As retreats from Moscow go, those by tobacco companies since the invasion of Ukraine are rather halfhearted. While other brands have closed operations and left the country, the makers of Marlboro, Lucky Strike, Rothmans, Kent and Gauloises have not abandoned hope.
Philip Morris International says it is suspending investment in Russia and
“scaling down” manufacturing, while British American Tobacco and Imperial Brands will transfer their operations to local partners. Quite what happens to the brands and how it will work financially remains vague.
“I think they’re fudging. I predict Marlboro and Lucky Strike will still be sold there, and they will keep the brands and take the profits,” says Anna Gilmore, professor of public health at University of Bath. She has reason to be suspicious, having studied how they swept into Moscow after the Berlin Wall fell.
They would leave behind a lot if they fully departed: brands such as
McDonald’s have done well in Russia but tobacco companies have triumphed. Philip Morris and Japan Tobacco, which owns Winston and Camel, dominate the world’s fourth-largest market, along with BAT and Imperial.
Russia is also a testing ground for the big shift that cigarette companies have been trying to make: transforming themselves into makers of vaping and heattreated tobacco products. Given that millions of smokers become ill and die each year, anything sounds better than selling cigarettes.
Their record does not inspire confidence in the health promises they now make. They entered Russia in the 1990s by buying state-owned factories —
BAT acquired Java and Saratov in 1994 — and used those as the platform for international brands that had previously been smuggled into the Soviet Union.
There could hardly have been a more receptive market. Men were heavy smokers and many were addicted to papirosi — high tar, unfiltered cigarettes such as Belomorkanal. The brand had a hardcore provenance, named in 1932 after the White Sea-Baltic Canal, which had been built by prisoners from Gulag