The King of Vodka (12 page)

“What?” replied Smirnov. “They are beating our boys? This is not to happen.”

Fistfights were common among young workers from opposing factories. More a sport, they formed teams and dueled, following strict rules that no one could hit an opponent below the waist or while on the ground.

Smirnov immediately sent word to his factory foreman. “Let all who wish to go [to the fight], go quickly.” Then he turned to his men. “Go on back. With new help you will beat the opposing team. If you beat them, I will treat you to a nice meal and you will be on paid vacation until 2
PM
tomorrow.”

“Hurray, Pyotr Arsenievich. Hurray! Don't doubt us. We will not falter.” And the men were gone.

When they returned later in the evening, they were bloody and bruised, but they were also happy and proud, having trounced the opposition. The men were rewarded for their performance with vodka, food, and time off. Smirnov “was like a happy child.” He boasted to his guests: “See how well the Smirnov boys showed their character.” Smirnov then called in his factory foreman, berating him for not respecting his men's right to defend their good names—and the Smirnov name. “You wanted to make a laughing stock of our boys?” he scolded. “If the workers have organized a fistfight, then it is a question of honor for them. For this reason, you should let them leave work and that's the end of it.”
^18
*

Smirnov understood what the scuffle represented to his men. He shared their competitive spirits, and he knew he would gain more standing with them than against them because of a pressing liquor order. He demonstrated his unbending support for their cause and then rewarded them for their determination and toughness. He put their needs before the company's. “My
father knew how to treat his subordinates. The white-and blue-collared workers respected and loved him. They carried out his orders not out of fear but for their own conscience,” Vladimir later told his wife, Tatiana Smirnova-Maksheyeva, who recorded her husband's memories.

In time, Smirnov's harmonious relationship with his workforce would be a bright spot in an otherwise contentious, increasingly hot-headed environment. Already in Russia, the gap between the haves and have-nots had widened. Revolutionary ideas fomented among small pockets of opposition leaders and their followers. Temperance crusaders were finding their voice. And a series of attempts on the tsar's life, the latest of which came in April 1879, spooked the reform-minded, liberal leaning monarchy. It involved Aleksander Solovyov, a participant in the “going to the people” movement earlier in the decade. He tracked down the tsar during one of his walks near the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. He fired his revolver five times, injuring a policeman but missing his royal target. Solovyov, easily captured, was hanged a month later.

With so much tumult, Smirnov may have wondered how long his good fortune might last. Little did he know that he was already under the scrutiny of temperance advocates and his industry rivals. Even Anton Chekhov, then a young, unknown journalist, had his sights on Smirnov. And soon, he would find out why.

T
sar Aleksander II was a reformer. Thrust into his country's leadership role in the wake of the Crimean War, which exposed Russia's shortcomings to the world, Aleksander came away from the experience with newfound conviction. As daunting and risky as the task was, he would embark on a campaign to modernize his country and motivate his people.

His first major act was to free Russia's 22.5 million serfs, roughly two years before President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States. The tsar moved on from there, reforming the justice system, sanctioning localized governments, loosening censorship, establishing more progressive economic policies, and abolishing the wine farming tax. In short, Aleksander II presided over one of the most prolific periods in Russia's history. At times called “The Thaw,” “The Russian Renaissance,” and “The Icebreaker” by the country's media, his reign was marked by rapid industrialization and an unprecedented artistic awakening.
¹
The masterpieces
of Tolstoy, Dostoevskiy, Turgenev, Repin, and Tchaikovskiy all occurred under his watch, and now, the tsar was on the brink of ratifying Russia's first constitution. Talks were underway to form a kind of parliament, too, with representatives from every province.

While these fundamental shifts had been pivotal for the advancement of industry and for the fortunes of men like Smirnov, Aleksander II had made more than his share of enemies. Many intellectuals were frustrated by what they saw as the slow, uneven pace of the tsar's reforms—and they wanted to end the monarchy. Peasants and members of the petite bourgeoisie were angered as they saw no personal benefits from the country's modernization. They had not received the land promised after emancipation, which meant that their other freedoms were also limited. And nobles, who feared that their privileged positions were eroding, worried that the tsar was making too many concessions to his liberal advisors. The most radical objectors took their acrimony to the extreme: Aleksander had eluded death at the hands of would-be assassins seven times. The eighth attempt came on March 1, 1881.

That morning, the tsar met with his progressive minister of the interior, Count Loris-Melikov, and approved a draft announcement that moved Russia a step closer to a constitution; he then arranged for a follow-up meeting with his Council of Ministers on March 4. As the tsar prepared to leave the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, the police chief drove up in a sleigh to escort him to his appointments. Aleksander II climbed into a closed carriage, accompanied by the chief of the royal guards and seven of his men.
²
Security had of course been tightened in anticipation of further attempts on the tsar's life.

