The Scent of Empires: Chanel No. 5 and Red Moscow, by Karl Schlögel

Abstract

This is a difficult book to summarise and review. Karl Schlögel is a German historian, a prize-winning scholar of Stalinism. But here he does not follow the usual conventions of the trade. The history of smell is far from the author’s previous work on dictatorship and terror; as a matter of fact, he confesses to knowing little about the subject at the start, aside from his memory of the heavy scent of official Communism in East Germany, which turns out to have been Red Moscow (Krasnaya Moskva), the iconic Soviet perfume. The book is lightly researched and luxuriously written. It begins with a comparison of two iconic scents—Chanel No. 5 and Red Moscow: one French, the other Russian—and uses this to begin a discussion of the two different economies and ‘smellscapes’—although, as the story proceeds, No. 5 tends to fade into the background, reappearing only occasionally. This makes sense, since Schlögel is a Soviet specialist, and his sources are in Russian, German and English, with no French-language sources in the notes or the bibliography. Besides, the tale of Coco Chanel and her signature perfume is well known; the history of Krasnaya Moskva is not.