Slava – The Accutron Knockoff

Slava was originally a brand name used by the Second Moscow Watch Factory. Today, although the Slava name is still being used, some of these watches are produced by Chinese / Hong Kong factories.

As far as electric watches are concerned, Slava were very good at copying Western designs; they produced a copy of the Accutron 214 known as the “Slava Transistorized”.

Several unauthorized clones of the Accutron 214 movement were produced by various Soviet-aligned manufacturers. The Soviets had a well-established policy of theft and duplication of US technology during World War II and the Cold War, the most notable examples being the atomic bomb and the Boeing B-29 Superfortress. Unlike these other technologies, the Soviets came in through the front door when stealing the Accutron design. President Lyndon Johnson presented an Accutron to premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1963, and the Soviets reverse-engineered the 214 in short order after Khrushchev ordered the Soviet engineers to make a copy of the watch.

The earliest and best-known of these clones is the Slava ‘Transistor’, which utilizes an exact part-for-part duplicate of the 214 movement. The Slava movement is well below the material standards established by Bulova, and was only produced in small quantities; working examples are rarely seen today. Slava later produced a model with a day/date complication, of which only one example is known to still exist.

The heart of the watch is a very small Tuning Fork. It hums with 360 movements per second at f-sharp. By keeping it in resonance through an electric circuit using a simple transistor very low power is needed to keep it going and create a relative long battery life…roughly a year. The transistor improved accuracy over mechanical watches. It could be regulated to +-2 seconds/day, but Khruschchev’s knockoff wasn’t near as accurate.

This Slava knockoff watch was issued in 1962 and it is said that there were less than 25,000 pieces made due to quality problems. Most likely, fewer than 1,000 exist today and can still be found occasionally (most usually not working) for sale on Ebay.

Some parts will swap from an Accutron 214, but no actual 214 parts went into the watch. It is estimated that of the overall lot, 1000 watches were made and given to government, and military leaders.