Smoke and Mirrors: From the Soviet Union to Russia, the Pipedream Meets Reality

(Hardback)

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Smoke and Mirrors is about a world which is no more. There is already no such country on the map - the Soviet Union. On the site where the famous throughout the Soviet empire tobacco factory Java, which was founded before the 1917 Revolution, stood in Moscow, there is a luxury residential complex. Tobacco companies all over the world are experiencing a crisis unprecedented in the history of the tobacco industry and are struggling to stay on the market despite the strongest anti-tobacco campaigns. Leonid Yakovlevich Sinelnikov is the last director of the Java factory, the first and last CEO of the Russian company BAT-Java, as part of the British-American Tobacco international tobacco company. In Smoke and Mirrors he talks about himself and about the time that has gone forever, when the tobacco industry was one of the most important state sectors, and the people, in the face of hard life and unprecedented labour enthusiasm, could find consolation only in the famous smoke breaks.

Author Bio

Leonid Sinelnikov was born in Moscow on November 3, 1939. In 1941 he was evacuated with his mother and grandmother to Semipalatinsk (Kazakhstan). The war-time childhood continued in Moscow, where in 1943 the family of the Soviet Army major Yakov Sinelnikov returned to with their four-year-old son Leonid. Leonid Sinelnikovs childhood was typical of the post-war generation of most Soviet children: while parents worked very hard, children were left to their own devices, considering street life and friends as their true family. Nevertheless, he successfully graduated from high school and entered the Moscow Technological Institute of the Food Industry, which, despite its modest name, was "packed" with distinguished professors. The proposed book is the result of the authors thoughts and life experience. He considers himself lucky to have witnessed and even, as the manager of a big tobacco enterprise, taking part in transforming his country within a historically short period of time from the Soviet planned economy to the free market.