Aleksander II attended to official business before having tea with his cousin at Mikhailovskiy Palace. He then climbed back into his carriage to head home. On his way, a young man approached the royal caravan, holding a small white package,
which he hurled at the carriage. Seconds after the blast, the carriage was encased in white smoke. When it cleared, the tsar, unharmed, could see one of his guards was dead and a young boy lay on the street dying. He climbed out of the carriage, bent over the child, and crossed himself.

Despite pleas from aides to reenter the carriage, the tsar moved first toward his attacker and then in the direction of the crater left by the bomb. Suddenly, the force from another deafening explosion slammed Aleksander and his protectors to the ground. This time, some twenty people lay injured, including the tsar. His legs had been nearly pulverized and he was bleeding profusely. In a weak voice, Aleksander reportedly commanded: “Take me home quickly.” He died little more than an hour later in his study at the Winter Palace, just a month shy of his sixty-third birthday.

The news of his murder spread like a contagion, sickening thousands of Russians. To Smirnov, a traditionalist and conservative to his core, it would have been devastating. For him, the tsar was holy, a father and protector. He represented knowledge and order and embodied authority and power. In a time-honored tradition, Smirnov, like many merchants, is thought to have kept a portrait of the tsar hanging in his office, a constant homage to his beloved monarch.

This tsar, Smirnov reasoned, had played a pivotal role in the vodka maker's own destiny. Had someone else been sitting on Russia's throne, Smirnov might never have achieved so much or advanced so far. Now, uncertainty engulfed the ex-serf and his nation.

It took just one week after the tsar's death for his eldest son, Tsar Aleksander III, to reject his father's nascent constitutional drive. His mandate, he determined, would be to restore discipline to his country. His father's legacy of reform had been dangerous and unhealthy, he concluded. After all, it had spawned repeated assassination attempts. Aleksander III issued a mani
festo after ascending to the throne, attesting to his “belief in the strength and truth of autocratic power.” He wanted to “put an end to the lousy liberals.”
³

The revolution that the assassins and their supporters hoped the emperor's death would spark did not materialize. On the contrary, Aleksander III moved quickly into crackdown mode, giving his special police force new authority to sniff out undesirables and revolutionaries. The perpetrators of his father's death were rounded up and executed in a public setting. And then, in an official statement, Tsar Aleksander III laid out a plan for the future. He vowed to close liberal schools, to transfer certain lawsuits from civil courts to military courts, and to stop the dissemination of some independent-minded newspapers and magazines.

Smirnov might have supported some of this backpedaling, figuring that Russia had grown too unpredictable and unstable. Order was always paramount in his mind. But just how far would this new tsar go? Would he revisit the vodka issue? What if the tsar determined that Russia's most popular spirit was better off back in the government's firm control? What if he decided to reintroduce a monopoly? Or wine farming? What if concerns over excessive drinking seeped into state policy?

Smirnov's worries were justified. The vodka industry was already undergoing considerable growing pains. Increased competition and the proliferation of greedy, rogue vodka makers had turned once tolerant rivals into ferocious enemies. In fact, the entire complexion of the business had changed.

In the previous decade, the number of legal alcohol manufacturers in Russia had grown by more than 40 percent—at least judging from the number of liquor-related participants in the All-Russia Industrial and Artistic Exhibition of 1882.
⁴
The swell came, at least in part, from the nation's continuing alcohol fever. The author Ivan Turgenev commented that liquor was “saturating Holy Russia.”
⁵
But the growth was at least as much a conse
quence of the ease of the business itself. Producing spirits was relatively cheap and simple, especially when it came to flavored vodkas, which were not required to be 40-degree the way pure vodka was. Vodka makers would often water down their alcohol two to three times, increasing the volume of the products they were selling. This meant that retail prices for their drinks could run as high as 1,000 percent of production costs.
⁶

The industry also operated without much regulation. Distillers paid an increasingly hefty excise tax and assorted other taxes while retailers paid licensing fees. There were also charges for mandated labels, which were glued onto bottles containing liquor. Beyond that, the spirits trade was free to do as it pleased. This arrangement made rich men out of skilled entrepreneurs like Smirnov and contributed to Russia's fiscal health. Vodka continued to be the largest single source of revenue for the treasury, averaging 30 percent or more throughout the nineteenth century.
⁷

