translated by Rodney Livingstone
Leonid Brezhnev was a petrolhead. His personal fleet included not only two Cadillacs, conferred on him by President Nixon, but also a Lincoln Continental, Citroën, Chevrolet and Chrysler — and I’m still on the Cs. The joke that went round Moscow was that the Soviet leader’s mother feared expropriation of their property: “But Lenya, what if the Bolsheviks come back?” But her massive, morose, mono-browed, medal-jangling son needn’t have worried.
Time was when every second Muscovite lived in a communal apartment, multi-generational families allotted no more than a single room of their own. Living cheek by jowl meant knowing one’s neighbors by their nocturnal moans and conjecturing the contents of their dinners from the decibels of their matutinal flatulence, as the poet and Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky observed in his essay “In a Room and a Half” — 11 people were accommodated in the communal apartment in Leningrad in which he grew up. It was all a little too close for comfort.
However, it wasn’t long before the politburo gave up this communitarian fantasy. Better sense prevailed. The mantra of Stalin’s heirs, Nikita Khrushchev especially, was essentially the same as that of Boris Johnson — “build, build, build” — with the only exception being that they actually delivered on it. Colossal housing projects, not all brutalist eyesores, sprung up.
If the state provisioned shelter, trade unions took charge of leisure. Here was an Eastern bloc peculiarity. To understand organized labor in the Soviet Union, one needs to turn the received image on its head. Think Sinatra rather than Scargill. On the Western side of the Iron Curtain, unions have always preoccupied themselves with work and wages. Break on through to the other side and they are all about rest and recreation.
An habitué since my penurious PhD days of a gritty East London banya, that Slavic institution where a bit of steam action and masochistic flogging can be had for a song, I was under the impression that Russian saunas were always a working-class thing. But it wasn’t always that way, Schlögel says. Right up to the First World War, only the nobility and bourgeoisie lounged about in them. It was the Bolsheviks who brought the alien luxury of Biarritz and Baden-Baden to the great unwashed.
To understand organized labor in the Soviet Union, one needs to turn the received image on its head. Think Sinatra rather than Scargill.
As early as 1920, the civil war still in progress, party poets and philosophers could be found convalescing in the dozens of sanatoriums set up by the Pythonesque-sounding TseKUBU, the typically baroque Soviet acronym for the Central Commission for the Improvement of the Everyday Lives of Scientists. And by the Seventies unions were sponsoring close to ten million holidays to warmer climes every year.
Yalta of the history textbooks is the gray setting of the wartime carve-up of Europe by Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt. But fast-forward 20 years to the Soviet swinging Sixties and you have an altogether different picture of the Crimean resort town: “Never-ending orgies, madly developing love stories, sleepless nights and dangerous relationships,” according to Schlögel. The rhythmic rustling in the woods accompanied the “rhythmic beat of the waves”. So the big state gave the little man his first taste of fun.
“Towards Abundance!” screams the preface of The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, the insufferably didactic state-approved cookbook published in 1939. It became a runaway hit, outselling many a Stalin opuscule; we needn’t self-flagellate that today’s eggheads cannot topple air fryer cookbooks from the top of the best-seller list. It went through many editions in the following decades, dazzling readers with its large color plates of overflowing tins and opulent recipes. Sample the myasnoy, a meat salad of boiled potatoes, carrots, eggs and sausages doused in mayonnaise.
Looking back, it was only a short step from Stalin’s cookbook to Gorbachev’s appearance in a cringeworthy Pizza Hut commercial at the turn of the century (“Good friends. Great pizza”). Cold Warriors on both sides were loath to admit it, but capitalism and Communism preached the same gospel: consumerism.
So much for Moscow’s egalitarian rhetoric — the class divide returned with a vengeance. A red bourgeoisie of stellar, meritorious workers emerged: “[Alexey] Stakhanov bought a suit, hat and gloves for himself, a silk dress, coat, sweater, perfume and silk lingerie for his wife,” observed a visiting US journalist of the much-decorated Russian miner. Scarcely a hair’s breadth separated the Protestant from the Stakhanovite work ethic.
