Although the tobacco business struggled in Russia under Peter the Great (1689-1725), by the time of Catherine II (1762-1796) it began to grow. On July 31, 1762, the empress established the free trade of tobacco, and soon thereafter the fi rst tobacconists in St. Petersburg were opened by foreigners. They sold crumbled smoking tobacco and by 1812 the number of such production houses rose to six; however, all of these worked with imported raw materials.1 Russia received is fi rst large-scale, internal raw material base in 1783 with Catherine’s annexation of Crimea. With the 1801 inclusion of Georgia, Caucasian tobacco production was added and soon the cultivation of tobacco spread to the Kuban region in Ukraine.