The End of (Russian) Vodka as We Knew It

In December 2000, my wife and I traveled to California to attend the wedding of her college classmate, a charming southern gentleman who used to write for The Harvard Lampoon. The wedding took place in an elegant hotel in Santa Monica, and during the cocktail hour with resplendent vodka martinis, I met a cousin on the groom’s side, an advertising executive from New York. When the cousin heard that I was originally from Moscow, his face brightened up. “Perhaps you could help us,” said the mad man. “We have the Stolichnaya account, and a new bid is approaching,” he explained. “We’ve run out of ideas. All we can think of are fur hats and Russian bears.”

The advertising firm hired me as a consultant. My task was to write a précis about various ways of presenting “Russianness” to an American audience. I remember sitting in my Boston College office early in the morning, a cup of strong tea with lemon on my desk, the Neo-Gothic tower of Gasson Hall and the treetops of centenarian elms soaring in the fog outside my window, as I furiously typed a list of historical and cultural associations that might be employed in advertising Stolichnaya vodka, to which PepsiCo had originally received the exportation rights from the Soviet government; the deal had also made Pepsi-Cola arguably the first American brand marketed and distributed in the USSR. (The first bottling facility opened in 1974 in Novorossiysk on Russia’s Black Sea coast, the second in 1978 in Yevpatoriya in Crimea, at the time still part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Well do I remember the joy my nine-year-old self felt as I gulped down the warm sugary imps from the elongated glass bottle—a foretaste of many other small culture shocks to hit the future émigré on the nose.)

By the winter of 2000-2001 I had lived in America for over thirteen years and had nearly stopped composing poetry in Russian while writing English-language fiction and nonfiction about the lives of Soviet exiles and expatriates. I populated the pages of my vodka position paper not only with facts but also with a whole gamut of “Russian” behaviors. I wanted those bottles of Stolichnaya to soar into the American marketplace on Baryshnikov’s winging legs, to ring with the dodecaphonous bells and whistles of Stravinsky’s later compositions, and to seduce middle-class American ladies (though not their teenage daughters) with the suaveness of Nabokov’s nympholept, he with a “a dash of the Danube in his veins.” I can no longer recall some of the cultural, sportive or political associations that I included in my report, but I do remember wanting the vodka to have the lofty beauty of Pushkin’s lyrics and the wisdom of the heart of Turgenev’s peasants. The reimagined Stolichnaya vodka was to possess the strength of hockey players and the brilliance of chess champions.

I wanted those bottles of Stolichnaya to soar into the American marketplace on Baryshnikov’s winging legs, to ring with the dodecaphonous bells and whistles of Stravinsky’s later compositions, and to seduce middle-class American ladies…

Many popular threads of Russianness came to my rescue, from the Zhivago theme with the handsome Omar Sharif in the role of the Russian doctor-poet to the flying boats and helicopters designed by the Kyiv-born Russian-American inventor Igor Sikorsky. I did not fail to mention the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin as the first man in outer space, the dogs Belka and Strelka (“Squirrel” and “Arrow”) or even the nameless Russian grey rabbit, two Russian rats, and three and a half dozen Russian mice—all of whom were the first to orbit the Earth aboard Sputnik 5. In the spirit of “however weak or strong, the bear is still a powerful animal,” I also told stories of Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and of Khrushchev banging the podium with his shoe (or just brandishing it, here accounts vary) at a plenary meeting of the UN General Assembly. I thought my précis would actually help the American vodka advertisers as it offered both traditional and less-tried approaches, and I was naively pleased with how it turned out. Two weeks went by, and I received my generous payment with a tepid note of thanks. After waiting another month, I emailed my contact to ask how their Stolichnaya presentation went. The email I received was brief and unsentimental: “Unfortunately we lost the account. Thank you, though, for your assistance.”

The reimagined Stolichnaya vodka was to possess the strength of hockey players and the brilliance of chess champions.

Twenty-two years later I had occasion to recollect my failed mission as a Russian vodka ambassador. It was March 5, 2022, the eleventh day of the war in Ukraine. On the way back from a morning of skiing my older daughter Mira and I stopped at a New Hampshire State Liquor Store only to discover that the vodka shelves had a gaping hole plastered over with flyers: “In compliance with Governor Sununu’s Executive Order, Russian-made and Russian-branded products will no longer be available until further notice.”

