A couple of years ago British journalist approached me for some photos and information about soviet watches. The article appeared in the Esquire magazine, which I quote below in it’s entirety.
Printed copy of the magazine is still available on their website here.
INTEREST IN SOVIET-ERA
WATCHES TAKES OFF
THE MOSCOW
TIMES
BY FINLAY RENWICK
Chances are you’ve never heard of the first watch to reach outer space. Eight years before Buzz Aldrin plonked his space boots down on the moon’s surface wearing, famously, an Omega Speedmaster, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man to journey into the eternal black ether, wore a Moscow-made Stur-manskie on his wrist, a handsome mechanical piece with a simple ecru face and screw-down case back on a brown leather strap. It was awarded to him upon completion of his astronaut training and it worked perfectly.
But while Omega’s space race presence cemented its status as a monolith of Swiss watchmaking, marketed in perpetuity as the
“Moonwatch”, Sturmanskie faded into obscurity, a relic of a bygone era. Yet for a growing band of collectors and enthusiasts, that’s sort of the whole point. “The Soviet watch industry, with its numerous factories and multitudes of brands, is quite controversial,” says Vlad N, owner of the Soviet Watch Store, one of the internet’s foremost marketplaces for vintage USSR-era timepieces. “It gave birth to some very ugly looking watches alongside some real masterpieces. One can concentrate on one brand like Poljot, Raketa, Vostok or Pobeda and realise years later that he hasn’t scratched the surface.
“It looks like we are in the middle of
ABOVE: RUSSIAN COSMONAUT YURI GAGARIN, WHO WORE THE FIRST WATCH IN SPACE A STURMANSKIE, PREPARES FOR THE LAUNCH OF THE VOSTOK ROCKET, 12 APRIL 1961
a revival of the [Soviet] mechanical watch market,” adds Vlad. “The Iron Curtain was the limiting factor in the long past, the exports were blocked by both sides. The industry-disruptive quartz movements followed and later cell phones kept the market in a tiny niche. For a long time there was low interest, it may have something to do with change of generations too, but now with cross border e-commerce, customers young and old are discovering and rediscovering the universe of Soviet watches.
And there is a lot to discover!”
Along with their historical relevance and the cult appeal of their retro designs, another key aspect of USSR collecting is the price and availability. While the market around vintage Swiss watches has been one of the luxury world’s biggest boom sectors in the last five years, one can still walk into an antique shop in Saint Petersburg, Volgograd or Novosibirsk and pick up a bargain. These watches are often referred to as “Babushkas”, for the fact that many were owned by grandparents.
On a recent trip to Tbilisi, I was thrilled to find the streets teeming each morning with market vendors, sitting idly, smoking copiously, selling vintage watches and cameras in various states of wear and disrepair, their goods spread out on blankets, shoulder-to-shoulder with competing sellers on the city’s pavements. While the vast majority of vintage Swiss watch collecting has become a preserved pursuit for the wealthy or the hardcore purist, a 50-year-old Soviet watch can still be had for a song at a strange market or dusty internet corner… at least for now.
“Over the past five or six years, the demand trajectory has been exponentially upwards,” says Vlad. “The number of qualified [watch] technicians though, as well as availability of watches, has been reducing gradually. With demand growing and supply not keeping up, I see only one way this is going. Let’s not forget, the absolute majority of factories are long gone and those few that are still around aren’t producing Soviet watches.”
Take the Vostok Amphibia, a watch with perhaps more than a nod to the aesthetic of a Rolex Submariner, yours for around £50 on eBay. Or an original Moscow-made watch by the brand Pobeda (“victory” in Russian), named in 1945 by Stalin, who demanded the first set of watches be ready to mark the anniversary of the Allied victory in WWII. Its designs are clean, elegant and minimalist. Or something by Raketa, a name synonymous with the Saint Petersburg Petrodvorets Watch Factory, one of the oldest in Russia, which is still operating now. But Raketa’s heyday was 60 years ago, when it produced “out there” watches with stone dials, wooden cases, transparent housing and models specially designed for the blind and visually impaired.
As with any watch collecting, the state of the piece is vital. “If you come across a NOS [new old stock, an old watch in brand-new condition] watch, it’s like a gem unearthed,” says Vlad. “Original vintage watch, unused condition, complete with its box and papers.
Grab it! It’s like opening a time capsule.”
