(FORTUNE Magazine) – Smoking is a no-no in the Clinton White House, but word apparently hasn't traveled the globe. In Russia, Muscovites are hawking a flimsy, filterless smoke called Clinton, which comes wrapped in red, white, and blue, and sells for about 4 pennies a pack. Made by the nonexistent American Overseas Tobacco Co. of New York, Clinton is one of dozens of counterfeit "American blend" cigarettes turning up in Moscow and other cities of the former Soviet Union. Their fly-by-night makers in Indonesia, China, and elsewhere borrow the Stars and Stripes, the Statue of Liberty, cowboys and other Western icons to snag smokers in the Wild East. Clinton isn't alone among the presidential smokes: Kennedy and Johnson have shown up in kiosks in Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan. Other names are outright steals: Dakota, made by the fictitious Tobacco International Richmond Inc. of Virginia, is a trademark owned by the real R.J. Reynolds Tobacco. To give their smokes a whiff of authenticity, many makers list company headquarters as Winston-Salem, North Carolina, or Richmond, Virginia, where Reynolds and Philip Morris have large cigarette plants. Packs are also often printed with the same label carried on every pack of American exports: U.S. TAX EXEMPT FOR USE OUTSIDE U.S.

Bruce Macdonald, BBDO's general director for marketing in Moscow, says the average Russian smoker thinks that his own Russian-made cigarettes are full of "sawdust and shit." American blend, he says, is synonymous with top quality. U.S. tobacco officials say that for the most part, the fly-by-nights , aren't worth tracking down. Indeed, most Russians seem to opt for the expensive real thing -- Marlboros or Camels.