Pepsi, the juice company, once had the sixth largest military in the world.
It all started in 1959, when then United States (U.S.) President Dwight Eisenhower decided to send a bunch of U.S. cultural icons to the Soviet Union as part of a goodwill tour.
Among them was the vice president of Pepsi, Donald Kendall, who had a brilliant idea: why not introduce the Soviets to the sweet taste of capitalism by giving them a few free samples of Pepsi?
He managed to get permission from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to set up a Pepsi stand at an exhibition in Moscow. There he offered Khrushchev a glass of Pepsi, and the Soviet leader liked it so much that he asked for another.
Kendall took a photo of Khrushchev drinking Pepsi, which became a sensation in the U.S. media. That photo also helped Kendall secure an agreement with the Soviets to sell Pepsi in their country.
But there was a problem: the Soviet ruble was not convertible into any other currency, so Pepsi could not be paid in cash.
Instead, they agreed to trade Pepsi syrup for Soviet vodka, which they could then sell in the U.S. and other markets. This arrangement worked well for both parties for a while, until Pepsi’s popularity in the Soviet Union grew so much that they needed more syrup than the vodka could cover.
So in 1989, Kendall came up with another solution: instead of vodka, Pepsi would accept Soviet warships as payment. Yes, you read that right, naval warships armed with cannons and missiles.
