RAKETA
Raketa is made at the Petrodvorets Watch Factory near St Petersburg, an enterprise whose origins trace to the Peterhof Lapidary Works founded by Peter the Great in 1721. The Raketa name was adopted in 1961 in honour of Yuri Gagarin’s flight. It remains one of the very few factories anywhere producing its own mechanical movements from raw material, at scale, outside Switzerland and Japan.
Movements Made From Scratch
The factory cuts its own wheels, makes its own hairsprings and assembles its own calibres, a vertical integration few manufactures of any size retain. That capability sustained decades of output for industry, the navy and polar expeditions, including 24-hour dials designed for latitudes where day and night lose meaning. The same architecture underpins the current collection.
Icons of Twentieth-Century Design
Raketa’s best-known designs — among them the 24-hour models and the Big Zero, with its oversized zero at twelve — have become reference points in industrial design and are widely collected. A modernisation programme begun at the end of the 2000s brought in outside expertise to rebuild production standards while keeping the historic calibres in production. The factory’s continuity, rather than any single model, is what makes it unusual.