Historians normally do not analyze fragrances, etc. But it was an everyday experience to go to the opera or a festival and there was always a certain scent in the air. I mean, I was interested in how the turbulences of times and the social changes are reflected in the air, literally. Bourgeois decadels. In the 30s there started the reconstruction of this industry and the new middle class, which emerged in the 30s. They had their own aspirations and expectations for a good life. It's one of the nostalgic moments, I would say.
Adam Rutherford asks what ordinary life was like in the Soviet Union and how far its collapse helps to explain Russia today.
Karl Schlögel is one of the world’s leading historians of the Soviet Union. In his latest book, The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World (translated by Rodney Livingstone), he recreates an encyclopaedic and richly detailed history of daily life, both big and small. He examines the planned economy, the railway system and the steel city of Magnitogorsk as well as cookbooks, parades and the ubiquitous perfume Red Moscow.
The historian Katja Hoyer presents a more nuanced picture of life in East Germany, far from the caricature often painted in the West. In Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 she acknowledges the oppression and hardship often faced by ordinary people, but argues that this now-vanished society was also home to its own distinctive and rich social and cultural landscape.
But what did it feel like to live through the fall of communism and then democracy? These are the questions Adam Curtis looked to reveal in his 7-part television series, Russia 1985-1999 TraumaZone (available on BBC iPlayer). The archive footage from thousands of hours of tapes filmed by BBC crews across the country records the lives of Russians at every level of society as their world collapsed around them.
Producer: Katy Hickman