Tochmekh (State Trust of Precision Mechanics)

After the revolution the watch workshops and shops of the old trade were nationalised, and in 1922 the small workshops were grouped into a state trust for precision mechanics, Gostrest Tochmekh, short for Gosudarstvenny trest tochnoy mekhaniki.^1, 2, 3

Alan Garratt, a historian of the Hampden company, writes, citing the Russian State Archive of the Economy, that it began in 1920, during the civil war, as a chief administration, Glavtochmekh, and became a trust in 1922; Andrei Bodrov, a Bolshevik of the civil war, directed it from 1924 to 1930.²

What it took in came from the trade of the tsars. The museum of the Luch watch factory in Minsk lists the Nov factory, the Aviapribor works, a former Reynin workshop, the shop of B. Leuba and the shops of Paul Buhre’s firm in Moscow and Petrograd; Garratt adds the remains of the Kann and Moser businesses.^1, 2

Through the 1920s, Garratt writes, the trust supplied a network of cooperative workshops, artels, with whatever parts it could buy abroad and finished the timepieces with parts of its own and dials signed Gostrest Tochmekh, while finished watches were still imported from Switzerland and Germany.²

Its store was Paul Buhre’s old shop in Moscow, Garratt notes, and in 1928 it absorbed the Moscow Electro-Mechanical Plant, a works of about 125 people that made telegraph equipment, radios and projectors and repaired the timers of Moscow’s trams. In September 1929, he adds, it took over a watchmaking school for street children run by the watchmaker Wolf Pruss.²

Two state watch factories opened in Moscow in 1930: the First State Watch Factory, on machinery bought from Dueber-Hampden of Canton, Ohio, and the Second State Watch Factory, made from the electro-mechanical plant and equipped with clock machinery from Ansonia of Brooklyn.^{1, 2, 4, 5, 6}

Garratt gives the First its full name as the First State Watch Factory of the Trust of Precision Mechanics, and reproduces a letter in which its managers told Tochmekh that without imported components production would stop.²

The trust pressed for an industry of the country’s own. Garratt suggests that Heinrich Kann’s Brief History of Watchmaking of 1926, which said the trust should first serve the country’s watchmakers, influenced Bodrov to push for the decree of the Council of Labour and Defence that ordered watch and clock factories built from nothing.²

The date of that decision is given two ways: 30 December 1927 by Garratt, who reproduces the directive, and 20 December 1927 by the Luch museum.^1, 2

Two plans competed inside the trust in 1928, Garratt records. Mikhail Izmalkov, chief engineer of the electro-mechanical plant, proposed buying complete plants; Pruss proposed assembly workshops paid for by selling watches put together from imported parts, with modern Swiss and German machines bought step by step. In April 1928 the trust chose Izmalkov’s way.²

Its commission of eleven, formed by October 1928, was refused entry to Switzerland and found no European maker willing to work with it; in America, on a tour arranged by Amtorg, it saw some 21 plants, eight of them watch factories, and Bodrov proposed buying American equipment, old as it was, Garratt writes. The purchase that followed is told under The Soviet watch industry.²

Gostrest Tochmekh was dissolved in 1933, at the start of the second Five-Year Plan, Garratt writes; Bodrov had left in 1930 to build the state ball-bearing works.²

Control passed to the people’s commissariats. Garratt lists Heavy Industry from 1932 to 1936, Engineering from 1936 to 1938 and General Engineering from 1938 to 1940, whose initials appear on movements of the two Moscow factories; in the war, Russian Wikipedia says, the factory evacuated to Chistopol worked for the People’s Commissariat of Mortar Weapons.^2, 7

After the war Garratt names a chief directorate of the watch industry, Glavchasprom, and its research institute, NIIChasprom, which he dates from an institute of 1940; the Great Soviet Encyclopedia records a research institute for the industry and a design bureau for its machine tools among the works built between 1944 and 1952.^2, 5

The structure outlived the Soviet Union in part. According to Vedomosti in 2001, a closed joint-stock company, Chasprom, had been formed on the basis of the industry’s chief directorate and given part of the shares of all its factories except the First Moscow and Chistopol works, and Chasprom was then the largest seller of Russian watches.⁸

The factories were privatised one by one: Russian Wikipedia records that the First Moscow factory became a joint-stock company on 14 February 1992, and that Tatarstan’s state property committee decided on 12 January 1993 to make the Chistopol works an open joint-stock company. In 2001, Vedomosti reported, the largest factories were discussing a holding company, with no owner yet known.^3, 7, 8