The Russian Marketing Blog has some great posts that offer a humorous look at international advertising, new and old, from a Russian perspective. If you are marketing to Russian consumers, or plan on marketing to them, the dissection of a cigarette brand's marketing efforts should be quite helpful:

Sobranie's first ads are starting to appear in subway stations around Moscow. The image, oddly similar to Salvador Dali's "The Persistence of Memory", depicts a cloudy field and what looks like a ficus tree tied to a golf iron, with the slogan "your style".

Sobranie Red is a mass consumer brand, with really confused positioning. On the one hand, it tries to appear premium, using icons like a Ferrari on its website, playing on its import status. On the other hand, Sobranie is priced like any cheap mid-range smoke. Anyone who has ever worked over here knows that Russians are very suspicious consumers, and don't believe in a good deal. If something is under-priced or is on sale, to a Russian it can only mean that there's something wrong with it. IKEA had to completely re-brand their clearance sales away from the notion of a "good priced deal" last year so that consumers wouldn't think that there was some sort of defect with the offered sale items.