pepsi navy is sometimes portrayed as an embarrassment for the USSR. Most interpretations of the story get its meaning wrong, too. PepsiCo was more a middleman than a maritime power. What’s more, the ships themselves were immediately turned over to a Norwegian shipyard to be scrapped. The Pepsi navy no more conferred military power than a rusting Model T could have been a Formula 1 contender. What PepsiCo acquired were small, old, obsolete, unseaworthy vessels. Yet in any real sense the story is false. According to an analysis of Jane’s Fighting Ships 1989-90, a country operating a squadron of 17 submarines would have tied with India for possessing the seventh-largest fleet of attack submarines. In recent years, an internet legend has grown up around this deal, which holds that Pepsi briefly possessed the sixth-largest fleet in the world. In 1989, PepsiCo Inc., the maker of Pepsi, acquired 17 submarines, a cruiser, a frigate, and a destroyer from the Soviet Union.
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