24 hours

A Raketa 24-hour watch does something no ordinary watch does: the hour hand goes round once a day, not twice. Midnight sits at the top, noon at the bottom, and the whole day is laid out on the dial at once — so you can see at a glance whether it is 07:00 or 19:00 without anything outside the window telling you. That was the point. The Petrodvorets Watch Factory built these for Soviet North Pole expeditions, where the sun simply does not rise or set for months at a time and a normal 12-hour dial is genuinely ambiguous. Every one of them runs the hand-wound 2623.Н calibre, Raketa’s dedicated 24-hour movement.

The format outlived its polar brief and became one of the most distinctive things the Soviet watch industry ever made — including the Goroda “World Traveler” versions, which add a rotating city ring so the 24-hour dial doubles as a world-timer. They take a moment to learn to read and then become oddly hard to give up. Each one below has been serviced by our watchmaker, tested, and photographed individually — the watch in the pictures is the watch you receive. See also the full Raketa collection and our space-themed Soviet watches.