“I smell like an old Soviet woman and I love it,” wrote Florence, a satisfied online customer reviewing her purchase of a bottle of Red Moscow perfume. Its fragrance was, she added, “somewhat reminiscent of Chanel No 5 and powerful – and significantly cheaper.”
Florence makes a good point. Not only is Red Moscow roughly five times cheaper than Chanel No 5 (which costs £62 for 35ml while Red Moscow retails at £13.40 for 42ml on the same website), but Red Moscow (Krasnaya Moskva) smells similar and shares a common olfactory heritage. Oh come on, you might well counter. Surely Russian scents smell of cabbage and disappointment, while Chanel No 5 has typified sexualised glamour ever since Marilyn Monroe revealed that in bed she wore nothing else.
The truth, as revealed in Karl Schlögel’s gripping olfactory history of the 20th century, is that both perfumes have roots in Tsarist Russia, in particular in a fragrance developed by two French perfumers, Ernest Beaux and Auguste Michel, to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty in 1913. Le Bouquet Préféré de l’Impératrice (The Empress’s Favourite Bouquet) was ill fated, appearing only four years before the Bolshevik revolution put an end to the Romanovs and everything they stood for, but it inspired the creation of both Chanel No 5 and Red Moscow.
During the Russian civil war, as perfumery became unviable, Beaux fled for France, crossing Russia’s Arctic extremities on his way. It proved an inspirational if roundabout route, for in the tundra his refined nose detected something unusual. “In the snow of the high alpine steppe and the blasted polar tundra,” Beaux wrote, “aldehydes appear in concentrations sometimes ten times higher than in the snows of other places.” The smell of snow and meltwater, later recreated in Beaux’s lab in Cannes by means of synthesised aldehydes (roughly, molecules sensitive to being isolated and stabilised during the oxidation process), when combined with jasmine, were fundamental for the (still secret) formula for Chanel No 5.
Beaux was visited at his lab by Coco Chanel in 1920. When she sniffed five samples he offered her as her couture brand’s perfume, she chose the fifth because it had “the scent of a woman”. And not just any old woman, but a new kind, one freed from flowery hats, trains and furbelows. Beaux’s composition of aldehydes smelled of modernity, dispensing with complex floral juxtapositions of scents from earlier eras. It was the olfactory equivalent of Coco’s little black dress or the Breton tops and elegantly cut but roomy trousers she designed. She decided the fragrance would be called Chanel No 5 and would be launched on the same day as her latest collection, 5 May 1921.
Meanwhile back in Moscow, another Frenchman was creating a rival modern fragrance. Auguste Michel could not leave the Soviet Union (the authorities lost, or perhaps we should say “lost” his passport), compelling him to remain in Moscow making soap until the authorities decided, quite sensibly, that the people deserved to smell good and so revived Russia’s perfume industry on a less elitist footing.
To that end, he created a perfume that celebrated the 10th anniversary of the revolution. Red Moscow even had an onion dome for a bottle stopper. It too represented a paradigm shift in perfume. Its headnotes consist of bergamot, coriander, neroli and aldehydes; its heart notes are carnation, rose, jasmine and ylang-ylang; its base is woody and balsamic. What it smells of, though, is less important than how it typifies the way Soviet perfumes were bolshevised. One was called Pioneer, another Tank, and my personal favourite was captivatingly named Collective Farm Victory.
It would be going too far to say that Chanel No 5 and such Soviet fragrances later became proxies in the cold war, but certainly a lot of 20th-century creativity was devoted to perfume industries in both the west and east. My favourite example of this is the bottle for Russia’s most popular cologne, Severny (meaning Northern), designed by Kazimir Malevich. It looked like an ice floe and was surmounted by a little polar bear that also served as the bottle stopper.
But forget about men. It’s the women who make Schlögel’s book linger indelibly – like, say, the scent of Laughter by Yardley. In particular, two tough women from humble beginnings, one an appalling antisemite, the other a shtetl-born Jew struggling to keep one step ahead of the executioner in antisemitic Stalinist Russia.
