Soyuz Pencils

My dislike of extruded pencils is fairly well-known amongst my pencil-friends. As much as many of you love your Staedtler Wopexes, I have tried even the best and highest-priced brands’ wood-polymer blends, to no avail. From Staedtler to Lyra, and my typical complaint is that the core is too hard and requires too much pressure to get a decent mark on the page, though I say this as an admitted soft-grade lover. This core’s polymer composition also means the feedback is different, which makes me tend to press harder because I’m not feeling the drag of the paper grain. Finally, the case is also polymer-based and tends to bend and warp in an uncomfortable way, especially in the presence of all this increased pressure I give to the point.

My earliest memories of extruded pencils were from primary school, where I remember some kids had these and when they sharpened them could produce a lovely tight spiral of shavings with the strips of core attached. All these prior impressions were completely turned on their heads with three lines of pencils from Союз/Soyuz, a brand of pencils from а Russian plastics company whose other products include such things as styrofoam, medical supplies and fibre-optic cable. I bought these three varieties — a hex, a rubbered hex and a triangular — from Ozon with another order a while back, and did not initially know they were extruded.

These pencils somehow manage to combine all the problems of extruded pencils with none of the supposed benefits. Extruded boosters tend to advertise the long point retention and durability of the cores, the flexibility of the cases making them difficult to break and easy to sharpen. Soyuz had none of these. The cores flaked and chunked off both in whatever sharpener I tried and during even the lightest pressure use. The cores were excessively flexible, requiring even more force to mark the page, which of course broke the core. Finally, extruding a pencil usually means the core and case are a solid and seamless mass, one reason the pencils tend to be more durable. But Soyuz’s cores and cases easily separated from each other and the cores broke and fell out of the case with light to normal pressure. See the video below:

Obviously for all these reasons I cannot recommend these pencils at all. They are possibly the worst I’ve ever used and I feel quite sad for all the school kids who get them this season…