ABSTRACT
Tobacco was a booming industry in late imperial Russia, with 272 factories throughout the Russian Empire in 1897 producing 126 million pounds of loose tobacco, over 181 million cigars, and more than 6 billion large, Russian-style cigarettes (papirosy), as well as other tobacco products such as snuff, altogether worth over thirty-one million rubles.1 By 1908, although the number of factories had decreased to 241, the number of cigarettes manufactured had risen to 10.4 billion and the total worth of production had almost doubled to fi fty-eight million rubles.2 Clearly, many Russians smoked, and the market was expanding.
