One of the more curious things about writing a blog like this is looking at the statistics. Sean Carton wrote a small post called Russian Drinking Chess. For some reason it regularly tops our stats for the most popular post. I think this might have something to do with the horrible and bewildering comments, but who knows?

Regardless, to satiate our Russian Drinking Chess Themed readers, I have gone through and found some appealing Russian Beer labels for you to enjoy.

All of these labels are BEFORE the revolution of 1917, so they are un-augmented by the collectivist virtues of thick lines and the color red.

Some things to notice with these labels:

a) the grandiose ornamental label is a great way to get the common man to cough up some money for an otherwise low-end product.

b) art-nouveau style made its way across europe to russia - who'd have thought?

c) the printing quality of these labels is quite good, from what is possible to tell from third hand jpegs.

Many many more pre-revolutionary labels can be found here.