Strela

The Strela (“Arrow”) is the Soviet chronograph that went outside. When Alexei Leonov left Voskhod 2 on 18 March 1965 for the first spacewalk in history, a Strela was on his sleeve — in vacuum, timing the most dangerous twelve minutes of the space race to that point.

The calibre 3017
Every real Strela runs the Poljot 3017: a 19-jewel, hand-wound column-wheel chronograph built at the First Moscow Watch Factory from the late 1950s into the 1970s. It is a genuine chronograph, not a stopwatch complication bolted onto a dress movement — central chronograph seconds, a 45-minute counter and running seconds, in a case that typically measures about 38 mm across (45 mm including the crown) and 11 mm thick on 16 mm lugs. The architecture is generally accepted to derive from the Swiss Venus 150, the same pattern of licensed Swiss lineage that later gave Poljot the 3133 from Valjoux.

Poljot, Sekonda, and the same watch
You will see the 3017 under more than one name. Sekonda was the export brand the Soviets used for Western markets, so a Sekonda-signed 3017 is the same First Moscow Watch Factory chronograph with a different dial — cosmonaut Aleksei Gubarev wore one on the Soyuz 28 mission in March 1978. Neither name is a red flag; the calibre is what matters.

Buying one
The Strela is among the most desirable Soviet watches ever made, which means it is also among the most faked. Redialled examples, replacement pushers and cases married to unrelated movements are all common, and a 3017 in genuinely good order is never cheap. Insist on seeing the movement, and treat a bargain price as the warning it usually is — our guide to spotting a frankenwatch applies double to chronographs, where a service is expensive and parts are scarce.

Every Strela below has been through a full service by our watchmaker and is tested and running before it is listed, with photographs of the actual watch you will receive. See also our Sturmanskie, the full Poljot collection, and our wider space-themed Soviet watches.