media1.s-nbcnews.com

In 1994, Natalia Orlova founded the first location of the business that she still runs today at 1 Brighton Road in Brooklyn’s Little Odessa neighborhood.  The storefront in the shadow of the Q train tracks cluster has since been joined by a satellite in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood.  In 2014, Macaulay Brooklyn Student Allegra DePasquale recognized it as “the world’s largest Russian bookstore outside of Russia.”

vodkatonik.com

Today, the main focus of the store is to provide the Russian community of Brighton Beach a central location for “all-things-Russian”.  The store has added a large amount of household items and souvenirs to their inventory because solely surviving on the sale of Russian books, music and video deemed inviable.