The curious case of Stolichnaya and the blacked out name

Over a decade ago I wrote this under the title "Silly Soviets":

I have this collector of my work who is very high up in the food chain over at Bacardi.

Most people don't know how HUGE this private company is, and how averse to publicity the Bacardi family is... but essentially Bacardi is a gargantuan octopus company - that is a company that owns a company, that owns a company, that owns a company and so on.

Anyway, when Stolichnaya (Russian: Столичная, also known as Stoli) was acquired by some group (Latvia or Russia) owned by someone, who is owned by someone, etc., one of the Western tricks that the new owners tried to teach the Stoli management was the trick of putting out the same product under a different label, but cheaper, and to do this whenever they needed a fast cash influx.

They were horrified when Stoli came out a little later with a few thousand cases of the iconic vodka with the same basic label, but with the name blacked out - sort of like what they used to do to porn pics in the 50s and 60s.

Cough, cough...