The Scent of Empires. Karl Schlogel

a modified version of this perfume that Beaux would present to Coco Chanel in 1920 after the end of the Russian Civil War. The information we have about Auguste Michel’s life, by contrast, is scant and contradictory. Some say he was the son of a French perfume manufacturer who had migrated to Russia in the nineteenth century, but he himself claimed in an interview in 1936 that he had been born and raised in Grasse on the French Riviera. He said he had trained as a perfumer there and then joined Rallet in Moscow in 1908, where he was apparently poached by Brocard.²²

It is very likely that Ernest Beaux and Auguste Michel knew each other, and that Michel was aware of the fragrances being composed by Beaux. We know for certain that both men were students of Alexandre Lemercier, the master perfumer at Rallet, and that both benefitted from the innovative work of the perfumer Robert Bienaimé at Houbigant, who had used an aldehyde (C-12 MNA) in the composition of his hugely successful perfume Quelques Fleurs from 1912. Auguste Michel, who had moved from Rallet to Brocard, therefore knew the formula for Bouquet de Napoleon, which became the starting point for the creation of his Le Bouquet Favori de l’Impératrice, or The Empress’s Favourite Bouquet. According to Natalya Dolgopolova, this means that in 1912–13, identical – or at least related – perfumes were created in two different Moscow factories under two different names.²³ Ernest Beaux of Rallet & Co. took the formula for Bouquet de Napoleon and Bouquet de Catherine with him to France, where he created Chanel No. 5, while Auguste Michel’s career took him from Rallet to Brocard and then, when Brocard was nationalized in 1917, to Novaya Zarya.²⁴

      In any case, Krasnaya Moskva was released into the world to become the best-known Soviet perfume, and after the demise of the Soviet Union and a brief hiatus resulting from the privatization of the perfume industry, the fragrance returned to the Russian market as a successful remake. The smell of this third-generation Krasnaya Moskva is probably far removed from the original scent. In order to experience that original scent – to actually smell it – you would have to reconstruct the earlier versions using the original formulas and original ingredients. Another possibility would be to find a tightly sealed, well-preserved bottle and open it. Or you could go by descriptions of the scent from Soviet experts such as R. A. Fridman: ‘A warm and delicate, even somewhat hot, yet intimate and soft perfume. A typically female perfume.’²⁵

      If it seems that knowledge was safely transferred and continuity maintained here, it was thanks to yet another coincidence – as revealed in an interview from the 1930s – that Auguste Michel was the man responsible for this continuity. After living through the turmoil of revolution and civil war in Moscow, Michel wanted to return home, following much of the rest of Moscow’s French community who had already gone back to France. But the passport he submitted to the authorities in central Moscow to apply for a visa was never given back to him. Even without papers, he was given a residence permit, so he stayed and resumed work at the nationalized Brocard factory. This carried on until diplomatic relations were restored between France and the Soviet Union in 1924. Then Michel finally got his passport back. But he opted to stay in Soviet Russia – perhaps because he was able to work again, perhaps because he had found the love of his life there. In any case, there seems to be no doubt that Michel played a significant role in the re-establishment of the Russian perfume industry after the revolution, which itself brought about a ‘paradigm shift’ in the world of fragrances.

      3 Brocard bottle

Before the revolution, the highly developed Russian perfume industry had been shaped largely by foreign (mostly French) firms that competed fiercely for the huge Russian–Eurasian market. But after the industry was nationalized, its priorities were radically different. Its main focus then became the mass production of everyday toiletries and cosmetics for the general population. The foreign experts had departed, the supply chains for importing and exporting essential ingredients had been disrupted, and the entire perfume sector had to be reorganized and placed on a new footing.

      The factories in the soap and perfume industry were first consolidated under a committee known as Tsentrozhir, or the Main Committee of the Fat Industry of the Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh), and then, from 1921, in a trust referred to as Zhirkost. When the New Economic Policy (NEP) began in the early 1920s, there were around 470 such trusts. All major cosmetics enterprises were incorporated into these trusts, including the former Brocard and Rallet factories. They produced perfumes, soap, eau de cologne, powders and toothpaste, all of which were also given new names. The cosmetics trust, which was reorganized multiple times, has gone down in Soviet history under the French-sounding name TeZhe. This abbreviation stood for Gosudarstvennyy Trest Zhirovoy i Kosti Obrabatyvayushchey Promyshlennosti, or the State Trust of the Fat and Bone Processing Industry. TeZhe (pronounced like a French tejé) became a brand name and the quintessential Soviet cosmetics label of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1926–7, TeZhe had 11 factories with 6,120 workers and 652 salaried employees, with perfume accounting for only a small portion of production.²⁶ With its French-sounding name, TeZhe was in semantic competition with French brands still familiar from the pre-revolutionary period, including Rallet, Coty, Guerlain and Houbigant. It also operated boutiques, some of them quite luxurious, in major Soviet cities, especially in hotels frequented by foreigners. TeZhe covered every sector relevant to perfume production, including chemical labs, glass-cutting factories and retail outlets. In its scope and range of products, the Soviet cosmetics and perfume trust became the largest of its kind in the world.

TeZhe stood for the return of sweet smells after years of war and civil war, but it also glossed over the reality that the industry was taking an entirely new path. Perfumery was now part of a state enterprise beholden no longer to the laws of supply and demand or the ‘anarchical competition’ of brands, but instead to an economic plan. The production of perfume thus became a state matter, and deciding on preferred fragrances and cosmetics, perfumes and labels, became the order of the day for the People’s Commissar for Food Production and Light Industry. Even the empire of scent was now governed by the ‘primacy of politics’.

The scent of a perfume once known as Bouquet de Napoleon or Bouquet de Catherine was the starting point for two other perfumes that were revolutionary in their own way. The scent was (nearly) identical, but it would take two different routes into modernity in the years (and decades) to come. A paradigm shift would take place in design as well – one that would find expression in the appearance of the bottles. Everything moved in the direction of simplicity – in one case, likely as a response to a surfeit of playfulness and ornamental excess; in the other, out of pure necessity. Still, the shapes of the bottles have a touch of geometry, functionalism and Suprematism about them. The labels for the perfumes from Brocard were probably created by an artist named Nikolai Strunnikov, while the packaging and the bottle for Krasnaya Moskva were designed by Andrei Yevseyev. Vladimir Rossinski is another unjustly forgotten artist who had also previously worked for Brocard. Before the revolution, he had designed the tasteful commemorative publication for Brocard’s fiftieth anniversary (1864–1914), which recounted the company’s history in part through coloured cartoons that were spectacular for their time. TeZhe adopted many aspects of the pre-revolutionary designs.²⁷ In the period of the New Economic Policy, from around 1921 to 1928, the old designs lived on in a slightly modernized form, but the names of the products changed. One poster advertised a loose powder with the sweet-sounding name Swan Down, while another featured a product named Spartakiade, recalling the proletarian games. Old and new forms coexisted, a situation often found in societies in transition and under a diarchy. But this particular transition would involve a collision in the world of fragrances, and it would not leave the creators of those fragrances untouched.

Notes

      1 1 Here and throughout the book, I am following the biography of Gabrielle Chanel written by Edmonde Charles-Roux, Chanel and Her World, first published in French in 1979. There are many other accounts of her life; see, e.g., Axel Madsen, Coco Chanel; Paul Morand, The Allure of Chanel. Regarding Grasse as the ‘Rome of fragrances’, see Grasse.

      2 2 Tilar J.