It was only a short step from Stalin’s cookbook to Gorbachev’s appearance in a cringeworthy Pizza Hut commercial.
The story of Red Moscow, “the scent of the Soviet era”, shows how capitalism, Communism and consumerism blend. This inspired concoction, with its “accent of fleur d’oranger” (no, me neither), was the product of two revolutions, the French one of 1789 that had Parisian perfumers and their aristocratic patrons fleeing to Moscow, and the Russian one of 1917, which led to the nationalization of those French émigré boutiques. The classic Soviet fragrance developed by the unsentimentally named Union Trust of Distinguished Perfumery, Fat-processing, Soap-making and Synthetics Production, it transpires, was only a rebranded edition of Ernest Beaux’s 1913 Bouquet de Catherine II, made for the Romanovs.
Now, there’s a further twist in the tale. Beaux fled the Russian Revolution to Cannes, where a Romanov prince introduced him to a certain Coco Chanel with whom he was having a fling. Not a fan of scents — “women only wear perfume when they need to hide bad smells” — she was nevertheless persuaded by the olfactory charm of Beaux’s Bouquet. You’ve guessed it: Chanel No 5 and Red Moscow are essentially the same.
The Soviet Century offers the kind of pleasure that I imagine an 18th-century gentleman amateur would have derived from leafing through Diderot’s Encyclopédie, which is to say it is not a work of history. Rather, it is a collection of 60 unrelated vignettes — a few interesting, a few esoteric, and many more just plain dull. A German historian at the European University Viadrina, Schlögel says he’s a votary of histoire totale, of “encyclopaedic completeness”, but is all too aware that it is an “unachievable ideal”. “I would like to have added a few more sections had I not feared outstaying my welcome,” he writes. Reader, he does outstay his welcome.
The Soviet Century offers the kind of pleasure that I imagine an 18th-century gentleman amateur would have derived from leafing through Diderot’s Encyclopédie.
Lying flat on my desk, his doorstopper resembles an obese Rolodex. Quite fittingly. There’s a fair amount of name-dropping here, not to mention a great deal of padding. The potted timeline of the Revolution is no more than a crude Wikipedia summary. Similarly, the tedious inventories of goods bought, buildings built and figures purged have the feel of BuzzFeed listicles.
On the few occasions Schlögel fancies himself as a historian rather than a storyteller, that is, as an interpreter rather than chronicler of events, he reveals himself to be rather out of his depth. Ukrainians may justifiably scoff at Schlögel’s suggestion that hubris has disappeared along with Communism. On his account, Russia today is moving “towards greater reflection … towards retrieving the most important aspects of every culture, a sense of form and a more measured approach”.
Likewise, take his lyrical, but ultimately banal explanation of the collapse of the USSR. Regimes, apparently, “perish when they are utterly exhausted”. In the event, it was “technical megalomania” and “state egotism” that did for the Soviet Union. One wonders how older, equally confident societies — Britain or the US, say — have survived. Readers in the market for a good political history would be better served by Ronald Grigor Suny’s or Geoffrey Hosking’s accounts of the rise and fall of Communist Russia.
Still, The Soviet Century is worth a cursory read for the anecdotes about everyday life. All in all, it’s a Tolstoyan tribute to a remarkable society that is, by turns, “so incredibly resilient and so disastrously dysfunctional”. It was precisely Russia’s anarchic aspects that confounded the grand designs of Communist apparatchiks. The Soviet experiment, in essence, was an ordering project. Stalin’s encyclopedists superbly illustrated this, trying, rather foolhardily, to replace alphabetical entries with a more meaningful system of categorization. But now dysfunction is back. Alphabetical anarchy has been restored. In the latest Russian encyclopedia, Stalin shares a page with Sylvester Stallone, and Marx sits cheek by jowl with the Marx Brothers.
Pratinav Anil is a lecturer in history at St. Edmund Hall, at the University of Oxford