In the 1690s Peter the Great reversed course, allowed usage, and sold monopoly rights to an English company to import and sell Virginia tobacco.
Thereby tobacco went from a minor product of occasional use to become a mainstay of Russian identity by 1914, when the average urban male smoked a pack of papirosa a day.
[6] According to Tricia A. Starks, the Soviet Union in the 1920s launched an antismoking campaign carried out by the Communist party on a national scale.
These initiatives involved the mass distribution of antismoking materials such as posters, pamphlets, articles, plays, and films, alongside the implementation of special state-sponsored smoking cessation programs that claimed high success rates.
President Gorbachev pleaded with Washington for help, and the largest American tobacco companies hurriedly made plans to ship 34 billion cigarettes to Russia, at a dollar a pack.
As Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe and the USSR, 1989-1991, Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds and Reemtsma (the main German firm) moved in and bought out 75% of the old tobacco industry.
"[11] Per-capita smoking rates in Russia rank among the highest globally, making it a prized market for tobacco companies facing declining growth in the heavily regulated Western world.
According to Public Chamber of Russia, an oversight agency, smoking kills around 400,000 Russians each year, a number comparable to the United States which has twice the population.