Smirnov Dynasty Parallels Russia’s Historical Travails

As if a book on a 19th-century Russian liquor magnate that a review calls "meticulously researched and notably sober historical narrative" wasn’t reason enough to attend the Monday, September 14 event, the OPC has sweetened this Book Night with a vodka tasting with author and journalist Linda Himelstein.

As if a book on a 19th century Russianliquor magnate that a Barnes and Noblereview calls “meticulously researched andnotably sober historical narrative” wasn’treason enough to attend this Monday, September 14 event, the OPC has alsoarranged for a Smirnoff vodka tasting.

Journalist Linda Himelstein (formerlyBusinessWeek) will discuss her book Kingof Vodka: The Story of Pyotr Smirnov andthe Upheaval of an Empire [HarperCollins, 2009]. This rags-to-riches storyof an uneducated serf who rose so high inthe Russian court that he won the imprimaturof the Czar for his vodka.

Linda Himelstein

Join us for what’s sure to be a memorable Book Night with The King of Vodka and a Smirnoff vodka tasting on Monday, September 14 at 6 p.m. at Club Quarters, 40 West 45th Street, New York.
RSVP by e-mail or call 212-626-9220.

For more information on the book go to www.lindahimelstein.com

The book brings together more than four years of research by Himelstein and Tatiana Glezer, a researcher and translator in Moscow. The two journalists culled through multiple archives in Russia and the United States and interviewed many Smirnov descendents and others who filled them in on the life and times of Pyotr Smirnov, who was uneducated, eventually liberated from serfdom, made a fortune in vodka and lost it all following the Russian revolution.

Himelstein has worked in the Washington bureau of The Wall Street Journal, The San Francisco Recorder and Legal Times, but it was in New York in 1996 where she worked as legal affairs editor at BusinessWeek and first came into contact with the Smirnov family. She covered a lawsuit filed by Smirnov’s descendants who wanted to return the trademarks and copyrights of the vodka empire and wrote the January 15, 1996 story, Who Owns the Smirnoff Name?, which earned BusinessWeek’s publisher’s award.

Himelstein relocated to San Francisco in 1996 to write for BusinessWeek then became its Silicon Valley Bureau Chief, but she didn’t forget the Smirnovs. By the end of 2004, she left the magazine and spent four years researching, reporting and writing to bring together The King of Vodka.

Himelstein writes in a recent blog that reading Seabiscuit: An American Legend, the tale of a horse who came from almost nothing to win some of the greatest treasures in horse-racing history, inspired her to pursue the Smirnov story. “Not only did I love the story itself, but I also loved reading about the lives of jockeys, the infancy of the automobile, developments in gambling, and a slew of other meaty historical topics,” she writes. “Smirnov’s story was similar…[and was] every bit as dramatic as I had imagined.”

Himelstein reports that tracing Smirnov’s earliest years proved daunting as his birthplace, Kayurovo, no longer exists, his local church is gone and no archives or written memoirs about life in Kayurovo in the 1830s could be located. She relied on oral histories from local ethnographers to recreate the environment in which Smirnov likely lived.

The book follows Smirnov’s liberation from serfdom to become one of Russia’s wealthiest and most prominent merchants. Through the Smirnov story, the history of Russia is also laid out with reforms in Russia that led to the emancipation or serfs, labor strikes, social uprisings, a government-imposed vodka monopoly, the Bolshevik revolution and the chaos it unleashed.

The bizarre escape of one of Smirnov’s sons from a prison in 1919 preserved the Smirnov legacy. Today, Smirnoff vodka is the best-selling premium spirit in the world, is distributed in 130 countries and worth an estimated $4.7 billion.

On Himelstein’s website, www.lindahimelstein.com, an interactive map of Smirnov’s trajectory, which includes a stop in Bethel, Connecticut where the first U.S. Smirnov factory opened in March 1934.

The Wall Street Journal calls the King of Vodka “a colorful chronicle of the rise of a business. Himelstein…keeps her narrative moving neatly along, distilling complex matters of commerce into a clear and readable form.” And Tilar Mazzeo, author of The Widow Clicquot writes that “the story of the Smirnov family is an operatic tour-de-force, and Himelstein tells it with grace and passion.”