In the 1950s, the USSR was second only to Switzerland in watch production. There was even a time when, long before the Cold War created a game of global chicken between the two superpowers, Russia’s watch industry benefited greatly from the know-how and technology of America. Soon after the stock market crash of 1929, Ohio-based watch manufacturer Dueber-Hampden went bankrupt.
The next year, it was bought by the Amtorg Trading Corporation the first USSR trade representation in the US) and its equipment and some 20 former employees headed to Moscow. These US watchmakers, engravers and technicians were rehired by the Soviets on a one-year contract to train Russian workers in watchmaking and help set up the First State Watch Factory, the USSR’s original watchmaking operation. Within a decade, the Soviet Union was turning out hundreds of thousands of watches per year.
Few people know more about the timepieces of the Soviet era than Dashiell Stanford, an American collector who owns around
ABOVE LEFT: ORIGINAL 44MM ‘KOMANDIRSKIE’ SUBMARINE MANUAL BY VOSTOK FACTORY, £78.
RIGHT: ORIGINAL 42MM MECHANICAL ‘RAKETA’ MANUAL BY PETRODVORETS FACTORY, €105
2,200 watches made in the Soviet Union. “I like to say this hobby turned from passion into obsession about 2,000 watches ago,” he says.
“Soviet watches are fascinating,” he continues. “From 1922 until 1991, the USSR built, developed, and let crumble, one of the greatest watchmaking enterprises on Earth.
Records are scarce, and much of what we know today is only thanks to a small but obsessive group of active collectors. There is no Manual for Soviet Watch Collecting’.
It takes work. But there is something special about owning a piece of history that is truly exceptional, truly exotic, truly unique – and from a place that is now no more.
“At their heart, Soviet watches are functional and utilitarian, but dig further and you uncover a world of mystery and intrigue, colour and pizzazz. I am not a collector of watches as much as I am a collector of history and culture – fragments of a life that once was. And indeed, these timepieces have an incredible tale to tell. They tell the stories of an industry in its infancy; of war and triumph and loss; of burgeoning technology; of the mother who bestowed upon her son a token of her love. These glimpses into a bygone era bring inanimate objects to life,” he says.
I ask Stanford why he feels that watches from the Soviet years, with their build quality,
history and talking-point scarcity, are still so relatively unknown? He mentions the general “branding” of the USSR – what we in the West associate with the grim vision of life behind the Iron Curtain.
“If you ask someone to tell you about the Soviet Union, a lot of things probably come to mind: hammer and sickle, the colour red, the space race, brutal winters, communism, authoritarian rule,” he says. “Whether intentionally or not, the Soviet ‘brand’ is strongly associated with these ideas. Wristwatches would not rank highly on the list. Most are probably not aware that the Soviets even made watches. It’s almost as if watches are too normal, too relatable. They are crowded out by more fantastic and sensationalised characteristics of the USSR.”
Stanford agrees the market is now appreciating for USSR pieces, but warns against going into collecting if you are in it to get rich.
“What I used to be able to source for $20 may have inflated two-and-a-half times in value, but that’s still just a $50 watch. So in relative terms, I don’t see Soviet watches holding any considerable value in the future, except for the most rare and collectible items. A damaged Sadko diver recently went for over $6,000 at auction, for example – an absolute fortune in the world of Soviet watches.”
Scrolling through pages upon pages of Soviet watches on eBay, Etsy and specialist websites like the Soviet Watch Store, I can’t help but think about Stanford’s “fragments of life” comment. A tinge of imagined nostalgia for a time and place I could never know.
These are heirlooms: gifts, treats and mementos bought and sold, sent and received in an alien world, behind the great myth and reality of life in the Soviet Union. I recalled a trip to Russia several years ago where my guide was floored by my 1970s film camera. “Why would you have that,” she asked, “when you can have a new digital one?” In modern Russia, she went on to explain, they wanted to forget about their mechanical past and look to the future. These objects were almost an embarrassment to them and how they viewed themselves on the world stage. Symbols of stilted progress, with nostalgia yet to kick in.
The Soviet Watch Store’s Vlad offers a well-known anecdote (and myth) when trying to summarize the attitude and intention of the USSR’s great mechanical watchmaking excursion. “It is an old story,” he says, “about NASA spending millions designing a ballpoint pen that would write in space, while the Soviet solution was a pencil. Utility trumps form in the Soviet Union.”
sovietwatchstore.com