Notes, again, on fragrance: Soviet perfume (Chanel No. 5 is Russian / sensual Marxism / Brocard and State Soap Factory No. 5 / Bulgakov's black magic)
◧◨◧◨◧◨◧◨◧◨◧◨ [NOTES, CONDENSED HISTORY OF SOVIET PERFUME]
▬ The French brought perfume to Russia; the Russians returned perfume to France.1 ▭ Alphonse Rallet was the first Frenchman to start making perfume in Russia. He set up a cosmetics factory in Moscow. This was long after the French Revolution and long before the October Revolution. He was followed by others, but Henri Brocard, who ran a pharmacy on Nikolskaya Street, was the most notable. They built fragrance empires in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These Russian houses credibly competed with foreign firms. ▭ When their works were expropriated by the Soviet state, Brocard became State Soap Factory No. 5, and Rallet’s firm became State Soap Factory No. 4. They made soap for the Red Army. ▭ Some of the perfumers fled the country. This is how Ernest Beaux—an employee of Rallet—came to meet Coco Chanel and present her with a set of fragrance samples that were variation on his firm’s Le Bouquet de Catherine (this was later Rallet No. 1). ▭ Between 1925 and 1937, Polina Zhemchuzhina, the wife of Vyacheslav Molotov, was appointed to head up the Union Trust of Distinguished Perfumery, Fat-processing, Soap-making and Synthetics Production. She recruited the old noses back into the business. This is how the Soviet Union, once it began in the 1920s to import the raw materials necessary, continued to produce perfumes that equaled those produced in the rest of Europe. ▬ ### ▬
▬ We can read the description and imagine it on the collar of a Kremlin wife, mingling with gunpowder, sour wine breath, and the Moscow morning. ▭ We step back to a windowless workshop, with equipment and compounds, glass and oils imported years before, when he still worked for Rallet, before Brocard was turned to producing soap: Auguste Ippolitovich Michel came up with Krasnaya Moskva—or, seizing the chance, he pulled the recipe from the archives, or, more likely, his memory. This was the showpiece of the Soviet perfume industry. ▭ I imagine that it smelled like those of us that still helplessly associate perfume with women older than our mothers imagine their generic imaginary perfume to smell. By this, I mean that it was undoubtedly heavy, floral, and complex. We can read the description and imagine it on the collar of a Kremlin wife, mingling with gunpowder, sour wine breath, and the Moscow morning. ▭ What did Coty’s L’Origan smell like in 1902? What did Guerlain’s L’Heure Bleue smell like in 1912? What did Krasnaya Moskva smell like in 1927? Would it help if I informed you that it was supposedly thick with blasts of alpha-ionone violet and warm with bergamot and neroli? Would it help to know that it played with jasmine and rose and ylang ylang, then closed with patchouli? The recipe was changed significantly in 1954, which opened it up to constant, disastrous tinkering until production ceased. ▬ ### ▬
▬ The names of the new era were political; the olfactory world was semantically bolshevized. Perfumes and cosmetics were now called Golden Grain, New Life (Novyy Byt), Red Poppy (Krasnyy Mak), Red Moscow (Krasnaya Moskva), Spartakiada, Hero of the North (Geroy Severa), Avantgarde. Later yet, in the Sturm und Drang of the First Five-Year Plan, they would bear the names of the building blocks of communism: Stratostat (a stratospheric balloon), On Watch, Our Answer to Collective Farmers (Nash Otvet Kolkhoznikam), Pioneer, Tank, White Sea Canal (Belomorsky Kanal), Hello to the Chelyuskin Crew (Privyet Chelyuskinam, named after a Soviet expeditionary ship that got trapped in the Arctic pack ice in 1933, though the crew was rescued), Collective Farm Victory (Kolkhoznaya Pobeda). And the new scents became a trademark of the new class of social climbers. ▭ This is Karl Schlögel, from The Scent of Empires: Chanel No. 5 and Red Moscow, translated by Jessica Spengler. ▭ In theory, the art of perfume was intended for the masses, where it could mix with the sulphur steam of stewed cabbage. Production runs for fragrances went into the thousands of tens of thousands. At the end of the 1930s, the Soviet Union made as much fragrance as France. If the high-end perfumes were usually still reserved for the privileged, which at least meant something different than it had before the October Revolution, the middle- and low-end was satisfied. ▬ ### ▬
▬ And on the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution, Auguste Michel … is assigned an important new task. He is to create a perfume worthy of the latest superlative the Soviet Union has to offer, a perfume named Palace of Soviets, with an aroma that adequately expresses this masterpiece of engineering. … What fragrance would encapsulate the era of Stalin? Michel hesitates, sceptical that a perfume smelling of cement, steel and mortar will find an audience, but he accepts the commission and gets to work. ▭ This is Karl Schlögel again. ▭ If his perfume of cement and steel perfume was ever realized, few had the chance to smell it. Another sample was chosen to represent the Palace of Soviets. Michel disappeared. There is no record of what happened to him. ▭ The industry was reorganized. Perfume production increased from hundreds of thousands to millions of bottles. ▬ ### ▬
