Who Owns The Smirnoff Name?

Boris Smirnoff's decaying office, located across the river from the Kremlin in Moscow, is in the same building that housed his great-grandfather's world-famous vodka business more than a century ago. The walls are decorated with black-and-white photos of ancestors, including Pyotr Smirnoff, founder of the Trade House of P.A. Smirnoff, as well as with prerevolutionary advertisements used to promote Czar Alexander III's vodka of choice. And now, almost 80 years after Bolshevik rulers stripped the Smirnoffs and all other Russians of their private property, Boris has launched a series of legal assaults to reclaim the family spirits business. "We have 287 recipes, and we are going to produce them," says the 37-year-old onetime KGB officer.

The problem is that Boris' lineage may not be enough of a claim to let him pick up where his ancestors left off. In the intervening decades, since 1939, Heublein Inc., a subsidiary of London-based International Distillers & Vintners (IDV) and its parent, food giant Grand Metropolitan PLC, became the exclusive distributor of Smirnoff vodka. The company says it paid $14,000 for the rights to the Smirnoff name from an American businessman who acquired them in 1933 from Vladimir Smirnoff, one of Pyotr's three sons. Today, the brand is worth an estimated $1.4 billion.