Vodka rivals do battle about the real thing

IT IS prime time on Moscow television. In the middle of the screen stands a bottle of vodka covered with snow. A finger strokes away the snow to reveal a red label with white lettering in English: 'Smirnoff,' intones a Russian voice, 'the world's purest vodka.'

Another Russian, talking not on television but from a dingy attic office across the Moscow River from Red Square, takes a different view: 'It's rubbish. What do Americans know about vodka? Only Russians can make it properly.'

So speaks Boris Smirnov, a descendant of Russia's nineteenth-century vodka baron, Pyotr Smirnov, and rival to the world's largest vodka maker, Pierre Smirnoff Company of Hartford, Connecticut, Allen Park, Missouri and Menlo Park, California. The Cold War may be over, but a bitter battle over Russia's national drink - or more precisely, ownership of its most famous name - gets more heated by the day. The Americans, who use a French spelling, Smirnoff, say they brought the name, recipes and traditions from Pyotr Smirnov's son, Vladimir. He sold the trademark in the 1930s. Boris, though, says Vladimir had already left the family firm and had no right to make such a deal. He also insists that he alone has the real recipes.

Also at stake is a grand but ramshackle mansion occupied by the Institute of Forensic Science in the middle of Moscow. It was from here that Pyotr Smirnov, who died in 1898, produced vodka for the imperial court. Boris Smirnov has rented a dingy room up a back staircase. Smirnoff has rather more ambitions plans: it has applied to the Moscow city government to buy the whole thing, though it says it will use the building to house a charitable foundation as well as its vodka salesmen.

Stirring the dispute is the fact that Smirnov vs Smirnoff is far more than just a quarrel over property and vodka. Central to the row, aside from the prospect of huge profits, are two different interpretations of what, after 70 years of central planning, the free market should mean.

For Boris, it is a fight to regain a birthright squandered, along with so much else, by the Bolsheviks. 'Russia is the motherland of vodka. We are taking back what is ours.' For Smirnoff, it is a test of whether Russian law can protect a company's legitimate rights. Says Michael Leathes, a lawyer with Smirnoff's parent company in London: 'This is a legal problem, not a question of national feeling.'

The contest, which has split the Smirnov family in Moscow into rival camps and produced months of inconclusive wrangling in Russia's trademark office, is hardly even. The American firm, a subsidiary of Britain's Grand Metropolitan, sold 170 million bottles of Smirnoff vodka last year in 120 countries. Boris Smirnov sold none. All he did was set up a company and rent an office. But he has big plans - and this is what worries the Americans. He has struck a deal with a state distillery in Krasnodar, near the Black Sea, and last month sent lorries to Moscow with 6,000 bottles from his first batch of vodka.

A week ago, the American firm filed six suits against Boris and his company in Moscow. The problem is not that Boris makes vodka, but his choice of a label, a replica of the one used by his great-great grandfather: 'Supplier to the Court of His Majesty the Emperor, Pyotr Smirnov and Descdendants, Moscow. Table Wine No. 21, Real Smirnov Vodka.' It is almost identical to the label used by Smirnoff.

Russia's patent and trademark office originally accepted Boris's registration application last summer. But in November, following an appeal from Smirnoff, it partially reversed itself. Boris, it ruled, could keep the trademark 'Pyotr Smirnov and Descendants' on the register but had no exclusive or protective rights.

In the end, perhaps the only person really qualified to judge is Tsar Nicholas II himself, since both sides claim him as their best customer. But he is dead.

Instead of the imperial court, it is now up to a legal court. Smirnoff lawyers vow to pursue Boris with 'determination and vigour'.

Boris, meanwhile, says he is unconcerned: 'Let them sue me,' he says. 'We will see who wins. My vodka is better.'