Watches and watch industry of the USSR
The clock is one of the oldest and most important instruments created by mankind – it is difficult to overestimate its importance on the course of civilization.
At first solar, sand, water, then pendulum floor and table, later pocket and hand - mechanical, quartz, electronic, and finally ultra-precise atomic and ionic, although on them story It doesn’t end there – scientists are developing even more precise versions of clocks, which are necessary for conducting scientific research and creating promising technologies.
But let's not delve into the "darkness of the ages" or the future - pocket and then wristwatches became widespread in the late 19th - early 20th centuries, when they became relatively accessible to the general population in industrially developed countries, and until the beginning of the 21st century, having a watch was an objective necessity - everything changed only after cell phones and then smartphones became widespread.
Cesium atomic clock
After that, many stopped wearing watches altogether, and a little later, many began to use fitness bracelets and smart watches, which are like watches, but in fact are more like wrist multifunctional computers with a bunch of sensors.
So what – are classic watches, especially mechanical ones, going to disappear soon?
In fact, the market for classic watches, primarily mechanical watches, feels quite confident. It's just that mechanical watches have essentially moved from a necessity to a luxury item, a status symbol, and in some sense have turned into a jewelry accessory - it's not for nothing that expensive watches are now often sold in pawnshops, even if they don't contain any precious metals.
By the way, in the last century, mechanical watches were already predicted to be forgotten, when quartz watches first appeared, providing unprecedented accuracy compared to "mechanics". However, it soon became clear that people liked mechanical watches - the sound of the mechanism, the smooth movement of the hands, so in the end "mechanics" pushed quartz mechanisms into the lower segment of the watch market.
In addition, in a sense, wristwatches have become one of the status symbols of the state - people look at what watches are worn by those in power, what watches are used in various branches of the armed forces - domestically produced or foreign? In a sense, the domestic watch industry plays the same symbolic role as the president's airplane and limousine.
On February 21, 2022, that is, the day when Russian President Vladimir Putin made a televised announcement and recognized the independence of the Lugansk and Donetsk People's Republics, he was wearing a watch from the Imperial Peterhof Factory (IPF)
What is the history and current state of the watch industry in our country?
In this material we will talk about the period of Tsarist Russia and the USSR.
Watch industry of Tsarist Russia
The first attempts to establish domestic watch production were undertaken under Catherine II - in 1774, the first watch manufactory in Russia was founded, and in 1784, the Swede Peter Nordstein, with the assistance of Grigory Potemkin, opened a manufactory that produced pocket watches, but, ultimately, the watch factories opened in St. Petersburg and Moscow closed after a few years.
Wooden watches from the Bronnikov dynasty are, of course, original, but hardly practical, more of a curiosity...
In fact, there is no point in further examining the watch industry of Tsarist Russia due to its actual absence - that is why the table of contents of this article only talks about the watch industry of the USSR.
Some will say that this is not so, because there were famous watchmakers – Pavel Bure, Heinrich Moser, but all of these were just small manufactories founded by foreigners, and they mainly imported parts and mechanisms from Swiss and German manufacturers, and then developed their own case to complete the watch, so the Russian watch industry before the revolution of 1917 was completely dependent on foreign supplies.
The only mass-produced industrial clocks that could truly be rightfully called Russian were inexpensive wall clocks, which were manufactured in quantities of about 100 thousand pieces per year at handicraft enterprises with primitive technological equipment at the beginning of the XNUMXth century. The largest factories were the factories of P. Dmitriev and D. Reinin in Moscow, as well as the factories of G. Afanasyev and V. Platov in the village of Sharapovo in the Zvenigorod district in the Moscow region.
Watches and watch industry of the USSR
Unlike Tsarist Russia, the USSR quickly understood the importance of watches – at that time there was nowhere else to get the exact time, so watches were not a luxury, but an extreme necessity, and in the 30s serious efforts were made to create their own watch industry.
For example, in 1930, the Soviet Union acquired two American watch companies – Dueber-Hampden Watch and Ansonia Clock. Characteristically, the US sold them despite sanctions (yes, they were imposed on us even then), as they considered these factories, as well as their technologies and equipment, to be extremely outdated. As a result, the "First State Watch Factory" was created, also known as the "First Moscow Watch Factory", which later produced watches under the "Polet" brand. Then, taking into account the experience gained, the "Second Moscow Watch Factory" was created, which would produce watches under the "Slava" brand.
At the same time, in 1930, the stone-cutting factory in Peterhof was renamed the “First State Plant of Precision Technical Stones” (“TTK-1”), which would turn into the “Petrodvorets Watch Factory”, producing watches under the brand name “Rocket", and in 1940, with the help of specialists from Peterhof, a second plant for the production of precision technical stones, "TTK-2" or "Uglich Watch Factory", was launched in Uglich.
In the late 1930s, together with the French company Lip SA d'Horlogerie, the production of world-class watch mechanisms was established, which were used in the first releases of the Pobeda watches.
The Pobeda watch based on the French R36 caliber was produced at the Penza Watch Factory, the First Moscow Watch Factory, the Chistopol Watch Factory, the Maslennikov Factory and the Second Moscow Watch Factory – judging by the number of manufacturers, one can easily imagine how much the Soviet state needed watches at that time.
After the start of the war and the evacuation, the Chelyabinsk Watch Factory and the Chistopol Watch Factory were created, producing the Volna and Vostok watches based on a precision caliber developed on the basis of the then newest high-precision chronometer Zenith 135.
The Vostok watch from the Chistopol Watch Factory, whose calibers are based on the Swiss caliber Zenith 135
Electronic watches under the brand name "Elektronika" were produced by the Minsk Scientific and Production Association "Integral".
Soviet electronic watches
By the beginning of the 1980s, more than 20 watch factories of various types operated in the USSR. These enterprises collectively produced about 20 million different watches annually, a significant portion of which were sold abroad. And the range of watches produced in the USSR was simply enormous!
Given the limited number of luxury items available in the USSR, as well as the existing shortage of civilian products, watches were not only a utilitarian tool, but also a status symbol. This position was supported by the release of limited edition departmental watches, which were produced in limited quantities and were not available for free sale. Certain categories of citizens were attracted to watches made in cases made of precious metals - one of the few legalized indicators of wealth and luxury in the USSR.
The disadvantages of Soviet watches include the same things that can be attributed to all civilian products of the USSR: the lack of a competitive market, shortages, government orders and other attributes of a planned economy led to the fact that technically and qualitatively, USSR watches began to lag significantly behind what was produced in Western countries.
For example, the accuracy of most Soviet watches remained at the level of -20/+40 seconds per day, while in the West many watches were produced according to the COSC standard (Contrôle Officiel Suisse des Chronomètres – the standard of the official Swiss chronometry institute), and even watches that did not fall under this standard were often more accurate than Soviet ones (according to the COSC standard, the deviation in the accuracy of mechanical watches should not exceed -4/+6 seconds per day, and for quartz watches – no more than 0,07 seconds per day).
Although there were exceptions, for example, the Vostok Precision watch, whose caliber was created on the basis of the Swiss caliber Zenith 135, had an accuracy of +/- 10 seconds per day.
Another problem was the quality of manufacturing - this concerned not only watches, but also, for example, hunting rifles, cars and much more. Often, high-quality items without defects and flaws could be purchased either "through connections" or by chance, and closer to the end of the Soviet Union, the quality of civilian products went downhill.
Of course, in the late USSR, when perestroika was already looming on the horizon, foreign watches were a desirable and inaccessible luxury item for the majority of the country's population, so the events that followed the collapse of the USSR were quite predictable, although we will talk about this in the next article.
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