The opening is garish, citric, a firework of grapefruit and vetiver. After a while, juniper and a trace of coriander follow, all very light, very green. This perfume is a stimulant, fragrant adrenaline. Two hours later, the unrest continues. The base note is herbaceous and vital, which at some point becomes exhausting, almost a bit sawing. Is that the “technogenic chord” that was mentioned when “Checkmate” was announced?
“Checkmate” is probably the first perfume in honor of a fighter pilot, namely the stealth bomber of the same name from the house of the Russian state company Rostec. This naturally begs the question: When do you wear it? Before use? After the mission? Instead of this?
Oxana Tschernysheva is a synaesthetist, she sees smells as colors
Oxana Chernysheva, the head behind the fragrance, has never thought about such aspects. She invited people to the meeting in a St. Petersburg gallery on Marsfeld, where she gives master classes for budding perfumers. She has been in business for eight years and heads the “Guild of Perfumers”, a company for niche fragrances in St. Petersburg. The name sounds like large laboratories full of virtuosos, but it essentially consists of Chernysheva and a handful of employees.
It doesn’t smell like that, but that’s what it looks like, the scent: “Checkmate” with a black horse’s head
(Photo: Alexander Utkin)
Oxana Tschernyschewa is a synaesthetist, so neurobiologically particularly gifted. She sees smells as colors, sometimes she organizes events in which she brings musical notes and perfume chords together. When she approached the Rostec PR agency with her proposal for “Checkmate”, she had the image of a cloudless blue sky in her head, clarity, sun, deep peace. – But isn’t it a fighter plane? “Yes. But at the beginning I didn’t realize it at all. I liked the lightness of the aircraft, its silvery sheen, its maneuverability. The shape is neither male nor female. I actually thought it was a private jet.”
Now the Sukhoi S-75 Checkmate is a fighter aircraft like there has ever been, a fifth generation jet, full to the brim with digital high-tech and artificial intelligence. The S-75 flies at Mach 2, is invisible to the radar and, at $ 30 million, is significantly cheaper than competing products from the USA, France or Sweden. When it is available.
Because everything is still a draft, all promises, everything advertising, also and above all Oxana Chernysheva’s scent. Rostec presented the S-75 at the Dubai Airshow International in mid-November; it will not be produced until next year at the earliest. The perfume was an original give-away for customers in the Gulf, which on the one hand meant that Chernysheva had to work with an alcohol-free carrier, out of consideration for the Arab hosts. In the Christian West, on the other hand, the bottle with the mahogany black horse’s head – the knight in chess – does not yet offer a solution for the difficult search for Christmas presents for him.
The commercial sounds more like grim Putin rhetoric than a light scent
The clients have tried to achieve a broad impact. Tschernysheva had designed two fragrances, “both cool, both with a certain sharpness”, but one was clearly wilder, “a hooligan”: “It would have taken courage for this fragrance.” Rostec opted for the “politically more correct variant”. She then had to revise her work three times to make it more pleasing, smoother, more feminine. The military-industrial giant Rostec, which Putin himself created in 2007, wanted a unisex perfume.
the commercial for “Checkmate”, admittedly, sounds more threatening, more like a Putin speech on the Ukraine crisis: “Where most people hesitate, there are a handful who are changing the world. Where most people play by the rules, some rewrite the rules . ” But Rostec presented itself as sensual on social media and praised the perfume’s echoes of metal, glass and leather, in other words: of the jet’s cockpit. Only after an hour nothing can be seen of this “technogenic chord”. “Of course, glass alone has no smell,” admits Tschernysheva: “The mixture of components creates an idea of cold, transparency, fragility, that is, of glass.” So smell it again? No, still no cockpit. Not even a small side window.
“Checkmate” is Chernysheva’s most recent contribution to daily politics, but not her first historical-political fragrance. The Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg brought out a series on the 100th anniversary of the revolution in 2017. Tschernysheva contributed a fresh combination entitled “Wassilij Kandinskij”, which she describes as a sequence from green to yellow to blue, for non-synaesthetes: a development from lime to Damascus rose to violet and amber. She dedicated her second fragrance to the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, it was a warm, cozy mixture of leather and chocolate that was especially appreciated by young women. Contributions from colleagues bore names such as “Anarchist” or, after a Mayakovsky poem, “Comrade Mauser”.
A quarter of a century’s scent of soldiers: a bottle with “25 Years of the Red Army” is on display in the Soviet Perfume Museum in Moscow
(Photo: imago stock & people)
Smells for weapons are not entirely new in Russia, neither are those for aircraft. The early Soviet Union added a touch of “Panzer” or a trace of “Stratostat” in honor of a particularly powerful tethered balloon.
In any case, smells as a gateway to Russian history have long been underestimated. This year the historian Karl Schlögel published his book “The Scent of Empires”. “Every time also has its own aroma, its scent, its smell”, he writes in it: “The entire history of the 20th century can be contained in a drop of a perfume.”
The first perfumes in the USSR were called “New Everyday” or “Spartakiade”
Schlögel tells the fateful connection between the most famous fragrance in the western world, Chanel No 5, and the most famous fragrance in the Soviet Union, Red Moscow. Both went back to a composition by French perfumers in the tsarist empire, only one, Ernest Beaux, went to France after the revolution and met Coco Chanel, while the other, Auguste Michel, stayed in Russia, built up the Soviet perfume industry and created the Red Moscow.
Like poetry, like painting, like all culture, perfumes and hygiene products were not a private matter in the Soviet Union, but a political commitment, instruments of departure, even if it was initially about basics. The liberated working class did not need eau de toilette, but soap, the folk soap “Narodnoe” for a kopeck or, to be precise: “October”.
The fragrances of yore had become treacherous, an indication of the wrong class affiliation such as glasses or clean fingernails. Even in the freer twenties, however, diplomatic wives and lovers of the red climbers no longer wanted to smell like the comrades in the factory. A first market for cosmetics emerged, camouflaged in a kind of mimicry with socialist key terms: “New everyday life” and “Spartakiade”, these scents were called “Golden Ear”, “Our answer to the collective farms” and after a prestige project by Stalin , in which 50,000 people died, “White Sea Canal”.
Oxana Tschernysheva knows the interaction between cosmetics and ideology, and she would like to make a film about the parallel story of Red Moscow and Chanel No 5. Russia’s perfumers deserve more respect, she says. Who knows that the perfumers in the late Soviet Union – unthinkable in the West – were planning a series with real amber and real musk? But then the gigantic empire collapsed, foreign smells sloshed into the country like manure, light, catchy notes that Chernysheva calls “cheap dung”, inferior to the heavier Soviet products: “It was trash, but we wanted it,” says Chernysheva : “We were tired of red caviar too.”
In the meantime, Russian customers have become more tasteful and more demanding, she says, and the market is highly dynamic. “Every year ten are added to the 200 independent fragrance creators in Russia. And twenty are received.” In order to bring out her lovingly designed scented walks through Saint Petersburg, she has to deal with bureaucracy, paternalism and then the pandemic. Some believe that scents can be used to make quick money. It is a tough business, tough as the shell of a fighter jet. The lucrative order from Rostec came not a minute too early.
It is early dark on Saint Petersburg. The first snow of the year blows over roads and canals in heavy clouds. It is an unforgettable fragrance that triggers flashes of memory in Russian poets like madeleines and linden blossom tea in Marcel Proust. One of them, Aminand Schpoljanski, called Don Aminado, wrote: “In the world there is only one smell / And in the world there is only one delight / That is the Russian winter at noon / That is the Russian smell of snow.”