In my family we favor the St. Petersburg-made Russian Standard, especially after I infuse it with fresh horseradish. And Russian Standard was now missing from the shelves of the New Hampshire State Liquor Store along with other Russian-made vodka brands. However, bottles of Stoli of various flavors had not been completely removed but rather pushed to the back of the shelves. A solicitous salesperson explained that they “may still bring Stoli back as it’s actually Latvian, not Russian.” “Latvian?” I asked in disbelief.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Stolichnaya vodka was indeed produced in Latvia from the grain grown in Russia’s Tambov Province, famous for the biggest peasant rebellion against Bolshevik rule. In fact, soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, the company rebranded its product as Stoli® and announced that instead of the bellicose grain from Russia it would use “Slovakian sources to further ensure 100% non-Russian alpha grade spirit.” Non-Russian spirit, I wondered. Pun intended?

Governors of New Hampshire, Ohio, and Utah were the first to ban the sales of spirits produced in the Russian Federation. President Biden (who doesn’t strike one as a vodka connoisseur) has since signed an executive order targeting Russia-made vodka, nonindustrial diamonds, and seafood, clearly betting that America would not be the same without Beluga Vodka or beluga caviar. In reality, Russia-produced spirits used to constitute but a fraction of the top U.S. vodka market, which also features excellent Polish, Swedish, Finnish, French and Icelandic vodkas as well as a fine American-made spirit with a name tainted with Balkan politics. During the first two weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the media attention had been so inordinately fixated on Russian vodka and on Stoli—with public rituals of vodka spilling or bottle breaking—that some of the coverage nearly obscured the much bigger picture of the sanctions and boycotts. The wartime targeting of Russian vodka, with its largely emotional rather than economic impact, illustrates the point that in the minds of many Americans—and Westerners—vodka is still synonymous with Russia, and the culture of vodka drinking still betokens stereotypical Russianness.

On the day I wrote this piece about the boycott of Russian vodka, more horrific news was coming in, with Russia’s troops turning the unsurrendered Mariupol to rubble, shelling Lviv, and treating civilians in a manner that evokes the Nazis’ treatment of the local population in the occupies Soviet territories. Experts now speak not just of the brutality of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but also of war crimes committed by Putin’s regime, and of a judgment in the tradition of postwar tribunals of Nazi criminals. In fact the very act of writing about a vodka boycott may come across as needless folly. But I don’t think it’s just about finding humor in times of war. It is also about the paradox of quicksand memory.

What of Stoli, the misbegotten victim of vodka bashing? On my April Fools’ expedition to a local Wegmans Liquor emporium, I was able to locate a large supply of different Stoli flavors but no vodka brands produced in the Russian Federation.

Stoli has been returned in its new, un-Russian incarnation while the Russian vodka scandal of the first two weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has quickly receded into oblivion. Just the scandal or the very Russianness of vodka?

I spoke to two workers on the liquor floor. Feigning naivety, I asked the first liquor salesperson,

“Do you no longer carry any Russian vodka brands?”

“Yep, and we won’t until the war is over,” he replied, curtly.

“Do people still ask after Russian vodka?” I asked the second salesperson.

“Not really,” he replied.

“It’s like it never existed, no?” I pressed on.

“Yes,” my interlocutor said and gently smiled. “Quickly forgotten.”

The vodka scandal begs the question of what such boycotts accomplish besides sending a symbolic message.How does the cancellation of Russian vodka help Ukraine?

Why bother speaking of it at all? The vodka scandal begs the question of what such boycotts accomplish besides sending a symbolic message. How does the cancellation of Russian vodka help Ukraine? How does the decision to ban all vodka distilled and bottled in the Russian Federation help dismantle Putin’s regime?

It is my sense that the choice to boycott Russian-made products should be left to the individual Americans rather than made for them by their government. This way we would have the freedom to choose not only between spending money on the French-made Grey Goose vodka instead of the Russian-made Beluga vodka, but between spending money on vodka and contributing money to the relief effort for Ukraine and her civilians.

Bud’te zdorovy! I mean, Cheers!

Maxim D. Shrayer is an author and a professor at Boston College. His recent books include “Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature” and “A Russian Immigrant: Three Novellas.” Shrayer’s newest book is “Of Politics and Pandemics