Union of Socialist Scribes

The Soviet Union had a fairly strong pencil industry, with production in three of the eventual successor states, from what I’ve found in my research. This compares to today, when only one of those states still produces pencils, Russia itself. In searching to learn more about Soviet and Russian pencil history, I’ve found lots of intriguing information, but numerous gaps in the record as well.

Like other countries (and former countries), the number of pencil producers in the Soviet successor states has dwindled as production has consolidated with globalization. More people around the world are literate today and likely more are using pencils than ever before despite the information technology revolution, and yet fewer companies and countries are making them.

From what I can gather in all my recent research, the region once known as the Soviet Union at its peak had five pencil factories (Karnatz, Krasin, Tomsk, Hammer/Sacco and Vanzetti and Sloviansk) likely sometime in the 1920s. Between that peak and the present day, four (all but Krasin) of those factories closed and two more (Kimek and Voskresensk) opened, and one of those two (Kimek) closed again. This would leave us with the present-day total of only two.

The first factory to open in Russia also appears to have been the first to close. Founded in 1875 in Moscow, the Karnatz factory lasted only until the 1930s, and was apparently a site of many historic revolutionary workers’ manifestations. This is one brand of which I lack any specimens. Voskresensk tells much of the history of Karnatz on their website, and between their concentration on this brand and the latest incarnation of their logo (which mimics that of the original Karnatz brand), they appear to consider themselves the successors to this early pioneer. Some clues I’ve used in uncovering information about these brands are their markings and names, and this re-use surely makes for some confusion.

Photo from Ozon.ru

Oddly enough, there is recent news that the Karnatz brand name is now being repurposed by a new pencil company building a factory in the Ryazan region not too far from Moscow. I don’t know if this is part of Voskresensk’s continued incorporation of old brands and trademarks or a genuinely new concern. It will be exciting if a new independent brand appears in this age.

Probably the only brand that was strong before, during and after Soviet times was the Krasin factory. This company still seems to have a fairly big production, but both their current and old stock are difficult to find right now. Ozon has a few Krasin products, and they pop up every now and then on eBay, but I lack a significant source for these. Their website is still active and shows a 2021 copyright and catalog, but strangely their competitor Voskresensk claims to be the only remaining Russian pencilmaker.

The third Russian factory from Soviet times that survived the 90s was the Tomsk factory, from which I possess only a couple specimens, but it alas shut down just in the past few years, something detailed better in a previous post.

Another intriguing manufacturer was the Hammer factory. Opened by an American industrialist, its name was changed in the 30s to Sacco and Vanzetti in honour of the famed duo of falsely-accused and executed anarchist Italian immigrants from Boston. The factory grounds house an old steam locomotive from a previous public heritage display that seems unfortunately inaccessible to the public, but satellite view shows the grounds as essentially an unused park-like space on the riverside in Moscow. I have only one Sacco and Vanzetti-era specimen from this maker.

Outside Russia, the aforementioned Sloviansk factory in Ukraine is where most of my vintage Soviet pencils have come from. They appeared to crank out massive amounts of pencils in Soviet times and these things are currently flooding eBay and Etsy and very easy to come by.

You can score a box of 100 short school pencils (11cm long with standard pencil diameter) from either their Roket or Kosmos lines for less than CAD .30 per pencil (more than you’d pay for a no-name standard modern Chinese pencil, granted, but surely more interesting).

I found a couple interesting features in my digging that discuss the factory and the city in which it operated.

Near the factory gates still stands a monument to what it once made in the form of a large sculpture shaped like three pencils. The factory is largely still in use by a chemicals firm, but pencils have not been made there since 2003. One interesting bit of trivia is that the factory was originally located in Warsaw when that city, too, was a part of the Russian Empire, and later moved by its owner.

A final place where pencil-adjacent manufacturing took place was Moldova, at a factory operated by a brand called Kimek, which seemed to exclusively make mechanical pencils - both the lead holders and the leads, but no woodcase specimens seem present in the searches I do for the name.

Kimek’s colouring pencils were largely plastic or resin-based, colour-coded to indicate the 2mm or 3mmleads you could use with each (similar to specimens currently produced by Koh-i-Noor). They also had several lines of lead holders meant for graphite. Most came with splendid cases ranging from simple plastic sleeves to debossed leather to decorative hard plastic.

The newest entrant is the aforementioned Voskresensk factory. This company seems to take its modern name from the town outside Moscow in which it operates. Their products are high quality, ubiquitous, and fairly easy to acquire outside Russia (which is why I've already posted about them fairly extensively). They largely use two logos in their production, but here and there (for example, in their website browser icon), they use the logo of Ukraine’s defunct Sloviansk factory, and many of their pencil lines (Chertezhnik, Engineer) take their names from lines once produced there.

Whilst it is popularly assumed that Soviet manufacturing was all dreary sameness with no marketing flair, each of these brands, on the contrary, sports unique logos and most show the same or greater level of design and merchandising acumen expected of any western brand of the era.

The biggest difference with their western counterparts was that until 1992 all of these factories employed more workers than they needed, and each of those workers had a pension plan and a job for life.

Thirty years on, the victorious west has contracted production of almost all their brands to the same few factories in the same few cities of East Asia, whilst in Russia two brands still work away making their own wood slats and graphite cores. Perhaps inspiring to us to at least envision a future with more sources rather than fewer, and with less capitalism rather than more.

If you see any facts that need correcting or have extra information or sources for Soviet-era pencils (especially pre- and early-Soviet resources), get in touch!