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Tag: Russia

  • Interview With Raketa CEO David Henderson-Stewart — An Englishman Abroad – Fratello Watches

    RN: Is there anything from the Swiss, or German, or even Japanese philosophies that you have adopted or might consider adopting for Raketa? DHS: Not really. We want to keep Raketa’s authentic Russian flavor: in terms of values, designs, and in-house manufacturing. This is one of the reasons why you will not find “classic” watch designs in Raketa’s collection. Raketa watches have a Big Zero on the dial (instead of the conventional “12”), they have 24-hour movements, they go counter-clockwise, they have triangular and round hands on the dial, etc. Every single Raketa watch has its own strong identity and tells a very Russian story, whether it’s about the conquest of space, avant-garde art, or the exploits of the country’s famous submariners. The world of watches would be sadder if there were just Swiss and German watches.

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  • Raketa, the beating heart of Russian watchmaking – Europa Star

    Founded in 1961 in honour of the space exploits of Yuri Gargarin (Raketa means “space rocket” in Russian), the large watchmaking factory from the period of Soviet centralisation, which produced millions of timepieces a year and employed thousands of workers, had shrunk to a tiny brand producing $100 souvenir watches for Western tourists in search of Soviet “memorabilia”. But in actual fact, its history dates back much further than the Soviet era. It is the heir to the former Imperial Peterhof Factory, founded in 1721 by the Czar Peter the Great.

    David Henderson-Stewart, a young Franco-British entrepreneur (with Russian origins) living in Moscow, knew nothing about watchmaking, but was convinced his project – to relaunch an important, truly Russian luxury brand for a market that buys mainly foreign high-end goods – was valid. It was rather by chance that he chose Raketa to realise his idea of a Russian luxury brand: browsing watch blogs, he noticed that Soviet watches had an international audience of enthusiasts. It seemed like a good starting point.

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  • America the evil mastermind? Not so fast, Russians are told – The New York Times

    As President Trump turns decades of U.S. foreign policy upside down, another dizzying swing is taking place in Russia, both in the Kremlin and on state-controlled television: The United States, the new message goes, is not that bad after all. Almost overnight, it’s Europe — not the United States — that has become the source of instability in the Russian narrative. On his marquee weekly show on the Rossiya-1 channel Sunday night, the anchor Dmitri Kiselyov described the “party of war” in Europe as outmatched by the “great troika” of the United States, Russia and China that will form “the new structure of the world.” […]

    The whiplash in ties with Washington was so stark that Russian state television on Sunday showed a reporter asking the Kremlin’s spokesman how it was possible that “a couple of months ago we were publicly saying that we were almost enemies.” “This, indeed, couldn’t have been imagined,” the spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, replied, marveling at the shift. American foreign policy, he added, now “coincides with our vision in many ways.” […]

    But for Mr. Putin himself, there may be a wisp of internal consistency in the swing toward Washington. He has generally avoided labeling the United States as a whole as Russia’s enemy. Rather, Mr. Putin has said it is the Western “neoliberal elite” that tries to impose its “strange” values on the world and seeks Russia’s destruction, while depicting American conservatives as Russia’s friends. It’s a mirror image of the propaganda tropes of the Soviet Union, when American progressives were cast as Moscow’s allies.

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  • “Recoup the costs” – Thinking About

    The American demand is of an extraordinary scale. In Kyiv and again in Munich, the Americans proposed that Ukraine concede half of the profits from its mineral rights in perpetuity and from other national resources and from its ports in perpetuity with a lien on everything important — in exchange for essentially nothing. This is not really a monetary proposition, let alone a “deal,” but rather the demand that Ukraine become a permanent American colony. It amounts to blackmail enabled by ongoing Russian invasion. In effect, the United States is telling Ukraine to concede its resources to the United States, under the threat that American aid will be otherwise withdrawn, and those resources will be taken by Russia.

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