About ME AND MY hobby:

I am a Russian collector of miniatures. I have been collecting miniatures since 1997 and assembled a collection of 340+ miniatures from 36 countries. My job duties in 1997 made me travel a lot and I started buying  minis in duty-free shops an airports. Since then I try to buy any minibottle I came across. Unfortunately collecting miniatures in Russia is not an easy task. First, Russian distilleries are not producing a lot of minis. Currently only vodkas and a strange Russian cognac (!) are all I known. Second, there are almost no foreign miniatures in licor stores. The explanation for the fact is quite strange - read the story below.

 

Russian miniature bottles:

So far I know that Russian distilleries produce only vodka minis (one exception). As you aware what is know today as Russian Federation till 1991 was part of the USSR - a Soviet Union. So I'll try to say something about minibottles of USSR, Russia and other republics of ex-USSR.

USSR: The leader here was and still is Moscow Kristall Distillery. This state-owned distillery must be well known in the world because of its famous Stolichnaya vodka. In times of USSR it was the only distillery producing minis. Many collectors have Stolichnaya and Moskovskaya vodkas miniatures in the collection.  By the way Stolichnaya came in different flavors - such as Pertsovka (pepper), Limonnaya (lemon), Kristall etc. Of course, the distillery still produces these brands. You can tell the bottle as produced in the USSR by "V/O Sojuzplodoimport" and "USSR" word on the bottle label. Another distinctive feature of USSR bottles - 4 gold medals on  the label. These medals were awarded to Stoli in DDR (Deutsche Demokratishe Republik) - now a part of Germany. Now these medals are removed from labels. In USSR these minis were produced only for export, you couldn't buy them at home. In the USA exclusive importer was Carrillon. See the picture of USSR vodka minis here. As far as I know besides minivodkas in USSR no other miniature bottles were produced. Correct me if I am wrong.

 

RUSSIA: After Russian Federation became independent, major producer of minibottles became Moscow Kristall Distillery. In addition to Moskovskaya and Stoli, which came in different flavors sometimes arranged in sets, many other brands are produced. These brands are new such as Gzhelka, Zavalinka, Prazdnichnaya, Priviet and other. I doubt that these are available in other countries outside Russia. The labels are in Russian and the taste of each is different.

Many distilleries came in recent years with its own minis and brands. These are Smirnov distillery, KIN Moscow and other. Mostly  these are minivodkas like flavored vodkas (you may read in details about them in MBC magazine). Some bottles are real masterpieces by design. But one miniature is particularly interesting - it is Moscow cognac. The story is that in times of USSR some distilleries produced brandy-like liquor that had the name Cognac. According to international trade-mark laws the brand Cognac is attributed only to the liquors produced in the French province of this name. But the thing is that in southern regions of USSR (Georgia, Armenia) the liquors with the name cognac had been produced for 100+ years under the nearly same technology. The Georgian cognacs were very popular in USSR. After several years of litigations and law-suits Russian and French distilleries came into wise decision: Russians were to remove the word Cognac in Latin letters from labels. names etc., but still conserved the right to put the name "Cognac" if it came in Cyrillic alphabet (Коньяк). The example of it is miniature of Moscow cognac.  

Speaking of law-suits, there is another interesting example. Everybody knows the famous Smirnoff vodka. Its miniatures come in various shapes and flavors, I believe every collector of minis have one or more Smirnoff minibottles in the collection. But the truth is Smirnoff has nothing to do with the vodka that was produced for Russian Tsars for ages by Smirnov. In 1920s one of Russian refugees, that had been an engineer in a Smirnov distillery went to USA and launched the product we know as Smirnoff vodka. The real descendants of Piotr Smirnov survived till these days and conserved the original recipes. The Smirnov descendants founded a distillery and sued Smirnoff for trade-mark law violation. The litigation lasts for 3 years and both parties are selling nearly the same product under the name Smirnov and Smirnoff. You may see the picture of rivaling Smirnov's miniatures and compare.

OTHER EX-USSR REPUBLICS

Every republic of former USSR is producing its own minibottles. The favorite are vodka brands inherited from USSR. For example Latvian distillery Latvijas Balzams is producing Stolichnaya and Moskovskaya minivodkas. Other types as brandies and liqueurs also exist. Currently I have minis from such republics as Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Moldova, so I do not have a lot of information about other ex-USSR countries. 

Why there aren't many minibottles in Russia

Several years ago (1992-1993) some ingenious businessman began selling "Russkaya" vodka in plastic 100g containers. The shape and look of those containers was as a yogurt can and people began calling it "yogurt vodka". It was cheap - 0.10 US$ per pack and soon after release yogurt vodka became extremely popular, especially among low society.

Various privately-owned distilleries produced tons of "Russkaya" of this kind making big millions out of it and the product beat competitors hard. So government tried to limit production favoring state-owned distilleries and forbid selling liquors in stores with volume under 120ml. Years passed and now you do may sell liquors of any volume but there aren't many miniatures in stores.