The Monopoly

In 1894, when Russia reintroduced a state monopoly on the production and trade of vodka, Finance Minister Sergei Witte announced the state’s intention to build 350 state wine distilleries.

A prime location was given to the Moscow State Wine Warehouse No. 1: on the banks of the Yauza river, near important railway channels and over three artesian wells. By the early 1900s, No. 1 was the largest in Russia, shipping 2.6 million deciliters of spirits a year.

WWI brought prohibition and halted the building of wine distilleries across Russia (148 had been built before the war broke out, 30 in Moscow). It also led to a shut-down of existing distilleries. No. 1 survived the war because a hospital was temporarily located there. Plus, there was still some demand for spirits and vodka. No. 1, said Zinaida Stepanchuk, public relations manager for the factory, “was virtually the only spirits production plant to survive prohibition.” It also survived the postwar prohibition instituted by the Bolsheviks, and in 1923 produced one of the first new vodkas, nicknamed Rykovka (after then Minister of Economics Aleksei Rykov).