The King of Vodka (35 page)

His passing, unlike those of his father and brothers, went almost unnoticed. It is unlikely that members of his family in Russia even heard about it. There was no mention of it in the news there, which was then dominated by Stalin's propaganda. Only Russians in France received word through a brief announcement that ran in the newspaper for émigrés. The end for Vladimir came like a whisper—without ceremony, without fanfare, without prestige. His simple grave in a Russian Orthodox cemetery in Nice was a communal one, its gravestone generic in its remembrances. It was a testament to how far Vladimir's life
had veered away from the once-mighty Smirnoff dynasty. He would not be buried with them and nothing would specifically identify his final resting place for nearly sixty years.

It was a sad, odd conclusion for a man who had lived such a loud and flamboyant life, but Vladimir, though he may not have known it, had come full circle. Just before his death, the son of an uneducated serf-turned-wealthy-capitalist had planted the seeds that would win his identity back. Because of Vladimir's perseverance, Pyotr Arsenievich Smirnov would get his legacy back, too. In one of Vladimir's last letters to Kunett, he unveiled his heartfelt emotion and genuine excitement at the prospect of keeping his father's handiwork alive. “Your business is dear to me,” he wrote, “because I see reconstruction of our old Smirnov company…I look at you with great hope. I am certain of your success.”

Vladimir could not have imagined how right he was.

S
uccess did not come swiftly. Kunett, a persistent salesman, promoted Smirnoff vodka every way he knew how. He oversaw the factory and its output, often wearing a smock to keep his suit from becoming soiled. The problem was, however, convincing Americans to forsake their favored beers, gins, and whiskeys for an unknown Russian alternative was a tougher sell than Kunett had imagined. In his first year in business, he sold just 1,200 cases, each case holding twelve bottles. By the fifth year, he increased sales to roughly 5,000 cases, which accounted for the total amount of vodka produced in America, but it was not nearly enough.
¹
By 1939 Kunett was on the brink of bankruptcy.

With little choice, he shopped the vodka brand around, hoping to find not only a buyer but also a partner. Kunett still believed that Smirnoff could win over Americans. He had few takers, though, until he approached John Martin, an affable, bespectacled Englishman running G. F. Heublein & Bros., a family-owned business in nearby Hartford,
Connecticut, that had started up as a producer of pre-mixed drinks. Due to the lingering effects of prohibition, Heublein was also struggling, relying on its one notable food product, A-1 steak sauce, for most of its revenue. Kunett proposed to sell his Smirnoff enterprise to Martin for $50,000, Martin recalled in a videotaped interview. Martin declined, though he was intrigued. He saw something promising and potentially profitable in a neutral-tasting spirit. Martin hammered away at Kunett's offer, agreeing to buy Kunett's equipment and the Smirnoff name for $14,000. He also made Kunett president of a newly formed Smirnoff subsidiary and gave him a 5 percent royalty on each case of vodka sold over the next decade.
²
Financial analysts and company insiders pronounced the purchase foolish, dubbing the agreement Martin's Folly.

Within two years, though, sales of Smirnoff vodka grew to more than 22,660 cases. South Carolina was an especially fruitful market, mainly because a distributor in Columbia came up with an ingenious, highly effective slogan: “Smirnoff White Whiskey—No Smell, No Taste.” The distributor was apparently inspired by the cap Heublein used on the first batches of Smirnoff vodka shipped to the state. It read “whiskey” because the company had none that read “vodka.”
³
When World War II arrived, the spirit's slow but steady climb stalled, as production of all alcohol was sharply curtailed and Martin went into the U.S. Army. It was not until about 1946 that Smirnoff vodka truly emerged from obscurity in America.

To hear Martin tell it, he and his old friend Jack Morgan can take much of the credit. Morgan was the owner of the Cock 'n Bull restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, a favorite watering hole for Hollywood starlets. The two friends met one another in New York when Morgan was trying to unload cases of ginger beer and Martin was trying to jumpstart demand for vodka. According to Martin, they came up with a new cocktail that combined Smirnoff vodka with ginger beer and lime.
Served in an engraved copper mug, the drink was called the Moscow Mule. “I imagine [the name] had to do with the kick,” said Martin.
⁴

To promote the cocktail, Martin used a grassroots marketing strategy reminiscent of his vodka's namesake, Pyotr Arsenievich Smirnov, reportedly used in Russia decades earlier. According to company lore, Martin flew out to Los Angeles with one of the first models of the Polaroid camera. He went into bars and took two photographs of the bartender serving the Moscow Mule. He gave one photo to the bartender as a keepsake and took the other photo to a different bar, highlighting to the next bartender his competition's promotion of Smirnoff vodka and the new cocktail. The ploy worked. Sales of Smirnoff vodka took off, surpassing one million cases annually by 1955.
^*

