By Ivan Zotikov
In May 1947 to February 1948, as production in the Arsenal factory in Kyiv was organised, construction techniques of the Contax rangefinder camera were studied and personnel were trained.
Initially, the work was conducted without equipment, and also without any technical documentation. Only the assembly area was completely active; the cameras were made from parts, brought by railroad from the original Carl Zeiss factory in eastern Germany.
What’s more, the production of these parts wasn’t fully finished, so some missing details had to be done on site. In 1947, without any additional equipment, 403 cameras were produced.
The cameras had oblique inscription, and today are very rare. There are two types of engraved inscriptions. The lower tail of the letter “K” in the name “Kiev” is at a different level in one version and at the same level in another.
At the end of 1948, the factory received all documentation and equipment from Germany, it was a long process. All production areas began work making part and cameras. It was very hard to implement technologies and equipment in the Arsenal production process, as until then there was no optical production at the plant, only weapons were produced.
In 1948, Arsenal produced 1,400 cameras. In the same year, a photo was released of a batch of these cameras with the note “a gift”. In these times of post-war construction, a camera was considered something rare, as many consumer goods in the USSR were.
These cameras were gifted to journalists, photo-workshop members, and to government delegation members. In 1947-48 its net price in Soviet rubles was 5,479 (to understand this, one should know that official currency rate dollar-rubel was about five rubles for one dollar). This price has been noted in an archive document, which was published to mark the 10th anniversary of camera production starting.
At that time, the salary in the USSR was 500 rubles, I find this information interesting for understanding the value of this camera. Today it is considered a stroke of good luck for a collector to find it.
Many cameras were later modernised in the factory’s the reclamations area. Some got an exposure meter, and a synchro flash contact was added to the camera’s body. Perhaps only dozens of the hundreds of cameras produced was left untouched.
The camera you can see in the photos contained in the article is one of those cameras; no detail has been changed.
Among those people who visited the Arsenal factory whole cameras such as this were being produced was the then leader of Soviet Ukraine, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev. He and his comrades received similar cameras as a gift from the factory.
What we do know for sure from his memoirs is that he was an avid photographer. At that time the Kiev camera was considered, at least compared to other models produced in the USSR, a high-end camera as it was more technologically advanced. The Arsenal plant was subordinate to the Ministry of Defence Industry located in Moscow, and made optics for military projects as well as cameras.
The first batches of cameras produced by Arsenal continued to be sent to Khrushchev’s employees. Today many examples of these early cameras are found in Russia and not Ukraine. As a matter of fact, the first standard Zorki ZK 50mm lenses for Kiev cameras came from the KMZ plant. That is why on cameras with sequential numbers there are lenses with different numbers. This applies to lenses that were installed on cameras from 1947 to 1950.
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
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Stephen,
Learning more about the minutiae of Kiev rangefinder production in the early days was a fascinating read, much of which I was not aware of previously. It’s most refreshing to encounter genuinely new information on a film photography topic which is not merely re-hashed content from old sources. Congratulations to you and Ivan for shedding some new light to English speaking Kiev enthusiasts on the conception of their camera series. Many thanks!
Cheers,
Brett