Smirnoff was born in Odessa, Ukraine, at the time part of the Soviet Union. He came to the United States in 1977 and became an American citizen on July 4, 1986. He has appeared in several motion pictures, such as Buckaroo Banzai and on television. Since 1992 he has been a fixture at Branson, Missouri.
He also invented the "In Soviet Russia" jokes, which frequently appear in many online communities, in particular Slashdot (see Slashdot trolling phenomena). The general form of the Soviet Russia joke is that the subject and objects of a statement are reversed, and the preposition: "In Soviet Russia" or something equivalent, is added. A modern example: