When Pepsi Owned a Military Fleet

Back in the late 1980s, the Soviet Union loved Pepsi, but their domestic currency, the ruble, couldn't be spent outside the country. To keep the soda flowing into Russia, the Kremlin had to get creative with bartering. In 1989, they signed an extraordinary deal trading a massive fleet of obsolete military vessels—including seventeen submarines, a cruiser, a frigate, and a destroyer—just to secure their next shipment of Pepsi concentrate. For a brief, bizarre window of time, a corporate soft drink company possessed a larger naval force than most sovereign nations on the planet, before they ultimately sold the entire fleet to a Norwegian shipyard to be melted down into scrap metal. #businesshistory #coldwar #ussr #pepsi #bizarrehistory