A History of Vodka (Russian: «История водки», Romanized: Istoriya vodki) is an academic monograph by William Pokhlyobkin, which was awarded the Langhe Ceretto Prize.

After years of painstaking research Pokhlyobkin concluded that Russia's first grain-based vodka could have been distilled at the premises of the Chudov Monastery in the Moscow Kremlin by a monk called Isidore circa 1430.

In Christian's opinion, the definitions of such terms as distilling and state monopoly were found so vague that it became hard to know when Pokhlyobkin offered firm dates for their first appearance.

The arguments about the first usage of the word "vodka" and its first appearance were marked as convoluted, messy, repetitive as well as sometimes self-contradictory and unconvincing.

It was pointed out that Pokhlyobkin used Mendeleyev's data in a speculative way to ascribe to solution of spirit and water the eminent "biochemical and physiological properties".