When Pepsi Had a Navy

In 1989, just before the collapse of the USSR, the Pepsi Company cut a deal with Soviet Premiere Mikhail Gorbachev that left it with a fleet of Russian military ships, making PepsiCo temporarily the sixth-largest Navy in the world. Against his company’s objections, Kendall, who had ambitious plans to expand Pepsi’s overseas markets, had agreed to sponsor a booth at the Exhibition, where he provided Pepsi-Cola that had been bottled both with American water and with local Russian. As part of his détente policy to ease Cold War tensions, Nixon was seeking to expand commercial relations with the USSR, and Kendall, as part of his plans to take on the Coca-Cola Company, viewed the Soviet Union as a vast new market.

Source: lflank.wordpress.com