Sturmanskie

According to the official history published by the current owner of the brand, the name "Sturmanskie" (Russian for "navigator's watch", after the sturman, the navigator on board an aircraft) was born in 1949 at the First Moscow Watch Factory, the same manufacture that in the following years would also give rise to the Poljot brand. At this stage Sturmanskie watches were produced "by special state order" for the Soviet Air Force and were in no way available to the public: an on-board instrument reserved for pilots and navigators, not a commercial product.

The event that secured the brand's place in history came on 12 April 1961, when Yuri Gagarin wore a Sturmanskie watch during the first human spaceflight: according to the same official source, the movement kept working correctly despite weightlessness and acceleration forces, making these the first watches in the world to have travelled into space. It should be noted that the available sources on this period do not fully agree: the Poljot page of this encyclopedia links the birth of Sturmanskie to 1961 itself, as one of the Moscow factory's lines distinct from Poljot — a discrepancy typical of a niche Russian brand whose archival documentation remains scarce and not always independently verifiable.

Sturmanskie watches remained exclusively for military use until 1983, when they finally became available to civilian buyers as well. In the meantime, from 1964 the factory adopted the name Poljot for its civilian production, but the Sturmanskie line continued as a separate brand reserved for the air force. After the historic factory went bankrupt in 2004, its legacy was split among several companies: the Sturmanskie name and rights eventually passed to Volmax, a company based between Moscow and Switzerland which, according to the available sources, is today the only company authorised to use Gagarin's name and image in watchmaking, and which runs Sturmanskie together with the Buran and Aviator brands, already covered in this encyclopedia on the Poljot page.