Hello, I'm Yuri Kravtsov, the founder of Soviet Watch Museum and a longtime collector of rare Soviet timepieces.

I was born in Moscow, USSR, in 1981, and my fascination with watches began at an early age. As a child, I wore all kinds of quartz watches, and on my 16th birthday I received a Tissot quartz watch to replace my old Casio. Later, as my career in High Tech progressed, I bought my first Swiss mechanical watch - an IWC Portugieser. That was the moment everything changed. One watch became three, three became five, and before long I had discovered the world of vintage watches.

Six years later, I had built a strong collection of vintage watches from Switzerland, Japan, and Germany. Around that time, I met Blaž Slamič, a self-taught Slovenian watchmaker who had already spent more than ten years collecting and restoring Soviet watches. Through that friendship, I quickly realized how fortunate I was to be living in Moscow, with access to some of the very best sources for Soviet timepieces.

At the same time, the vintage Swiss watches within my budget were becoming increasingly common. As Instagram, Hodinkee, and other watch media grew in influence, truly rare Swiss pieces became much harder to reach.

Soviet watches, by contrast, remained remarkably undervalued, and exceptional examples could still be acquired at very reasonable prices. I decided to focus on building a world-class collection of unique Soviet watches instead of chasing the next Rolex, a watch made in the hundreds of thousands and with countless examples available for sale at any given time. What made this pursuit even more exciting was the fact that early prototypes, as well as watches with space,Arctic, and military provenance, were still available - even though many of them truly belonged in a museum.

This website presents the result of that ten-year journey. I invite you to explore the Collection page and discover some of the rarest Soviet watches ever made.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the wonderful people I met along the way, who helped shape my taste, sourced extraordinary watches for me, guided me away from fakes, serviced my watches, and, most importantly, made this journey far more enjoyable and exciting. In particular, I am deeply grateful to Blaž Slamič, Andrew Babanin, Alexander Uvarov, Alexey Ballod, David Abishov, Petr Bernard, Alexander Samarenkov, Simon Stern, Chin Sheng Lee, Łukasz Radziszewski, and many others, without whom this collection would not have been possible.