June 22 - the beginning of the Great Patriotic War ...

And outside the window, outside the window is the beauty of the new moon.
Weeping willows whisper with Bug.
Forty-first year, early June -
Still alive, still alive
Everything, everything ...

Everything is ahead, everything is still, everything is the day before.
Twenty sunrises remained happy.
Forty-first year, early June -
Still alive, still alive
Everything, everything ...

It was warm summer days, the air in Moscow was filled with flowering linden trees. In the tenth grade, exams began, someone was going to rest in the Crimea, L. Utyosov and L. Orlova watched from the posters ... Nothing, it seems, foreshadowed that huge tragedy that would begin soon in the perfume industry, there will be silence. It would seem, why the spirits in this tragic time, when the number of killed, dispossessed is innumerable. However, the spirits of the Soviet era during this period of grief and loss had an unexpected patriotic pathos on a par with the music and poetry of those years.

Chemical plants, including Esters, were evacuated from Moscow and Leningrad to the Urals. Already on the ice of Lake Ladoga, all the equipment of the Lenaromat plant was removed under shelling. The Moscow factories "Novaya Zarya" and "Svoboda" went over to martial law - men went to the front, women built anti-tank barriers. Before perfumery? ... At the Svoboda factory day and night they produced soap and tooth powder for the army. The population was given everything on cards and in very limited quantities. Then the bar of soap became a highly valuable thing.

The Novaya Zarya factory produced cologne for the senior officers from the remaining reserves of ethyl alcohol. For the rest, it was not available either by cards or for money. Ethyl alcohol was a strategically important product during the war. Before the war, it was produced from food raw materials, and already in the first years of the war, vast territories of our country, where up to 38% of grain and 87% of sugar beet were grown, were occupied by the Nazis. But alcohol was very much needed not only for perfumery, but also for medicine and pharmaceuticals. Therefore, for the production of alcohol used various agricultural products of Siberia, Altai, the Far East.

Patriotic enthusiasm increased every day, and not only on the battlefields or at the factory machines in the rear, but also in the cultural space of Soviet wartime life, which gave rise to outstanding works of music and poetry. And the spirits "Krasnaya Moskva", "Wait for me" breathed their aroma over the devastated country as a symbol of the service of perfumery to human feelings:

In mud, in darkness, in hunger, in sorrow,
Where death, like a shadow, trailed at his heels,
We were so happy
We breathed such stormy freedom,
That the grandchildren would envy us ...