To counter the persecution of gays in Russia, some in the West have been calling for a boycott of Russian vodka—the idea being that if things don’t improve, we ought to hit ’em where it hurts. After all, Russians drink and make a lot of vodka and there was a time (in the mid-19th century) when close to 50 percent of tax revenue came from the neutral grain spirit. But as Mark Lawrence Schrad pointed out in yesterday’s New York Times, those days are long gone. Yes, the Russians still make a considerable amount of vodka, but we here in the States don’t drink much of it. And no, the Stolichnaya available here is not Russian.

According to Schrad, “the Stoli we drink is distilled in Latvia and owned by the SPI Group, based in Luxembourg, as opposed to the (cheaper, less venerated) Stoli consumed in Russia, made by a struggling state-owned company, FKP Soyuzplodoimport.” Not only that, but “the Kremlin’s historic reliance on vodka revenues is largely over—making efforts to enforce the boycott ineffective and even cringeworthy. Many bars have stopped serving Smirnoff, which was produced in the United States, not Russia, as far back as the 1930s and is now made by a British conglomerate, Diageo.” (Schrad is the author of the upcoming book, Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State. My own book, Vodka: An Illustrated History, is due out next spring.)