WFAA legend reflects on his documentary about the Soviet Union

DALLAS – The Russian invasion of Ukraine will be one year old on Feb. 24, and President Joe Biden acknowledged the ongoing struggle with his unannounced visit to Ukraine this week.

The war is devastating the same region and the people who have retired, WFAA legend Byron Harris documented 3 decades ago.

“I just wanted to show people what Russia was like,” says Harris. “An enemy with whom we have lived in peace for decades.”

Harris said that for his generation, the Cold War was a constant threat that dictated much of what the United States did at the time. After studying Russian in high school, he traveled to the country several times, including to shoot the documentary Faces of Perestroika, which chronicles the lives of people in the Soviet Union as their government began to crumble.

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“Russians are people like everyone else. They have children. They love each other. They hate each other.”

“Perestroika” means “restructuring” in Russian, and when communism fell, there were attempts and hopes that their country’s government could be transformed into a Western capitalist democracy like the United States.

In a documentary shown at WFAA in the early 1990s, Harris visits the very first McDonald’s to open in Russia. The common everyday product of American life meant much more in a country where markets were often empty, supply chains were broken, and people stood in long lines for food.

“(McDonald’s) symbolized the affordability of consumer goods,” Harris said.

Indeed, McDonald’s served 45,000 meals a day, making it the world’s busiest restaurant at the time.

But hopes for a brighter, more pro-Western future did not materialize as many of the people Harris spoke to had hoped.

“They never made it,” Harris said. “Economically they couldn’t compete with the United States.”

And as conflict and infighting once again sweep the region, Harris looks back on his trips to Russia and realizes that this is a lesson for all countries, including ours.

“I realized how difficult it is to be a democracy,” he said.

After the fall of communism, Americans expected capitalism to change Russia and democracy to quickly reign, Harris said.

But that didn’t happen, and Harris said it was a history lesson.

“Democracy is very fragile, very difficult to establish and very difficult to maintain, which is what we are seeing right now.”