Soviet Wrist Watches

I recently bought two vintage russian, or should I rather say Soviet, wrist watches. They were “New Old Stock” meaning they were unsold, so practically new.

One is a Raketa (Paketa) 24 hour watch 19 jewels. It’s not a normal watch. First things first, it was probably made mid-late 80’s when russia was still CCCP. What’s strange about it then? Well it’s a 24 hour watch. Usually watches are 12 hours, meaning that in 1 day, the hour dial will go round twice. In this case, it goes round once. You can see the difference in the photo! It’s hand wound, and it lasts approximately 36 hours. It also has a rotating bezel that shows cities around the world, so you can tell what time it is there too!

The second is the real deal. It’s a Slava Medical watch. This watch was apparently given to all Soviet doctors. As you can see from the pictures, it has a pulse measuring aid. This one is hand wound too and was made around the same time as the Raketa. I immediately thought of my girlfriend (she is in her 4th year studying medicine) and so I’m going to give it to her as a present. It’s actually a very good watch, with 26 jewels, which is actually a few too many, but hey…

Here they are (I recently changed the wrist bands because they were unglueing):

The ones I now own 2

The ones I now own 1

Slava Medical

Mine has the cities in russian unlike this one (prolly US version)

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