Froment, who staged a major Chanel No. 5 exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2012, says this perfume is the embodiment of the ‘quintessence of its time’.14
A ‘paradigm shift’ of unequalled brutality had taken place in Russia in yet another ‘time of troubles’ – a decade of war, revolution and civil war. In the midst of this chaos, factories were shut down and expropriated, their staff expelled and murdered, and changes in ownership led to archives being destroyed or scattered across the globe. Plants closed when their workers left for the countryside to find food, the supply of raw materials was interrupted in the turmoil of the Civil War and blockade, and the authorities considered discontinuing the perfume industry as a luxury sector altogether. Foreign experts had disappeared (Germans were considered ‘enemy aliens’ and fled as soon as the war broke out in 1914), and work discipline had collapsed, as had production. Large cosmetic and perfume companies, such as Brocard & Co. in Moscow, lost personnel; Brocard had employed 1,000 people before the revolution but only had 200 afterwards. Master perfumers and technicians fled, and factory buildings were repurposed. The former Brocard building was temporarily used to print Gosznaki, or Soviet paper money, while the successor to Brocard had to move into a former wallpaper factory. An opulent publication commemorating Brocard’s fiftieth anniversary in 1914 shows that, at the time, the company had one of Moscow’s most advanced factories and one of the largest perfume plants in the world.15 It is no surprise that, in the general deprivation of the Civil War period – with paper in short supply and entire libraries winding up in the stoves known as burzhuiki – it was unthinkable that the impressive advertising posters that had made the company famous throughout the empire would continue to be used.
Private enterprises were nationalized and given new names. Brocard first became State Soap Factory No. 5 and was later renamed Novaya Zarya (New Dawn). Rallet & Co. became Soap Factory No. 4 and then Svoboda (Freedom) after 1924. The S. I. Chepelevetsky and Sons perfume factory was turned into the Profrabotnik (Trade Unionist) plant, while Köhler became Farmzavod (Pharmaceutical Plant) No. 12.16 If and when production resumed, it was to focus entirely on the toiletries urgently needed by the population. The perfume industry thus returned to its origins in soap-making – at least for a brief time. Priority was placed on the needs of Red Army soldiers who required basic toiletries to exchange for bread during their food procurement campaigns in the countryside. Soap and perfume became precious commodities in the barter economy, in which a single piece of soap could be equivalent to a life-saving loaf of bread.17
According to Russian researchers, it was primarily the workers and employees themselves who were responsible for ensuring that factories threatened with closure were able to resume operations. A worker and member of the Bolshevik Party named Yevdokiya Ivanovna Uvarova was appointed director of Soap Factory No. 5 (formerly Brocard) and made a personal appeal to Lenin himself on behalf of her factory.18 As a result, some of the valuable essences used by Brocard and other companies could be recovered and used to restart operations on a much reduced scale.
The materials left behind by Brocard and Rallet after the revolution and nationalization – the tools, machines and ingredients – were not the most important legacy of these companies. Their real heritage was their ongoing work and the knowledge and expertise of their specialists and managers. At Brocard (or Novaya Zarya), the head perfumer was Auguste Ippolitovich Michel, who possessed the formulas for Brocard’s perfumes and knew how they were produced. Essential oils began to be imported again in 1924, and Auguste Michel set about composing fragrances. His first new creation was Manon in 1925. Krasnaya Moskva (Red Moscow) was developed in the same year. As described by the perfumer S. A. Voitkevich, it was composed of essential oils of orange blossom, lemon, bergamot and musk. The base note was alpha isomethyl ionone, which made up 35 per cent of the fragrance; another account claims that the perfume had sixty components, including iris, violet, clove, ylang-ylang, rose and ambergris.19 Though the scent was created in 1925, it was not launched on the market until 1927, for the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution.20
For a long time, no one talked about Auguste Ippolitovich Michel in the Soviet Union, and his authorship of the fragrance was repeatedly called into doubt. Apparently even pioneers of the Soviet perfume industry who had been trained by him, such as Alexei Pogudkin and Pavel Ivanov, spoke poorly of the foreign perfumer. But in 2011, Antonina Vitkovskaya, director general of Novaya Zarya, declared once and for all that it was Auguste Michel who had ‘created the famous Krasnaya Moskva’. She presented a bottle of it as a gift to Dmitry Medvedev, president of Russia at the time, saying: ‘Krasnaya Moskva is a legend of Russian perfumery. A sample from 1913 was preserved in our factory . . . We give it to you so you can hold a piece of the history of Russian perfumery in your hands.’ It was a vintage flacon of the original perfume that had been renamed Krasnaya Moskva after the revolution. In the Moscow Museum for the Art of Perfumery at the Novaya Zarya plant, bottles of Bouquet de Catherine and Krasnaya Moskva were exhibited in cases next to each other.21
In truth, the story is not so clear. While we know the details and trajectory of Ernest Beaux’s life, Auguste Michel’s biography is largely a mystery. Ernest Beaux, son of the head perfumer for A. Rallet & Co., purveyor to the tsar, was born in 1881 in Moscow. After studying and completing his military service in France, he returned to Russia in 1902 and became the chief perfumer at Rallet, where he achieved great success with his Bouquet de Napoleon in 1912, released to mark the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Borodino. This success was repeated in 1913 when he developed Bouquet de Catherine for the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty. In 1914, the perfume commemorating Catherine the Great was renamed Rallet No. 1 for the sake of Russia’s French allies in World War I. It was 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
