WFAA legend reflects on his Soviet Union documentary

DALLAS — The Russian invasion of Ukraine will reach the one-year mark on February 24 and President Joe Biden acknowledged the on-going struggle with his unannounced visit to Ukraine this week.

War is devastating the same region and people who retired WFAA legend Byron Harris documented 3 decades earlier.

“I just wanted to show people what Russia was like,” says Harris. “The enemy we lived with in the world for decades.”

For his generation, Harris said the Cold War was an ever-present threat that dictated much of what the United States did during the era. Having studied the Russian language in high school, he made several visits to the country including a trip to produce a documentary called “The Faces of Perestroika,” a look at life for people in Soviet Union as their government began to crumble.

Watch the full documentary:

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

“Perestroika” means “restructuring” in Russian and as communism fell, there was an effort and hope their country’s government could be restructured into a western, capitalist democracy like the United States.

In the documentary that aired on WFAA in the early 1990s, Harris pays a visit to the very first McDonald’s to open in Russia. A common, everyday staple of American life meant so much more in a country where marketplaces were often bare, supply chains broken, and people waited in long lines for food.

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

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

But the hopes of a brighter, more westernized future were not realized the way many of those people Harris spoke to hoped.

“They never achieved it,” Harris said. “Economically, they could not compete with the United States.”

And as conflict and struggle again grips the region, Harris looks back on his trips to Russia and knows there is a lesson for all countries, including ours.

“What I learned is how hard it is to be a democracy,” he said.

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

But it never happened and Harris said that is history’s lesson.

“Democracy is very fragile, very hard to establish and very hard to sustain which we now see happening here.”