Timothy Snyder
provided a blurb for the publisher of this book and that caused me to
buy it, since Snyder’s own work is very, very impressive. It’s a short book and
I read it at one sitting, which may explain why I noticed some unnecessary
repetitions of basic bits of information, suggesting that the book was prepared
from shorter pieces prepared for separate occasions. An editor could have dealt
with this.
The book doesn’t quite come off. I love the idea of taking
something apparently minor or peripheral, like the history of the recipe for a
perfume, and trying to make the whole world emerge from it as if from a grain
of sand. But partly because of incomplete information - for example, the fate in
the 1930s of one of the main characters, the Tsarist- turned Soviet-perfumer Auguste
Michel - we are left with sketches rather than any whole picture.
Brevity also creates the occasional misunderstanding. After Stalin’s
death, his henchman Lavrenty Beria appears in person ( p 116) to release
Molotov’s wife Polina Zhemchuzhina, exiled in 1949 and re-arrested again shortly
before Stalin’s death. She is a major figure in the narrative since in the 1930s
she headed up Soviet cosmetic and perfume manufacture and in 1939 achieved
the distinction of being the USSRs first female full-rank People’s Commissar (
p 107). She was more than Molotov's wife, though it was that which first gave a place at the top table. That Beria appeared in person to release her makes him sound rather
gallant. Separately, we are told that she remained a convinced Stalinist and
hated Khruschev (p 117). The context is this: immediately after Stalin’s death,
Beria formed a ruling troika with Malenkov and Molotov; Molotov could easily have made
his wife’s release a condition of his participation. The aim of the troika was
to maintain the status quo. It was
ousted in Khruschev’s and Zhukov’s coup of June 1953; Beria was executed in
December 1953 and those now in power explicitly or tacitly agreed that with the
death of Beria - without question an
evil figure - they would henceforth stop
killing each other. Beria was most definitely not gallant and Khruschev stopped
not only Beria but Polina and her husband Molotov from carrying on Stalinist business
as usual.
For me the most interesting part of the book was the reminders
it provided of the vast army of foreign talent assembled in Russia before 1914,
not only to develop Russia’s infrastructure and heavy industry (think, notably,
of John Hughes in the Donbass) but to service the tastes of Russia’s most
wealthy, the 1% who lived a life of leisure and ostentation funded by rents
generated far away from St Petersburg or Moscow and ultimately based on the
labour of an impoverished population.