Heublein then launched a series of aggressive campaigns showing American consumers how to mix vodka with a variety of liquids, from juices to teas to beef bouillon. Slick print advertisements over the next three decades were eye-catching, too, featuring a parade of such top stars as Woody Allen, Groucho Marx, Eva Gabor, Vincent Price, and Marcel Marceau. In 1962 Smirnoff also began a long, high-profile partnership with the James Bond movie franchise. In the first Bond movie,
Dr. No
, Sean Connery drinks a martini, famously “shaken not stirred,” made with Smirnoff vodka. Since then, bottles of Smirnoff have been featured in twenty-one of the twenty-two Bond films.

These marketing drives propelled Smirnoff from a little-known, foreign commodity into a powerhouse brand, eventually outselling all other premium spirits in America. Moreover, it helped vodka surpass gin and bourbon as the top-selling liquor in America, a position it has largely retained since the 1970s. “Americans, you know, were
un
informed about Russia, but they
were
mis
informed about vodka,” explained Kunett in a 1955 interview with
The New Yorker
.
⁵
Once Americans were reeducated, though, vodka's upward spiral continued almost without interruption. Today, more than 23 million nine-liter cases of Smirnoff vodka are sold each year in some 130 countries, and Smirnoff, almost 150 years after its founding, is the best-selling premium spirit in the world, outperforming second-place Bacardi by some 4 million cases.
⁶
As for the brand itself, a 2008 study estimated its worth at $4.7 billion.
⁷

 

A
S
S
MIRNOFF SURGED
in the West, the political realities of the Soviet state under Josef Stalin took their toll on the Smirnovs and other similarly situated families. The known fates of Smirnov's descendants differed, depending upon how closely tied they were to the fallen vodka empire and the former aristocracy. Arseniy, Pyotr Petrovich's son and the patriarch's grandson, for instance, suffered miserably. According to an interview in the early 1990s with his son, Pyotr,
^*
Arseniy worked as a street cleaner following the revolution. He was arrested and sentenced to death by firing squad in the 1920s because of his family's capitalist background, but Arseniy's wife saved him from execution by giving prison authorities everything the couple had. Still, life continued to be unkind to Arseniy; after divorcing his wife a few years later, he moved to the Volga River region and worked as a cemetery caretaker. He tried to flee Russia but was caught and beaten by soldiers with the Red Army. He later remarried and had three children. The family struggled to make ends meet. In 1943 Arseniy died, buried only in his underwear because his clothes had been sold for food.

Vladimir's son, Vladimir Vladimirovich, also faced difficulties under the Soviet regime. He continued the excellent
education his father had started, graduating with an advanced degree from the prestigious Plekhanov Institute. He spoke several languages, including English and French. Before World War II he worked as a senior instructor of physical metallurgy at Moscow's Machine Tools Institute. According to archival documents,
^*
Vladimir was arrested on September 10, 1941. The home he shared with his mother, Aleksandra, his wife, and two daughters was searched. Vladimir was accused and convicted of having “anti-Soviet attitudes and to have expressed dissatisfaction with the existing social order of the U.S.S.R.”
⁸
It was noted in his interrogation, during which he denied the charges against him, that he was from a family of first guild merchants.

For his crimes, Vladimir was sentenced to five years at a corrective labor camp. The hope of the authorities was that his anti-Soviet attitudes could be rehabilitated, and that later he might rejoin society in a more productive manner. His mother, Aleksandra, filed a protest, citing his innocence, her poor health and advancing age, and the livelihood of his daughters, as reasons to reopen his case. Justice was slow in coming, but after five years in prison and almost fifteen years after his arrest, Vladimir was cleared in 1956 of the charges against him for “lack of proof.”
⁹
He left Moscow and moved to Tver, where he taught at a local polytechnic institute. He died in 1969 at the age of sixty-seven, just eight years after his mother had died.

The other Aleksandra, Smirnov's rebellious daughter who had married Borisovskiy, died in 1950. At the time, she lived in poverty in a small dark room in a communal apartment.
¹⁰
Her son, Vadim, fared better as an accomplished musician who founded a Soviet school for viola players. As for Eugeniya, she spent the last years of her life in a modest nursing home in Nice. Three years before her death in 1961 at the age of ninety-
two, she signed over to her daughter, Tatiana, her claims to the Smirnov estate. According to Eugeniya's grandson, Boris, his grandmother still held out hope that her rights could one day be restored. “My grandmother gave full power [of attorney] to my mother to do all she could do to prove that she was the sole proprietor of all the [Smirnov] assets,” Boris said.
¹¹

