In 1967, Vostok was commissioned by the Soviet Defense Department to produce a dive watch comparable in performance to it’s foreign counterparts, proven watches like the Blancpain Fifty Fathoms and Omega Seamaster – no small task for designers Mikhail Novikov and Vera Belov at the Chistpool watch factory.
They say the enemy of creativity is the absence of constraint. For Vostok, designing a watch that met the specifications of the Russian Navy without using the proven industrial design methods of the Swiss forced them to reimagine the fundamental elements of a dive watch.
Protecting the inside of the case from water penetration being the primary goal, Vostok was forced to innovate – coming up with novel solutions for the winding mechanism, crystal and caseback to prevent water entering...
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