In 1989 PepsiCo bartered for 17 Soviet submarines.

1989

The USSR paid for Pepsi syrup with Stolichnaya vodka, and when vodka sales fell, with decommissioned vessels — submarines, a cruiser, a frigate and a destroyer — for PepsiCo to resell.

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The event

• Perestroika1985–1991 · Moscow. In March 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party and launched perestroika and glasnost. The reforms eased censorship and introduced contested elections and market elements, amid a deepening economic crisis.

20th century

More amazing facts

• 1989 In 1989, the year Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web, the golden toad was seen for the last time in Costa Rica's forests.
• 1990 · 1993 Hubble's mirror was ground wrong by 2.2 micrometres, dozens of times thinner than a hair.
• 1991 The world's first webcam watched a coffee pot. In 1991 Cambridge University computer scientists pointed a camera at their coffee machine so colleagues would not make a wasted trip to an empty pot.
• 1991 A single eruption cooled the whole planet.
• 1991 · 1992 Sergei Krikalev left Earth from the USSR and came back to Russia.
• 1992 The first text message ever sent was a Christmas greeting.

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