IN THE WAKE of the 1917 October Revolution, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin set about restoring the important monuments that had been destroyed during the turmoil. At the top of the list was the Kremlin’s Spasskaya Bashnya, the sandy-colored clock tower that rises up over Red Square. Struck by a stray shell, the clock no longer worked. n Lenin struggled to find an engineer up to the task of renovating the enormous timepiece. Eventually, locksmith Nikolai Behrens came forward who, with the help of his sons, restored the clock in time for the one-year anniversary of the revolution. Lenin, though, was not content with simply returning the clock to its previous condition. In an early example of his 1918 “Plan of Monumental Propaganda,” he also ordered that the clock play new revolutionary music. The artist and musician Mikhail Cheremnykh put together arrangements of The Internationale and You Fell A Victim, the former chiming at 12 am and the latter at 12 pm. n This was a new tune for a new era: a celebration of the proletarian revolution and a constant reminder of the new collective ethos of the Soviet state. Broadcast on the radio across all of the republics, these chimes would give the same fuzzy feeling that a British listener of BBC Radio 4 gets upon hearing the hourly beeps. n Lenin’s obsession with timepieces, and understanding of their importance for the realization of a Soviet utopia, neither started nor ended with the Spasskaya Tower. Exiled in Switzerland at the beginning of the twentieth century, Lenin, already an experienced political revolutionary, met a young fellow exile: Vladimir Osipovich Pruss. Hearing that Lenin was the man to go to with problems, Pruss had tracked him down to ask his advice on how to obtain a passport. He desperately needed it to marry his fiancée. Lenin not only sorted out this problem, but after questioning the young exile, also offered him some wise counsel. He advised him to train in clock-making, taking care that he move to live among Protestants rather than Catholics, whom he said were “somewhat quarrelsome.”
Like a good disciple, Pruss followed Lenin’s advice, and in a case of old-fashioned networking, after the revolution was appointed head of the Soviet clock-making industry. This marked the beginning of a transformation of the clock industry — a cornerstone of industrialization, and a weapon in the struggle for ever greater productivity and efficiency.
The growth of clock-making in the USSR, from modest pre-revolutionary importer and assembler, to second only to the Swiss in the number and types of timepieces produced, is more than a tale of technological achievement. The spread of clocks and watches produced a sea change in the rhythm of life and societal relations for many living on the territory of the USSR. In short: 1917 was, for them, also a revolution in time.
Tsarist Russia had been home to a rather small, artisanal clock-making industry. A few scattered factories were set up to assemble timepieces from imported parts — the high tariffs on completed watches and clocks was extortionate. By 1913, trade was booming, with 3.5 million clocks and clock parts imported into the country each year. Yet it was still largely the upper class and bourgeoisie in urban centers who owned mechanical clocks. In fact, until the time of the “Veliky Perelom” — the Great Break at the end of the 1920s, which saw the abandonment of the New Economic Policy (NEP) and an acceleration of collectivization — rural communities showed little interest in precise time-keeping devices. Instead, their lives continued to be organized around liturgical cycles marked by bellringing, or around nature’s seasons and rhythms.
As 91-year-old Mambetaliev Kojoke, from the Talas region of Northern Kyrgyzstan, remembers, the passage of time in pre-Soviet Central Asia was marked by the phases of the moon, meaningful for their implications about changes in the weather: “An ancient saying notes, that ‘Until there are five new moons, the cold weather will hold.’...If the new moon leant backwards, then the weather in the coming month would be dry. If the new moon leant to one side, the month will be rainy.”
Kojoke recalled how the Russians brought watches with them in 1916 when they invaded Kyrgyzstan to put down the Kyrgyz Revolt. And watches remained a rarity for another 15 years: “Watches began to be used a lot in the thirties. Until then, watches were something unusual, found rarely and considered an expensive gift... Since then, people have lost touch with nature, when they measure time.”
Rural life was not dissimilar to rural Europe in the distant past when, according to French historian Jacques le Goff, “Labor time was still the time of an economy dominated by agrarian rhythms, free of haste, careless of exactitude, unconcerned by productivity…”
Lenin and others harbored little romanticism or sentimentality for such a bucolic existence. It was time to do away with the nineteenth-century peasant manner of catching a train — turning up at a station at dawn and waiting until one passed. Such habits were hardly conducive to an effective and productive economy. The New Society demanded mass organization. And for the masses to be organized, they needed to be on time.
In 1919, a Clock Agency was created to control clock-production from parts that had been imported before the revolution, and the quantity produced rose throughout the 1920s. In 1922, the Aviapribor factory was set up to produce simple clocks. Over the next two years, it churned out 20,700 clocks and 37,300 alarm clocks. It then merged with the Nov (Новь) Clock Factory, multiplying its output many times over to produce 150,000 clocks and 350,000 alarm clocks in 1925 and 1926.
