A Community in the Clouds: Advertising Tobacco and Gender in Pre-revolutionary Russia

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when western advertisers used women as bait for the male smoker, Russian manufacturers displayed a more relaxed attitude toward policing gender boundaries than in western democracies, and offered images of empowered female consumers who made rational choices in the marketplace. Advertising images of women smoking in Russia were distinctive in their subject, number, and early appearance. The examination of Russian tobacco advertisements complicates scholarly studies of the Russian business community and advertising that emphasizes the conservative tendencies of these industries, and counters studies of global tobacco culture that tie smoking to liberal male political identity in the period before 1914. Russian women’s smoking, like Russian women’s early suffrage, does not fit the established paradigms.