Today I received this watch - as a little New Year's gift for myself - a Soviet Raketa straight from the 80s.

And here’s a little story about it :)

The watch "Raketa"-"Zero" ( rus. Большой ноль, "Big Zero") of the Petrodvorets Watch Factory appeared in 1984-1985.

By order of the All-Union Society of the Blind, a watch design with a white dial, large contrasting numbers and wide hands was developed for visually impaired people.

By 1986, the release of this model was planned to be discontinued, since enough watches were produced for the Society, and ordinary citizens didn’t need them. Perestroika has begun.

For the first time this design became popular thanks to the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Mikhail Gorbachev. During an international summit in Italy, he was asked to explain what “perestroika" means. Gorbachev just pointed at his Raketa “Big Zero" watch and said: "It's like on my watch: the Russians want to start everything from ground zero!"

The phrase immediately made headlines in Italian newspapers. That's how the legend of “Big Zero" began!

Italian entrepreneurs came to the Petrodvorets Watch Factory. The watch with "zero" delighted them and they made a huge order for themselves, the demand for everything related to "perestroika" in the West was very great at that time.

From that moment on, the production of all kinds of exterior designs of the "zero" began at the PWF: on the theme of perestroika (with images of Soviet symbols), pocket watch, in classic cases, with black dials and even with a holographic film on the dial.