◧◨◧◨◧◨◧◨◧◨◧◨ [BULGAKOV INTERLUDE]
▬ With an engaging leer Faggot announced that the firm would exchange absolutely free of charge, any lady's old dress and shoes for model dresses and shoes from Paris, adding that the offer included handbags and odds and ends that go in them. ▭ The cat began bowing and scraping, its forepaws gesturing like a commissionaire opening a door. ▭ In a sweet though slightly hoarse voice the girl made an announcement which sounded rather cryptic but which, judging from the faces of the women in the stalls, was very enticing: 'Guerlain, Chanel, Mitsouko, Narcisse Noir, Chanel Number five, evening dresses, cocktail dresses...' ▭ Faggot bent double, the cat bowed and the girl opened the glass-fronted showcases. ▬ This is Mikhail Bulgakov, from The Master and Margarita (the translator is Michael Glenny). This is black magic in 1930s Moscow. This might be taken as proof that not everyone was satisfied with Krasnaya Moskva, or that it was as rare as Mitsouko, or that unhealthy nostalgia still reigned, or that Bulgakov did not mix with women that spritzed Red Poppy on their wrists. ▬ ### ▬
◧◨◧◨◧◨◧◨◧◨◧◨ [THE HISTORY CUTS OFF HERE AND THE QUESTION IS WHY DID ANYBODY BOTHER, WHICH I DON’T SATISFYINGLY ANSWER]
▬ In a sense, this question is easier to answer than other questions about, say, the presence of a particular strain of avant-garde art. Why was there opera? The answer follows: because there was perfume. But more seriously, Russian hygienic modernity was hard to dislodge, and the connection between fragrance and cleanliness affirmed before the October Revolution was solid. And they possessed the equipment and expertise to make the nation smell sweet. And perhaps the new elite wanted some of the trappings of the old elite. If you have opera, Perhaps they wanted to compete with the French, culturally or industrially. ▭ And perhaps there is something to the line used to describe Krasnaya Moskva, which, from memory, was that it invited a “feeling of normal healthy nostalgia,” which might have been accompanied by some kind of ameliorative effect. ▭ But is there any Soviet perfume theory? No. ▭ We might try to imagine it—a Leninist line on perfume, the Trotskyite response, and Stalin sweeping aside the debate with industrial organization. ▭ I do not have the expertise to imagine what that would look like. ▭ But, yes, it is good to smell good because it makes you feel that life is worth living. That is the theory. It is good to smell good because there is art or craft in the creation of fragrances. ▭ I came across a section from Marx that is, if not the most frequently cited of his lines in treatments of sensory history, quite useful, I think. ▭ He is talking about estrangement of man from their senses. Desires are replaced with drives. “Even the need for fresh air ceases for the worker.” Their world is “contaminated with the mephitic breath of plague” that infects that place that they find themselves precariously occupying. He goes on: ▭ Light, air, etc.—the simplest animal cleanliness—ceases to be a need for man. Dirt—this stagnation and putrefaction of man—the sewage of civilisation (speaking quite literally)—comes to be the element of life for him. Utter, unnatural neglect, putrefied nature, comes to be his life-element. None of his senses exists any longer. and not only in his human fashion, but in an inhuman fashion, and therefore not even in an animal fashion. ▭ This is from “The Meaning of Human Requirements where there is Private Property and under Socialism,” translated by Martin Milligan. ▭ He is describing not merely a grinding down of man to an animal existence, since even animal needs are not fulfilled, but something far worse. The senses fade, like those of a creature that lives underground. The sense of smell, most sensitive to this “stagnation and putrefaction,” this chronic uncleanliness, goes first. Nobody smells the filth around them. ▭ And so, to go further, as he writes before this section, “man is affirmed in the objective world not only in the act of thinking, but with all his senses.” ▭ I do not want to live in that way. ▬ ### ▬
The details throughout come from two books by two books by Karl Schlögel: The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World, translated by Rodney Livingstone, and The Scent of Empires: Chanel No. 5 and Red Moscow, translated by Jessica Spengler. I also drew on Sovetskiy stil: Parfyumeriya i kosmetika by Marina Koleva, which I highly recommend.