As the new elite moved to speed industrialization, demand for accurate time-keeping devices soared: the Red Army, the Navy and the Railways, as well as the general populace, all desperately needed them. Yet supply could not keep up with demand. By 1926, the warehouses were bare, the pre-revolutionary imports all used up. One watch specialist, Heinrich Kann, wrote that same year:
It is time for us to pull ourselves together and realize that we can become serious competitors with foreign producers of clock-making. True, there is no need to ignore the fact that at the current time, foreign watch producers command technology that is at a higher level, and that it will take significant strength to catch up with the outside world in this regard.
In 1928, the Soviet press took up this clarion call. The journal Ogonyok declared:
We don’t have our own clock-making industry in the USSR. The watches imported from Switzerland and France are very expensive. A few industrial cooperatives buy up old clocks, freshen them up, and sell them for a ridiculously high price. We have to create our own industry...
Others had a more humorous take: “Don’t rush, comrades,” wrote Rabochaya Moskva (Working Moscow), “let the working man be late for work. And come to think of it, instead of an alarm clock, he can use... a cockerel.”
In 1929, the USSR leapt at the chance to buy two ready-made, bankrupt clock factories from America — the Dueber Hampden and Ansonia factories. Working through the Amtorg Trading Corporation, which served Soviet import and export firms seeking to do business in the U.S., a steamboat was loaded up in April 1930 with 28 freight cars full of machinery and parts, along with 21 American watchmakers to train their counterparts. The American workers reported on their return that they had been treated extremely well, and were impressed with the speed at which their Soviet counterparts had picked up the skills of the trade.
These were the early days of cooperation, when the economic challenges facing the USSR and the pursuit of profit by U.S. entrepreneurs mired in the Great Depression overcame any ideological animosities. The deal was masterminded by the flamboyant, maverick businessman Armand Hammer. Hammer, who, according to many biographers was named after the symbol of the Socialist Labour Party, was somehow both a Communist Sympathizer and a Republican Capitalist — he famously bragged that he was the only man to have been friends with both Lenin and Reagan.
The willingness of the Soviet Union to borrow time-keeping technology from others also highlighted the dual nature of the Soviet relationship with modernity. Despite trying to create a better reality, they acknowledged a need to borrow from the West. The Soviets were willing to incorporate this technology and use it in the service of their ultimate goal: surpassing the West. By November 1930, the transplanted factory — now called the First Moscow Watch Factory — had turned out its first 50 pocket watches. In 1931, it crafted another 70,000.
While the Russians might have been copycats, they also made vast improvements to their clones. From the 1930s to the 1950s, the Soviets collaborated with the French watch-making company Lip (which, ironically, suffered from debilitating worker protests in the 1970s) to create the world’s first assembly line production of watch movements. After World War II, the Soviets took entire watch factories — including designs, machinery and parts — as reparations from the Germans.
By the 1960s, Soviet mass-produced wristwatches were state of the art pieces, using sophisticated shock protection and hairsprings found in only the highest quality Swiss watches. In 1966, Sekonda was launched to export the best Soviet watches, mainly to the UK and commonwealth countries. In 1980, the First Moscow Watch Factory alone turned out more than 2.5 million watches and the Vostok Factory more than 4.5 million.
The iconic Soviet watches produced by the Moscow Watch Factory and others were used by participants in the most important events in Soviet history. During the Second World War, the Kirov Factory churned out timepieces to equip the Soviet battle planes. As the war drew to a close, the factory began to produce a new watch — called Pobeda (Victory) — the name and design chosen by Joseph Stalin himself.
In the post-war years, special watches were designed to decorate the wrists of heroic explorers and cosmonauts who pushed the boundaries of science. A magnet-proof Antarktika (Antarctica) timepiece was commissioned in 1957 for members of the first Soviet expedition to the Southern Pole of Inaccessibility, thought to be the coldest place on Earth. The newly designed Shturmanskiye (Navigator) watch went up into space with Yuri Gagarin in April 1961, coping well with the low-gravity environment.
That the growing clock industry was directly related to the military strength and technological prowess of the Soviet Union was not lost on observers west of the Berlin Wall. In January 1957, Dudley Ingraham, Vice-Chairman of the Board of E. Ingraham Co. (a prominent U.S. manufacturer of clocks and watches) told a panel of Office of Defense Mobilization Officials that he was sure that the Russian build-up of its clock and watch industry was not “just so every Russian can have an alarm clock or a good watch.” He emphasized the role that their industry played in supplying timing devices for missiles and other weapons.
Yet Ingraham was mistaken if he thought that defense was the only reason. Clocks were needed not just to protect against external enemies, but to realize the internal utopia. The need to enforce temporal discipline in order to increase worker productivity, and the manner in which this would be carried out was a central theme of repeated party debates.
