Mysterious world of Soviet watch collectors

With pseudonyms like the The Bastard, The Broker, The Astronaut and The Vampire, they've banded together deep inside the world of Soviet-era watch collecting.

This cabal of watch aficionados spans the globe, albeit in cyberspace, bringing history to the wrists of thousands with timepieces dating back to the days of Stalin. Dashiell Oatman-Stanford calls himself “a Soviet watch nerd.” His friends call him The Catalog. His website, Watches of the USSR, reveals why. It brings together highlights from his exhaustive archive of around 3,000 pieces. Some come and some go, as he refines and revises his collection. But despite only starting his hobby seven years ago, Oatman-Stanford is one of the czars of historic Soviet watches. “Why Soviet watches?” he asks on his website. “I am not a collector of watches as much as I am a collector of history and culture -- fragments of a life that once was. And indeed, these timepieces have an incredible tale to tell.” “Soviet watches are functional and utilitarian, but dig further and you uncover a world of mystery and intrigue, color and pizzazz,” writes Texas-born Oatman-Stanford who now lives in the former Soviet republic of Estonia. Oatman-Stanford and his Soviet watch collector friends have carried that mystery and intrigue into the present era, forming what they call the Bureau of Russian Watch Intelligence.

Membership of this secretive collectors group comes by invitation, said Ulices Rosa, who founded the bureau a few years ago by connecting people asking questions about Russian watches on Facebook. If you've been snooping around about Soviet watches, he may just find you. With his Jersey accent, Rosa might have come from central casting for an old black-and-white Hollywood movie to head up a shadowy bureau. The Lansing, Michigan, resident calls himself The Broker, and you could imagine him selling watches stashed in his overcoat. “I'm the guy who's constantly connecting the others to the sale,” he said in a video interview. Other members include The Vampire, in Malaysia, who's up at all hours making watch deals, Rosa said. Then there's The Astronaut, an Italian guy specializing in Soviet watches related to the USSR's space missions. “A niche, upon a niche upon a niche,” as The Catalog puts it. The Bastard, the youngest of the group, lives in the Netherlands. He once found a $1,000 Soviet watch for $50. He's “the luckiest guy,” Rosa said. The Broker, meanwhile, can do things that will make your jaw drop. He recalls viewing the third season of the Netflix hit series “Stranger Things” and seeing a mission emerge. His 14-year-old son wanted the watch worn by Alexei, the Soviet scientist on the show. Freezing the frame, The Broker determined that it was a Kirovskie model, made by the Soviet's First State Watch Factory in the 1950s or '60s.

“I went on a hunt as soon as my son spotted it,” he said. “I found it within two weeks for about $36.”  The story illustrates just what make Soviet watch collectors tick. It's a hobby that gives them a relatively cheap way to connect with a bygone world. A working, presentable and likely authentic Soviet-era watch can be easily found on the internet for under $100 and in some cases as low as $40 or $50, Rosa said. And that's what sets Soviet watch collectors apart from your regular horology enthusiasts, said Oatman-Stanford. “Nobody is buying Russian watches or Soviet watches for the reason that most people buy watches, which is it's a fashion piece, a jewelry accessory,” he said.  “It is purely for the interest and intrigue, exoticism, the military connection.”

Roots in America

The Soviet watch industry traces its roots to what was then America's industrial heartland. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin wanted to modernize the country's economy, and precise timing was key to making things runs efficiently. “To coordinate anything in a modern world you need reliable time pieces, and the Soviets didn't have anything of that sort,” Oatman-Stanford said. Lacking the domestic manufacturing capacity, the Soviet leadership looked overseas and found help in Canton, Ohio. The equipment and know-how for Moscow's First State Watch Factory was imported from Dueber-Hampden Watch Co., a Canton company that went bankrupt in the late 1920s, according to the city's local newspaper, the Canton Repository. A 2016 report in the paper said that a company representing the Soviet Union's trade interests in the United States “bought bankrupt Dueber-Hampden's watchmaking machines for $325,000, loaded it onto train cars and shipped it off to Russia.”