"Putin awards medal to man who brought Pepsi to Soviet Union
Associated Press
Jun. 21, 2004 12:15 PM
MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin on Monday gave a medal to retired Pepsico chief Donald Kendall, who made Pepsi-Cola the first American consumer product to be manufactured in the Soviet Union.
"We consider you a great friend of our country, a man who well knows the culture of Russia and loves it," Putin said at a ceremony presenting Kendall with the Order of Friendship medal, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency.
The 1972 agreement to manufacture Pepsi in the Soviet Union, worked out when Kendall, now 83, was at the company's helm, was seen as a breakthrough in U.S.-Soviet commercial relations." :p
Just to add that Pepsi-Cola first appeared in the USSR in 1959 at the first American National Exhibition in Moscow.
In 1971, Kendall met with the head of the Soviet government, Aleksei Kossygin, in Moscow. They started negotiations on cooperation.
The next year, Pepsi-Cola became the first Western product on sale in the USSR. In exchange, Pepsico received exclusive rights to import and distribute the Soviet vodka Stolichnaya in the United States. The first plant to produce Pepsi-Cola in the USSR was opened in Novorossiisk in 1974.
That arrangement was arrived at to get around the currency-exchange problem between dollars and rubles, right? (dollars were no good in the USSR, and rubles were no good in the USA--so goods were exchanged instead)
The finnish newspaper "Hufvudstadsbladet" (which translates as "The Newspaper of the capital") reports today that the Chief Mayor of Helsinki has been awarded the russian Order of Friendship:
MOSCOW
The President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, has awarded the Chief Mayor of Helsinki with the Order of Friendship of the Russian Federation. The news agency ITAR-TASS reports that the awarding was announced by the press office of the Kremlin this Monday. Chief Mayor Eva-Riitta Siitonen recieved the award for "having enhanced and strengthened the relations between Russian and Finland", according to ITAR-TASS. (FNB)
(My translation, published in swedish language.)
I don't know how often finnish officials are awarded Russian awards, I know that at least president Kekkonen recieved the Order of Lenin during the seventies from Brezhnev.
04-02-2005, 09:49 PM (This post was last modified: 01-22-2014, 07:16 PM by CtahhR.)
Tretov Wrote:I don't know how often finnish officials are awarded Russian awards, I know that at least president Kekkonen recieved the Order of Lenin during the seventies from Brezhnev.
I think that there are not many nowadays Russian awards awarded to Finland.
From Soviet awards Order of Lenin is awarded, as you mentioned, to president Urho Kekkonen but not in seventies. It was in 1964. And then there is president J.K. Paasikivi, Order of Lenin awarded in 1954.
There are also others, but I can't remember them directly.
Also Taisto Sinisalo, the communist politician, got Order of Lenin in August 1970.
Here is a picture where you can see Kekkonen wearing his order of Lenin.
This is the first and only picture so far where I have seen any Finnish citizen actually wearing the Order of Lenin.
The picture is taken in Moscow November 1980.
The marshal who appears in the first picture is Ustinov?
There's nothing in the streets
Looks any different to me
And the slogans are replaced, by-the-bye
And the parting on the left
Are now parting on the right
And the beards have all grown longer overnight The Who, Won't get fooled again
U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Steven Smith and U.S. Air Force Maj. Patrick Poon were presented the Order of Friendship Medal by Russian Ambassador Yuri Ushakov at the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C. yesterday. The Order of Friendship Medal is the highest honor awarded to non-Russian-citizens. They were recognized for their actions associated with the rescue of the Russian submarine crew on Aug. 7, 2005.
WASHINGTON (NNS) -- Underneath a portrait of Czar Peter the Great, the Russian Ambassador to the United States presented two U.S. officers with the Order of Friendship for their parts in rescuing submariners trapped underwater off the Kamchatka peninsula in August.
Ambassador Yuri V. Ushakov presented the awards, the highest honor to non-Russian citizens, to Air Force Maj. Patrick Poon and Navy Lt. Cmdr. Steve Smith at the Russian Embassy here. Both men said it was due to the combined efforts of all on the team that seven Russian submariners survived their Priz AS-28 deep submergence submarine ordeal.
Joint Chiefs Chairman Marine Gen. Peter Pace and Undersecretary of State Robert Joseph attended the ceremony.
Aug. 5, 2005, the 45-foot long craft became entangled in discarded fishing nets in Russian Far East waters. The disabled submarine was stuck at 600 feet, and time was a crucial factor in rescuing the crew.
"I got the call at 8 a.m. and by 1 p.m. I was on a plane heading toward Kamchatka," said Poon, commander of Detachment 1, 36th Contingency Response Group, at Yokota Air Base, Japan.