Yet even in a totalitarian and centralized state with a blossoming clock and watch industry, this task was far from easy. According to sociologist and historian Vladimir Andrele, in 1933 over three-quarters of the industrial labor force had no industrial employment experience prior to 1929. How to accustom this labor force to clock-focused, rather than task-oriented work was a huge challenge.
It began with an attack on absenteeism in November 1932, with little success. It also didn’t help that life on the factory floor was like a social club. One survey calculated that, what with all the chatting, smoke-breaks and shopping workers were doing on the shop floor, they averaged only four to five and a half hours on the job. Bad timekeeping remained a blight.
The attempts to discipline workers were also confused by questions of how exactly they should be organized. As Stephen Hanson, author of Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions wrote:
The whole point of overthrowing capitalism… had been to usher in a world beyond the time constraints operating in class-based society, beyond the alienating subjection of the creative force of human labor to clock discipline for the sole purpose of expropriating surplus value to line the pockets of the ruling class. The proletarian revolution could not be considered complete, then, until control over time was somehow restored to those participating in everyday productive activity. At the same time, however, as long as world revolution and full communism remained a distant hope, time discipline had to be maintained at all costs, lest the tender shoots of the future society be crushed by the continuing power of capitalism.
Factory managers sought to encourage spontaneous revolutionary enthusiasm in order to counter criticism that worker arrangements strongly resembled those of capitalist systems. Heroic workers like Alexei Stakhanov were celebrated and rewarded for exceeding their quotas, inspiring their fellow workers, and thereby bringing the shining communist future one step closer. This all took place, however, in a closely controlled framework of quotas and shifts.
For anybody who doubted the need to go faster and faster, Joseph Stalin had a harsh rebuke:
It is sometimes asked whether it is not possible to slow down the tempo somewhat, to put a check on the movement. No, comrades, it is not possible! The tempo must not be reduced! On the contrary, we must increase it as much as is within our powers and possibilities…. To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind. And those who fall behind get beaten.
Stalin had already been working on maximizing efficiency and productivity within his powers and possibilities when he got rid of the seven-day week in 1929, replacing it with a five-day variant. Each day of the five-day week was labeled by one of five colors or a Roman numeral from I to V, and each worker was assigned a color or number to identify his or her day of rest. Factories began to run every day of the week with four-fifths of their personnel, the other one-fifth resting. This reorganization had another advantage as well: it made it a lot more difficult for the religiously observant to keep track of their Sabbath and Orthodox holidays.
Yet the arrangement lasted only two years. By 1931, Stalin announced that factories could move to a six-day week, with five days work and the same rest day for all. An unforeseen problem had led to much grumbling and strain on socialist families: husband and wives, allocated different rest days, never saw each other. For nine years, until 1940, the six-day week was used. In 1940, the USSR rejoined the rest of the world and reintroduced a seven-day week with two rest days.
Even if the leadership of the Soviet Union failed to create their own relationship with time different from that of the West, they did succeed in making some of the most admired and reliable timepieces of the twentieth century. Yet as the Soviet Union fell apart and collapsed, the industry also disintegrated. A year after the fall of the USSR, Sekonda stopped buying from Russia or Belarus, and sourced all of their watches from the Far East. Chinese imports flooded the Russian watch market, and only two Soviet era factories — Vostok and Penza — continued production.
While factories spluttered, however, a number of independent artisans sprung up — creating a new aesthetic, with a focus on originality. Back in April 2005, one long-time collector, Dmitry Tsedro, decided that he couldn’t find the watch he was looking for. So he decided to make it himself. “At one point I wanted a special watch, so the company was born,” he said. Tsedro prides himself on the fact that his company produces only unusual mechanical, skeleton watches, worn by the rich and famous. The timepieces are sported by those who, he says “already have a few expensive watches” and want something out of the ordinary — the actor Hand “Dolph” Lundgren, Deborah Harry, ballerina Anastasia Volochkova, and actor Mark Dacascos are just a few customers.
Another hobbyist turned luxury watchmaker is St. Petersburger Konstantin Chaykin. Chaykin’s oeuvre includes a Jewish wristwatch that measures time in the Hebrew helek and regaim units, and a number of Muslim astronomical clocks which incorporate separate scales for months of the Muslim and secular calendars.
These creative timepieces are a departure from the timepieces made in the Soviet Union. Their new aesthetic represents more of an interest in clocks and watches as works of art and status symbols, rather than functional or utilitarian devices as in the Soviet era. As important, though, in creating these different calendars, they remind us that abstract time, the “universal grid against which the duration of all particular events can be measured,” as Stephen Hanson put it, is just one of the rhythms by which we have organized our lives throughout history. RL
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