During World War II many a Russian officer would have been issued one of these map measures. Made at Krasnogorskiy Mechanicheskiy Zavod, production of the KMZ curvimeter continued into the Cold War era with little change in design.
“The plant, which is being restored on the premises of the former plant No. 69, shall be assigned No. 393”
Order of the People’s Commissar of Armaments of the USSR, No. 63 of February 1, 1942, Moscow
As a result of the German invasion of the Soviet Union from June 1941 during World War II, Russia was forced to relocate many of their factories. A large military industrial complex was created in Krasnogorsk, near Moscow, on the site of evacuated optical mechanical plant No. 69 that had recently relocated to Novosibirsk. Krasnogorsk had supported an optical factory since 1926 and subsequently became one of Russia’s largest optical factories, a major employer in the area.
A large military industrial complex was created and the factory complex took on the name Krasnogorskiy Mechanicheskiy Zavod (Красногорский механический завод), or in English- Krasnogorsk Mechanical Works. Operational by 1942, in the 1950s and early 1960s, two factory names were being used in correspondence- “State Union Plant No. 393 of the Ministry of Armaments of the USSR” and the less wordy “Krasnogorsk Mechanical Plant”. It was officially retitled with the latter name in May 1963. The common abbreviation was/is KMZ and the locality is more commonly referred to today as Krasnogorsky Zavod.
Many precision instruments were made at KMZ. Commencing in 1941 they concentrated on supplying the military with optical-mechanical products that included periscopes, mortar sights, optical sights for sniper rifles, aerial and film cameras for reconnaissance work, rangefinders, magnifying glasses and the subject of this month’s post- KVM topographic map curvimeters. Following the war, the factory concentrated on making camera lenses and still has a large military optics and mechanical engineering division. Another product was the Tochka 58, a miniature espionage camera. The factory is now part of the large Shvabe Holding company within the Russian state-owned Rostec group.
Alongside the specialised cameras and optical equipment, many thousands of KMZ Curvimeters were manufactured. Simple in design, the very great majority were subsequently issued to military commanders and their subordinates, and formed part of a ‘kit list’ of equipment that fitted within a standard issue leather despatch case. They were used during World War II and continued to be manufactured and issued during the Cold War that followed. These younger curvimeters can be identified by the altered KMZ logo.
Introduced in 1942, the original works logo was a hammer and sickle with a five-pointed star above a Dove prism. A Dove prism is a reflective prism used to invert an image. It is named after its inventor Heinrich Wilhelm Dove. On most products this was simplified to just the prism and it was this that was used on early KMZ curvimeters.
A certificate for the exclusive use of a logo that comprised of a Dove prism with refracted light beam (with open arrow tip) passing through it was issued by the Ministry of Trade of the USSR, Trademark Registration Bureau and was classified as case number 4102, product class 34, for optical devices.
The copyright holder for the logo was State Union Plant No. 393 (KMZ) of the Ministry of Armaments of the USSR and was valid for use on both military and civilian products from 30 May 1946 [but was first used in 1949] until 30 May 1996. The beam was officially changed to having a closed arrow tip in 1970 and later further simplified by the removal of the arrow tip, with line thickened, in 1993.
However there is a problem with this official timeline of the logo development as examples with a closed arrow tip (supposedly introduced 1970) survive with paperwork dated from the 1950s. It would appear that the second type of logo, with open tip arrow used 1949-1970, may not have moulded well on smaller plastic products and a closed arrow logo was in use over a decade earlier than records would suggest. This may point at a reason for the open arrow generally changing to a closed design in 1970.
The logo later again changed to Dove prism with thick beam with an additional company name below. The Dove prism was later removed from the design and the most recent incarnations had simply the factory name with nothing above.
The numbers produced were huge, one authority stating 18700 curvimeters being manufactured in the first year of production. While there was an uncommon long-handled version of this measure, by far the most common were those with short handles, all the better to fit in an officer’s despatch case or be hung around the neck. The smaller measure is small indeed. It is just 69mm in length, the case is 37mm wide and 9.5mm deep. Weights vary. My 1940s example weighs 14.25g, while the post-war example weighs 12.17g.
This is a simple instrument with few moving parts. To use, it is held by it’s slightly shaped handle and the finely toothed tracking wheel is steadily rolled along a line on a map by the user, which rotates the measuring dial by means of a small cog at the central axle of the tracking wheel. This dial rotates past the crescent windows in the case and the various measurements read off by the user. This is amongst the simplest of mechanisms with little to go wrong and is quite similar in operation to that used in the Polish made Inco Krzywomierz Turystyczny.
The small acetate windows allow each side of the rotating dial to be seen on each side of the measure. One side of the dial measures 0-39, converting, written in Cyrillic- версты (verstes) from дюймы (inches), the other measures 0-100, converting Сантим. (centime./centimeters) to килом. (kilometer). The later curvimeter has the dial flipped, which makes no difference to it’s actual operation.
The curvimeter is almost certainly made of Carbolite. This was a phenol-formaldehyde resin plastic created by reaction of a phenol with formaldehyde. It was analogous to Bakelite and used in Russia and the Soviet Union. While Bakelite was made from a basic (alkaline) concentrate, Carbolite was made from acid concentrates.
State Standards were mandatory for use in all sectors of the national economy across the USSR. Measuring instruments were under the control of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, who were responsible for particularly important standards. From 1920-1940 State Standards of the USSR were designated by the index “OST” and from August 1940, by the index “ГОСТ”. ГОСТ = государственный стандарт, which means a state standard or governmental standard. The word ГОСТ is Russian for GOST, an acronym for gosudarstvennyy standart, The ‘-**’ in a number indicates the year that the standard was revised, so the ГОСТ 300-41 on the box containing this measure indicates that the standard was revised in 1941, thereby dating our measure as post-1941, though we knew this as the logo on the measure dates it to post-1949. While I have been able to find little about the precise detail of the specification, in 2015 the US CIA declassified a Soviet “Index of State Standards”, originally published in Moscow and dating from 1955. This shows that GOST (ГОСТ) 300-41 relates to specifications for odometers ‘instruments for spatial, linear, angular, profile and other measurements’. Links to other CIA declassified reports relating to the KMZ plant are included at the end of this post though it is all too apparent that the CIA were not interested in curvimeters at all, they receive no mention and they were much more interested in the cameras and other optical equipment being produced at Krasnogorsk.
The two measures shown above each have the KMZ Dove prism logo, from WWII and post-war eras. This design of curvimeter also exists with another logo, shown here on two further examples. I do not know what manufacturer this logo represents and welcome comment from those better informed than I. The case and handle shape are slightly different and it may be that these are actually copies of a similar version of the KMZ curvimeter, made by Freiberger Präzisionsmechanik in Germany.
Three Points of the Compass has looked at a few more Map Measurers in detail. Links to these can be found here.
Three Points of the Compass 
One side of the dial measures 0-39, converting, written in Cyrillic- дюймы (verstes) from версты (inches),
Other way round! дюймы = inches, версты = versts.
A verst was about two-thirds of an (English) mile (there was a much longer Russian mile too) and a “duim” or inch was, surprisingly, the same as an English inch. I didn’t realize they were still in use this late, but apparently Russian measures were only officially metricated in 1925, so many older maps, and many people, would still have used these old measurements well into the post-war era.
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Whoops! thanks Daniel, silly mistake on my part, now corrected. Older maps would have remained in use for some time due to the circumstances at the time and shortage of newer cartography.
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