Pogar

Pogar is a small town in Bryansk oblast, in western Russia, and its tobacco factory is one of the oldest in the country: an enterprise opened there in 1839, and the Pogar Tobacco Factory has existed under that name since 1915. The tobacco was then grown in the Russian Empire. After the revolution, then the war, the plantations disappeared and the factory survived by making cheap goods; it returned to cigars later, with leaf bought in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Brazil and Nicaragua, and everything is done on site except growing.

This atlas does not carry what Pogar makes in volume — machine cigars, flavoured ones, a low-price range — but what it makes by hand: cigars rolled by its torcedores, which a Russian retailer gives as the country's largest hand-rolled production. The entry attributes that to the retailer. The brands say the era and the place: XO, Aroma Cubana, and Dostoevsky, spelled in the pre-1918 orthography.

With Siglo de Oro, it is the second factory that brings Russia into this atlas as a rolling place. It has no English-language press; it has a century.

Range Depth

• Dostoïevski

  Wrapper Undisclosed · Strength Medium-Full

  Dostoevsky, written on the band in the pre-1918 spelling — the factory's hand-rolled line.

• XO

  Wrapper Undisclosed · Strength Medium

  In single tubes, at a moderate price.