PARIS — Soviet-era Russia was not a particularly friendly environment for aspiring fine watchmakers. For Konstantin Chaykin, who was born in St. Petersburg in 1975, there was no school where he could learn the craft that he dreamed of pursuing. So he taught himself.

“I started out selling watches in a small store that I owned,” Mr. Chaykin said in an interview during the Belles Montres watch show in Paris last month. “I began to fix watches myself. I would read up on watch repair from any and all sources I could find. Once I started reading and repairing watches, I never stopped.”

In 2003, he saw an exhibition of historic Breguet watches at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Inspired, he decided on the spot to create his own watches.

He started, with a confidence based on blissful ignorance, with a tourbillon — the complication invented by the 18th-century master Abraham-Louis Breguet that remains to this day one of the supreme tests of watchmaking skill.