Zino Davidoff — tobacco (davidoff) with roots in the Russian Empire
Zino Davidoff was born Sussele-Meier Davidoff on 11 March 1906, in Novhorod-Siverskyi, in the Chernigov Governorate of the Russian Empire, according to Wikipedia and the European Route of Industrial Heritage; other accounts, including the company's own histories, give Kiev. His given name was later Russified as Zinovy. His father, Henri, was a tobacco merchant who hand-rolled cigarettes from oriental tobacco, and the family kept a small tobacco business in Kiev.
In 1911, when Zino was five, the family left the Russian Empire and settled in Geneva, where his father opened a tobacco shop near the Place des Philosophes. It became a meeting place for Russian political émigrés. Zino grew up in Geneva and in 1924 set out for South America, spending about two years in Argentina, Brazil and Cuba learning the tobacco trade from the growers.
Returning to Geneva around 1930, he took over the family shop and added a cigar department that soon became a leading address for Havana cigars. During the Second World War connoisseurs travelled to Geneva to buy their cigars from him, and by the mid-1940s the shop had become, in the words of one cigar journal, the centre of the European cigar scene. After the war he obtained a licence to produce his own cigars, made by the Hoyo de Monterrey factory in Havana, and named the different sizes of this 'Château' series after the great vineyards of Bordeaux, among them Château Margaux, Château Latour and Château Lafite.
In the late 1960s Cubatabaco, the Cuban state tobacco monopoly, proposed a line of cigars carrying the Davidoff name, and the Davidoff No. 1, No. 2 and Ambassadrice followed. In 1970 Davidoff sold the business to the Basel firm of Oettinger, staying on as its ambassador and public face. The partnership with the Cuban monopoly broke down at the end of the 1980s; in 1989, with Cubatabaco representatives and Swiss customs officials present, Davidoff publicly burned some 130,000 Havana cigars, and from 1990 Davidoff cigars were made in the Dominican Republic. The brand later passed, in 2006, to Imperial Tobacco.
He died in Geneva on 14 January 1994, aged eighty-seven, by then widely known as the 'King of Cigars'.
"His family, tobacco merchants, left the Russian Empire in 1911 and settled in Geneva, where his father opened a tobacco shop."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Novhorod-Siverskyi, Chernigov Governorate (now Ukraine) — Kiev per other accounts
Born Sussele-Meier Davidoff in 1906, in Novhorod-Siverskyi in the Chernigov Governorate according to most reference works, or in Kiev according to others, into a Jewish family of tobacco merchants; the family left for Geneva when he was five.
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Novhorod-Siverskyi, Chernigov Governorate (now Ukraine) — Kiev per other accounts. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.