Revolutions and Wars

The Tsarist Ban of 1914

When World War I broke out in 1914, Tsar Nicholas II imposed a ban on vodka sales, officially to safeguard military effectiveness and morale during the war. For the state budget, this was a risky move, since the 1894 monopoly had provided a large share of revenues. The ban drove the trade underground: illegal distilleries and smuggling flourished, while official tax revenues collapsed, an effect that would later also characterize American Prohibition.

Revolution, Civil War and Exile

After the October Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks initially upheld the alcohol ban, partly out of ideological distance from the tsarist vodka business. Many of the old distilling families, among them the descendants of the well-known Moscow producer Pyotr Smirnov, lost all their property in the wake of the revolution and the ensuing civil war and fled to the West, above all to France. They took recipes, brand rights and technical knowledge with them, but could initially profit little from this in their new homeland, since they lacked capital and markets.

Stalin's Return to the State Monopoly

It was not until 1925, under the Soviet government's New Economic Policy, that legal vodka production resumed in the Soviet Union, this time entirely in state hands. The state urgently needed the tax revenue to rebuild the shattered economy, even though economists privately warned of the social explosiveness of the move. Over the following decades, Soviet production was centrally standardized, with uniform recipes and quality grades that remained largely unchanged until the 1980s.

Knowledge Migrates Westward

What proved decisive for the further history of vodka was that knowledge and brand rights now existed outside Russia. Members of the Smirnov family living in Paris made several unsuccessful attempts to revive their brand in the West, until an American entrepreneur took notice of them. This encounter would lay the foundation for vodka's triumphant rise in the United States, the subject of the next stop.

A Comparison: American Prohibition

At the same time, another country was experiencing its own alcohol ban, albeit for different reasons. From 1920 to 1933, the United States prohibited the production and sale of alcohol nationwide. Unlike in Russia, this was not about wartime morale but about a broad temperance movement with religious and social roots. As in Russia, a black market flourished in America too, led by organized gangs rather than individual farmers.

The decisive difference lay in the outcome. The US lifted its ban for good in 1933 and left the market to private enterprise. The Soviet Union, by contrast, did not return to freedom in 1925 but to a strict state monopoly. These diverging paths shaped their respective spirits industries for decades. In America, room opened up for new private brands, while in Russia everything remained under state control, a difference that also explains the starting conditions for Smirnoff's later history in the US.

Both bans ultimately taught the same lesson: a consumer good deeply rooted in everyday life and sociability can hardly be suppressed by legislation alone. Demand finds new, often riskier paths as soon as legal access is blocked. Both American gang crime and Russian black-market trade arose from exactly this pattern. Political decision-makers in both countries had to learn this lesson the hard way before fundamentally changing their alcohol policies. A ban alone, it turns out, rarely creates new sobriety, it mainly shifts who ultimately profits from consumption.