Zim Owner Review : Remarkable, conceptual and proportionate

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Samara Zim factory produced a number of watches under the Pobeda brand, featuring slogans on the dials. This one reads "democracy" in big red letters. Well, let's be clear, if we need to write in big letters on wristwatch dials that we live in a democracy, that the Soviet constitution is the most democratic in the world, it's because deep down, people don't really believe it. So, of course, the big Demokratiya is crushed by the weight of the Hammer and Sickle above it, which compress the central letters. That's what we see first on this dial, a big, red, staining Democracy trampled by Soviet torture instruments. But that's not what strikes us most. What's truly disconcerting isn't visible; it's an absence that is felt. The main number isn't there; there's a blank space in its place. Like George Pérec's novel "The Disappearance," written entirely without the letter E, which is by far the most common in French and whose absence creates a real stylistic unease, like the disappearance of the Jews in 1940s Europe. An omnipresent absence. Making the 12 disappear, when all the other numbers are neatly chained together in their proper places, is an equivalent disappearance. An omnipresent absence. There are dials where only the 12 is present; it's the main number, the twelve strokes of midnight, the Wednesday noon siren. Raketa knew how to replace it with 0 or 00, but it's only a matter of style. The finish line of the past half-day or the beginning of a new one. It's all a matter of point of view and style. But making the number disappear while leaving its comrades standing is something else entirely. Where is this 12, the leader, the brightest on the dial? Was he arrested at home in the middle of the night by the secret police? Ten years without the right to communicate? Is he broken, exhausting himself at the bottom of a mine beyond the Arctic Circle? Is he at the bottom of a cellar, subjected to repeated torture? Is he at the bottom of a mass grave covered by a grove of birch trees? Technically, it's a 34 mm diameter chrome-plated brass case with organic crystal and a stainless steel clip-on caseback. The mechanism is a Zim 2602 with 15 jewels and a small seconds at 6 o'clock. The lugs lengthen the watch, measuring 41 mm from lug to lug. You could listen to a song by Nautilus Pompilius while wearing this watch: linked by the same chain. The entire drama of the USSR is there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0QuEpg4V4U.