An Introduction
to Soviet Leica-Derived Rangefinder Cameras
produced by FED and Zorki

by Comrade Stoisha

My passion for photography somehow didn’t survive marriage and children, and by the early ‘80’s, all of those cameras were gone. Almost twenty years have gone by, and as sometimes happens, my interest in photography has been rekindled.

When I looked over several year’s worth of my photos, I found that the ones I liked the best were taken not with the fancy SLR’s and their many lenses, but with the old Leica IIIc and its 50 mm lens! My first thought was to buy another old Leica, but when I saw how much they now go for, I wished I had invested 20 years ago in screw-mount Leicas rather than my company’s 401K.

Then I remembered reading years ago in "Camera Collector" about good Leica clones made by Canon and other Japanese manufacturers … no luck there either – collectors have driven up prices for these as well.

Finally, I recalled a dim memory of "Russian Leicas", screw-mount clones of the Leica II series. With a little research on the Internet, I found that the Soviets had indeed made relatively faithful copies of the classic screw-mount Leicas – both before and after WWII – and many more in fact than Leitz ever produced! Not only that, but the Soviet photo industry went on to make a surprising variety of Leica-Thread-Mount, focal-plane shuttered, rangefinders with a number of improvements over the original Leitz design. And not only that… but a quick check of online auctions and dealers’ websites showed that they were plentiful and cheap!

As the Soviet Union was a closed society, the history of the "Soviet Leica", particularly during the war years, is not always crystal-clear and undisputed. But the story clearly begins with the establishment of institutions in the 1920’s for orphans whose parents died in the Bolshevik revolution and the turbulent years that followed. Some of these institutions came under the direction of the Soviet Secret Police, or "Cheka, founded by Felix E. Dzerzhinsky. After Dzerzhinsky’s death, the Cheka was renamed the OGPU, and later the NKVD (forerunner of the KGB.)

By the late 1920’s, Stalin’s objective was the rapid transformation of a basically agrarian country into an industrial nation, no longer dependent on the "capitalist world" for industrial products. As a step in this direction, the Ukrainian branch of the NKVD decided to transform one of the orphanages in Kharkov, Ukraine into a "labor commune", which would combine secondary school education with productive work. The commune was named "F. E. Dzerzhinsky", after late founder of the NKVD, and soon came to be known simply as "FED."

The young communards rapidly learned such skills as carpentry and ironwork, and soon became a successful producer of furniture and other goods. By 1932, the addition of a university-level work-study group allowed the commune to take on more complicated products, such as electric drills reverse-engineered from Black & Decker designs.

In April 1932, Leitz thrilled the photographic world by unveiling their Leica II. The same year, Soviet planners suspended the import of photographic equipment to the Soviet Union. The leadership of the FED labor commune viewed this as an opportunity to create a "Leica" of their own. This was no small task, as the mass-manufacture of something of this complexity and precision had never been attempted in the Soviet Union.

By 1941, more than 175,000 FEDs had been produced, along with a variety of additional lenses, including a 50mm f 2, a 28mm f 4.5, and a 100 mm f 5.9. All of this came to a stop in June 1941 with the invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany. With the Ukraine under immediate threat, FED personnel were evacuated to Berdsk in southern Siberia. Here, they were assigned to Soviet Air Force, where they produced aircraft parts such as injection pumps and carburetors. By late October, the German Army overran Kharkov, destroying the FED factory in the process.

Once the war ended, the process of rebuilding FED in Kharkov began in late 1945, and production was resumed in 1946. In another boon to collectors, the "Kombinat" was redesignated as a factory ("Zavod") with the appropriate change to the top plate engraving. Although this engraving still carried the name of F. E. Dzerzhinsky, the reference to NKVD was dropped. Production ramped up slowly, but by the end of its run in 1955, more than a half-million postwar FEDs were produced at Kharkov. A nice one with a coated FED f 3.5 "Elmar clone" can be had for $50-60. You can also find pre-war FEDs, with the earlier engravings commanding higher prices.

Having had a long and successful run with the original FED (nowadays referred to as the FED 1,) the engineers at FED started looking at new designs by 1950. They produced two "FED 2" prototypes in the very early ‘50’s, both having combined rangefinder/viewfinder. The first design, and the path not taken by FED, looked very similar to the earlier models. This approach was later taken in another Soviet design, the Zorki 3.

The second prototype was quite a departure from the original Leitz design. The viewfinder was enlarged and the rangefinder housing now included a narrow "tunnel" along the front. This "tunnel" provided room for a generous 67 mm rangefinder baseline (compared to 38 mm used by Leitz from the Leica II all the way until the IIIg). The combined rangefinder-viewfinder was augmented by a diopter adjustment lever coaxial with the rewind knob. Instead of being a bottom-loader, the FED 2 had a cast, removable back, á la Contax. Like the Contax, the back locked with two keys, one at each end of the baseplate, and had a tripod socket in the center. In terms of features, the only similarity to the late FED 1 design was the shutter, which still had speeds of 1/25 – 1/500, plus B.

You can snag a nice FED 2 with Industar-26M lens for $40-$50. Serious FED collectors may have to dig deeper for the rare square-windowed pre-series model, which can go for as much as $200.

The FEDniks finally got around to adding slow speeds with their FED 3 models. The FED 3’s and all later FEDs have shutters with what we now think of as a "normal" progression of 1, ½, ¼, 1/8, 1/15, 1/30, 1/60, 1/125, 1/250, and 1/500 as well as B. There are two distinct FED 3 variants, usually referred to as "type a" and "type b." Both variants used the same basic body shell as FED 2, but with different superstructures.

Type b’s were produced from 1963 all the way to 1980. The normal lens was the excellent Industar-61. In the later years of the FED 3, the glass for the I-61 was reformulated with the rare earth element Lanthanum, and redesignated Industar-61 L/D.

The FED 4 series added an uncoupled selenium exposure meter. Like the FED 3, line, there were two main variants. The FED 4 type a bears a close resemblance to the FED 3 type a, but the taller superstructure required for the selenium cell gives it a decidedly chunky look. Alas, this early FED 4 is the last in the FED line to have strap lugs. The FED 4 type b added a rapid-advance lever. This model substituted a printed metal nameplate for the traditional FED engraving, a move that lends a tacky look to this and later FED models. Both FED 4 variants retained the diopter adjustment feature of a collar around the eyepiece. An unusual feature of the FED 4 series is a rewind disk in the right side of the rangefinder housing.

1977 saw the introduction of the Feb 5B, which looks basically like the FED 4 type b without the built-in metering cell and with an even tackier nameplate. This new model gained a hot shoe and a rewind crank. The following year witnessed the release of the FED 5 (with no letter suffix), a design that returned the uncoupled selenium exposure meter but replaced the rewind crank with a pop-up rewind knob. The final FED 5 variant, and indeed the last Leica-derived camera design by FED, the FED 5C, appeared in 1983. This version has an uncoupled selenium meter and projected (but non-parallax-compensated) frame lines in the viewfinder, but it lost the eyepiece diopter adjustment.