Coco Chanel not only had a Nazi lover in occupied Paris, where she lived in luxury denied her compatriots in her Ritz suite, but she also holidayed with him at the Wannsee villa where the Final Solution was decided upon (facts you’d never know from the hagiographic 2009 biopic Coco Before Chanel starring Audrey Tautou). Only an exculpatory letter from Winston Churchill spared her the postwar fate meted out to other Frenchwomen guilty of so-called collaboration horizontale.
She figures as the book’s villain: it can be no coincidence that, after reading of her return to Parisian life in 1954, we turn the page to a chapter about another fragrance, the smell of the camps. There Schlögel writes, briefly but shatteringly, of how the uncontrollable stench of Auschwitz’s furnaces drifted over the Polish countryside. For survivors, the smell of death camps and gulags is unforgettable; for the rest of us, there is no olfactory memory of humanity’s barbarism. The past has become deodorised.
Schlögel, a specialist on Russian history based in Frankfurt, is sensitive to how, in the hierarchy of the senses, smell is at the bottom. Sight for us children of the Enlightenment is the most rational of senses; smell, by comparison, is unconscious, irrational, perhaps intolerable. He has done something improbable: written a memorable book about the most ungraspable of historical phenomena. Osip Mandelstam said there was a noise of time (hence the title of Julian Barnes’s novel about Shostakovich); Schlögel plausibly argues there is a smell too.
As for the book’s other woman, Polina Zhemchuzhina was a Jewish Stalinist who clearly captivates Schlögel. She was chiefly responsible for reviving the Soviet Union’s perfume industry and making ordinary Russians unprecedentedly fragrant. A committed fighter for Bolshevism and for women’s role in the revolution from an early age, in 1921 she married Vyacheslav Molotov. He not only unwittingly gave his name to the cocktail, but rose to become, as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, the second most powerful Soviet politician after Stalin. As a result Polina was, for a while, the Soviet Union’s second first lady. Zhemchuzhina became responsible for Soviet perfume and cosmetics production, heading for a while the superbly named State Fat and Bone Processing Industry.
For a time, she and her husband shared a communal flat with Stalin and his second wife. But Zhemchuzhina fell from grace and fell prey to the anti-Jewish purges of the 1940s. She was forcibly divorced from her husband and sentenced to exile. Her problem was that she had a brother in British mandate Palestine to whom she wrote; worse, she made friends with the American ambassador’s wife. From such scanty facts, secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria’s henchmen concocted the lie that she was a Zionist spy. The truth rather is that she remained fiercely loyal to the memory of the diabolical dictator who ensured her downfall until her death in 1970, despite having spent five years in the gulag to be freed on Stalin’s death.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia has been conquered by western brands and smells like everywhere else. Red Moscow was disdained by young Russians because it smelled like, as one put it, “old ladies”. As if that were a bad thing. But that is not the end of the story. Red Moscow is being made again under a new business model that caters for Soviet nostalgists and for those, like Florence, who want a cheap alternative to Chanel No 5.
At the end, Schlögel notes that a luxury perfume boutique is planned for 23 Nikolskaya Street in Moscow, once a key site in Stalin’s Great Purges. Here, between 1936 and 1939, 31,456 Russians were sentenced to death, many taken through tunnels to the NKVD building in Lubyanka Square and shot. History, far from being deodorised, is now doused with high-end perfumes to cover up its stench. The newspaper Novaya Gazeta recommended that the names of the dead be projected on to the facade of this shopping temple. Better was the idea of creating a new fragrance to mark the former court’s new incarnation. What should the perfume be called? Pulya v zatylok, suggests the correspondent, which translates as Bullet in the Back of the Head.
• The Scent of Empires: Chanel No 5 and Red Moscow by Karl Schlögel is published by Polity (£20). To support The Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
