Vostok

The factory that makes Vostok watches today was born in the autumn of 1941, when the First Moscow Watch Factory was evacuated eastwards, away from the front, and moved to Chistopol, a town on the Kama river in the Republic of Tatarstan, with a convoy of about 170 railway wagons, barges and aircraft that arrived on 10 November 1941. Founded as the "Chistopol watch factory" and initially focused on producing military components, in 1943 it made its first wristwatch, the K-43 "Kirovskie", intended for Red Army commanders; after the war the catalogue expanded with models such as the Pobeda, Kama, Volga and Mir, while in 1962 the factory received a gold medal at the Leipzig International Fair.

The leap in quality came in the mid-1960s: in 1965 the plant became an official supplier to the Soviet Ministry of Defence and launched the Komandirskie, the field watch for officers; two years later, in 1967, came the Amfibia (Amphibia), the military diver that would become the brand's most famous model. In 1969 the factory changed its name to "Vostok" and all models were rebranded under this name, which has since identified the entire production, including the lines born in previous years.

In the late Soviet period Vostok watches also spread to Europe, the United States and Japan, thanks to their low price and mechanical toughness, to the point of attracting a fair amount of fakes made by third parties in the West. After the collapse of the USSR the factory was privatised in 1993, the year it also signed an exclusive distribution agreement with the Swiss company BN-Trading for about 500,000 pieces a year; in 2010 it went bankrupt and was reorganised into smaller entities grouped under Vostok Watch Factory LTD. Today production remains concentrated in Chistopol, where the brand claims to make almost all components in-house: public information in Western languages on its corporate structure, recent production figures and the exact numbering of many variants nonetheless remains fragmented and not always up to date, and should therefore be treated with some caution.