Vostok

Vostok began as a Moscow factory sent east in the war. Russian Wikipedia, Garratt and Vechernyaya Kazan say the Second Moscow Watch Factory was ordered to Chistopol, a small town on the Kama in Tatarstan, by a decree of 15 October 1941; English Wikipedia says it was the First.^{1, 2, 3, 4}

Garratt writes that 488 people and 170 lorry-loads of equipment left Moscow, that much of it was held at Kazan when the river froze, and that the factory began in an old distillery with a quarter of the space it needed, making fuzes from early 1942.²

Russian Wikipedia says the factory counts 1 July 1942 as its founding, that it worked for the People’s Commissariat of Mortar Weapons, and that it began making Kirovskie wristwatches in February 1943.¹

Its start on the Pobeda is reported differently: Russian Wikipedia gives 1949, while Izvestiya, in a CIA summary, reported in July 1953 that Chistopol, one of the newest plants, had just begun it, with workers trained at the plant who came from Tatar, Chuvash and Mordovian villages.^1, 6

Russian and English Wikipedia record the Kama, a shock-resistant and water-resistant watch, in 1952, and a gold medal at the Leipzig fair in 1962.^1, 4

From 1965 the factory supplied the Ministry of Defence, Wikipedia says, with the Komandirskie, followed in 1967 by the Amfibia diver’s watch; from 1969 all its watches carried the name Vostok.^1, 4, 7

Russian Wikipedia says that by 1972 its watches were exported to 54 countries, and that the cosmonaut Georgy Grechko gave the factory a Vostok watch that had flown on Soyuz 17 and the Salyut 4 station in 1975.¹

Russian Wikipedia says Vostok reached Japan, Western Europe and the United States in 1989, and that in the early 1990s American buyers ordered its watches in quantity, including an order for 10,000 watches sold in the United States as Desert Shield.¹

The factory was privatised in 1993 and the same year signed an exclusive distribution agreement with the Swiss trading firm BN-Trading, Wikipedia records.^1, 4

According to Vechernyaya Kazan, Moscow’s Poljot wristwatches and Slava alarm clocks were to be made at Chistopol from 2003.³

Wikipedia says the company went bankrupt in 2010 and was reorganised as several smaller companies under one owner, and that it still makes the Komandirskie and Amfibia.⁴