Members of the Bakhrushin side of the family had similarly mixed outcomes. These descendants became noted doctors, scientists, and teachers. Pyotr Bakhrushin, for example, worked in a psychiatric hospital in Moscow. Others, though, were not so lucky. Nina Bakhrushina, a foreign language teacher, married a prominent chemist. They were exiled to Siberia after one of her husband's students accused him of unpatriotic conduct.
¹²

It is, again, unlikely that any of the Smirnovs who remained in Russia, with the possible exception of Nikolay, until his death, knew of Vladimir's efforts to revive the family business in Europe or his agreement with Rudolph Kunett. Years later, however, as the Smirnoff brand grew in prestige and notoriety, they, like other descendants of once prominent merchant dynasties, grew curious. They wondered about their roots and tried to piece together their forgotten or hidden heritages. Oleg Sergeyevich Smirnov, Sergey's son and a retired lawyer in Moscow, led the effort in the 1970s for the Smirnovs. Outraged by the way his grandfather's name was being used in the West, he combed through reams of archived information, assembling a three-volume monograph about the patriarch's business history and his far-flung family. He discovered relatives he did not know and a global business giant he had not fathomed. The big question, Oleg began to ponder, was whether the Smirnovs could get it back.

 

T
HE FIRST OFFENSIVE
was launched in the early 1980s in Cologne, Germany. Plodymex, a joint Russian–East German spirits
export company, sued a German importer of Smirnoff. Plodymex claimed that Smirnoff's labels, which included Cyrillic lettering and images of the awards Smirnov had earned a century earlier, misled consumers about its Russian origin. Relying on Oleg's research, the plaintiff further argued that Vladimir had had no right to sell his family's trademarks and copyrights to Kunett in 1933 because he had already sold his shares in the business to his brother, Pyotr, in 1905. The charge was potentially explosive. Smirnoff's future—and past—might hinge on the actions Vladimir took almost five decades earlier, the same actions that salvaged his father's legacy.

The two companies settled the case in Cologne. Heublein agreed to alter its labels, removing the Cyrillic script and references to Russia or Moscow. In addition, it would make clear that the vodka it was selling was not manufactured in Russia. This settlement, which affected trade only in Germany, was far from the end of the matter. There was a glint of promise in this battle that perhaps there was some merit in the fight. Moreover, Russia was on the brink of dramatic change, just as it had been when Smirnov launched his enterprise in the nineteenth century. Mikhail Gorbachev was coming to power.

Russia in 1985 was in a period of deep stagnation, economically, politically, and socially. Like Tsar Aleksander II following the painful lessons of the Crimean War, Gorbachev realized that key aspects of communism were outdated and ineffective in a globally integrated world. Problems ranging from corruption to alcoholism to apathy were contributing to a sharp decline in industrial productivity and output. He vowed to introduce comprehensive reform through
perestroika
(restructuring) and
glasnost
(openness). These initiatives, Gorbachev hoped, would prompt entrepreneurism, technological innovation, and corporate development.

Gorbachev's first major campaign, however, did not directly target the economy. It targeted alcoholism. Vodka was still an
integral part of life in Russia, and like Witte and others before him, Gorbachev associated drunkenness with Russia's poor economic and moral condition. Even though the state stood to lose millions of rubles in revenue from its vodka monopoly, he figured that if the people's drinking could be controlled, other issues might be more easily resolved. Gorbachev's government in 1985 announced a “comprehensive program for the prevention and overcoming of drunkenness and alcoholism.”
¹³
The production and sale of vodka and other spirits were now limited, and efforts were made to encourage moderation. Russians reacted much the same way they always had—with anger and dissatisfaction. Long lines formed outside liquor shops. It was estimated that some Muscovites spent an average of up to ninety hours a year waiting to purchase alcohol.
¹⁴
Prices of vodka and other spirits spiked, and a black market for moonshine flourished. In the end, Gorbachev's sobriety drive failed, and restrictions were relaxed after just a few years.

Other initiatives had a more lasting impact. Gorbachev wanted to transform the old centralized Soviet system into a more robust market-oriented economy. He believed, as Aleksander II had, that modernizing the nation's financial infrastructure would ease existing societal pressures. He noted that “it is only the market, in tandem with the humanistic orientation of all society, that will be able to satisfy people's needs, ensure just distribution of wealth, safeguard social rights and guarantees, and consolidate such values as freedom and democracy.”
¹⁵
Gorbachev's rhetoric was as groundbreaking as were the reforms he crafted. Private ownership of profit-oriented businesses and cooperatives was not only legalized but encouraged. The law also permitted the establishment of corporations. Greater freedom of speech, more independent media, and an increased democratic political process were also integral parts of Gorbachev's agenda.