With so much easy money up for grabs, corruption seeped even deeper into the alcohol trade. Illegal distillers, underground vodka makers, and other unscrupulous profiteers flooded the marketplace. They did not pay taxes, purchase licenses, or buy the required labels for their products. They produced their own liquors that they then sold cheaply to taverns, directly to consumers, or to unsanctioned distributors. They undercut legal vodka makers like Smirnov on price. The government, recognizing it was missing out on a sizable chunk of revenue, struggled to tackle the conundrum caused by these vigilante producers, instituting a few insignificant rules. But it was like trying to capture tadpoles with a fish net. As one observer put it: “We know very well about how many cases of secret vodka-making take place, how many cases of cheating and swindling are discovered every day at distilleries. Illegal, secret spirits making is so unbelievably easy to do that we have no chance even to dream about stopping such violations.”
⁸

The problem was simply too immense. Data shows that the
number of bulk warehouses used to hide unlawful spirits rose an astonishing 31 percent, from 4,896 in 1878 to 6,395 just eight years later.
⁹
Other rampant offenses included the spicing of food sold in taverns. It was routinely doused in pepper and salt in an attempt to increase the thirst of revelers. At the same time, more liquor retailers illegally opened their doors, and their hours of operation went beyond the legal limits.

For Smirnov, this situation was more of a nuisance than a serious worry. He occupied a position of great strength in the spirits industry. By then, he was the biggest vodka manufacturer in Moscow, raking in almost 3.2 million rubles annually with 280 employees. He was outdone in size by only a handful of rivals based in St. Petersburg. Smirnov's brand was prominent and secure, synonymous with high quality and good taste. A reviewer from the All-Russia Industrial and Artistic Exhibition of 1882 praised Smirnov's drinks as “excellent.” His factory, too, was singled out for being “respectable.”
¹⁰
The vodka maker's market share was strong, both with aristocrats as well as with the masses. And he could charge a premium for his most superior goods. He knew he was losing out on some income due to the sale of illegal moonshine, but this alone was not enough to worry Smirnov or prompt him into action. Besides, illegal alcohol had always been a problem in Russia—even before the removal of state controls.

Smirnov would weather this minor aggravation. He might even use it as an opportunity to tout his products as the most genuine, most trusted in the land. But what he could not and would not tolerate was the surge of vodka counterfeiters. Vodka was the product of choice for nineteenth-century Russian imitators. And increasingly, it was Smirnov's brand that came under attack. It was a top target for counterfeiters, ironically, because Smirnov had been one of the few manufacturers to aggressively pursue the formation of a meaningful brand.

Copycat bottles displaying his labels in the marketplace in
furiated him. To the casual consumer, these products were practically indistinguishable from the real Smirnov bottles. Looking closely, however, the name of the imitator could sometimes be found on a label or a notation stating that the bottle had been produced “at the request of P. Smirnov.” This distinction did little to dissuade customers since so many fans of Smirnov's liquor were either unable to read or too unconcerned to take the time to authenticate the bottle.

More insulting to Smirnov than the fraud itself was the inferior product that counterfeiters pushed. Always with an eye toward earning the title of purveyor, Smirnov knew his reputation for quality was paramount. He would not be awarded this ultimate prize if customers complained about the caliber of his liquor. Smirnov pondered his options. He could not sue the perpetrators because no law existed forbidding counterfeiting or protecting copyrights and trademarks. He could not enlist the help of the police, some of whom were likely in cahoots with the offenders, because producing fakes was not a crime. He could not hunt down the no-name distillers either. There were just too many of them. Still, Smirnov was determined to defend his turf.

He devised a comprehensive, two-pronged campaign. First, he would do everything in his power to distinguish his products from the copies and confound his imitators. Beginning no later than 1881, Smirnov introduced caps on his bottles with corks stamped with both the state emblem and his factory's signature. He then sealed those corks with resin, a white waxlike substance. The second part of Smirnov's strategy was more novel. For the first time, he decided to advertise.

Smirnov, along with most other liquor merchants, had always taken a dim view of advertising. To them, it would have been a waste of money as well as an ineffective way to reach potential customers. The state had historically controlled most of the content in the media, from placed announcements to news stories. In addition, the readership of newspapers and periodicals was largely limited to
the aristocracy.
^*
Few publications targeted the other castes, which were too diffuse to reach or overwhelmed by illiterate citizens. As Smirnov put it, according to Vladimir's recorded memories, “Our firm is known everywhere. There is no need to talk about it with ads or with loud words.”
¹¹

But by the 1880s much had changed, thanks in part to Aleksander II's reforms. A slew of new, more independent publications had emerged, which reached all levels of society. What's more, they were now stuffed with commercial advertisements for everything from perfumes to syphilis remedies. Smirnov was one of the first from the alcohol industry to join the fray, and he did so in a big way, thereby becoming a central figure in what would later be called the vodka wars.

 

S
MIRNOV'S FIRST KNOWN
advertisement ran on April 27, 1881—less than two months after the tsar's assassination. Displayed prominently on the front page of the progressive, widely read
Russian Courier
, the ad took up about a sixth of the page. Smirnov, as usual, was direct and unequivocal.