The history of the Soviet film camera.

Soviet portable small-format film camera "Sharp-4" production of the Krasnogorsk mechanical plant (KMZ). Serial number 5763756. It was produced in 1956-73. It is equipped with a synchronizer and self-timer, has a viewfinder combined in one field of view and a rangefinder mechanically coupled to the lens. In a brown leather jacket. It is considered the most mass and technically perfect model of Soviet cameras. The condition is satisfactory. Original. Few people remember that" sharp-Sighted " became a direct descendant of the once legendary domestic camera brand fed, the appearance of which was preceded by a fascinating story.

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Let's start a little from afar. After the October revolution of 1917, the well-established Royal system of charitable and public charity institutions in Russia was completely destroyed. The new government had to take care of the weak and the poor, including orphans, on the basis, of course, of their own ideas about this social sphere. After the first World war and the Civil war, the number of street children in Soviet Russia increased dramatically. Thus, according to the Great Soviet encyclopedia, by 1923 there were about four million of them (some sources even write about eight million). Back in the autumn of 1921, the Chairman of the Central Committee to combat the counter — revolution and sabotage Felix Dzerzhinsky led another new Commission, which was called-to improve the lives of children. So it is no accident that "iron Felix" is credited with authoring the idea of creating children's colonies for juvenile criminals.

In that hectic time, without exception, homeless children are a priori considered to be criminals because wandered and hunted for food if you are not stealing, begging. Children's colonies soon appeared all over the country: on the banks of the Volga, for example, there was A labor agricultural colony named after writer John reed, there was a colony in Bolshevo near Moscow, and in Ukraine. According to official statistics, in 1924 in such disciplinary institutions managed to place more than 280 thousand homeless.

On the one hand, it was the epoch of severe bureaucracy (the care of homeless, except for the police, was engaged in people's Commissariat, and the Commissariat and the trade unions, and the Komsomol), but post-revolution were widespread experiments, in particular, and in pedagogy. The children were encouraged to learn without lessons and teams, that do nothing to teach, they say, some people freak out, so let it be. In this chaos of ideas one of the most interesting and effective in Soviet pedagogy was the method of children's self-government. And the most famous teacher who realized this idea in practice — Anton Makarenko.

Anton Semyonovich graduated from the pedagogical Institute with a gold medal, before the revolution he worked in a boarding school for children of railway workers and even visited the school Director. In 1920, by order of the local Department of public education Makarenko created in the Ukrainian village of Kovalevka near Poltava colony for juvenile offenders, which in 1921 was named after the main proletarian writer — Maxim Gorky.

At the colony Makarenko was involved in an abandoned monastery, where they spent their repair and patched the rotten roof. The building was inhabited by homeless children aged 14 to 18 years, which for several days were collected at the stations and streets. "You are the masters here!"- these words met yesterday's vagabonds Anton Makarenko. He told the teenagers that the arrangement of their new shared house they have to deal with on their own, on their own. "No tables-make tables, chairs, whitewash the walls, insert the glass, fix the doors," explained the children a new method of education of their mentor. Contrary to the skeptics, he did not use any "special teaching methods". Life itself forced children to work together-both big, and small. And if someone was stopped to carry out its functions, the rest was harder, and they "educated" the tape. That's the whole method. Like family. In fact, Makarenko became one of
the ideologists of the "soclose" — social education. His system was based on trust and respect for children, but with the maximum demands. He soon turned the colony into a commune where there was no security and barbed wire on the fence. Each child, depending on age, had a specific area of responsibility: someone cleaned potatoes, someone made furniture. Everyone learned to read and write. Makarenko applied the principle of a self-organizing organism, where the balancing moments were work, study and creativity.

This system became widely known thanks to Anton Makarenko's book "Pedagogical poem". Nowadays, it has received international recognition, UNESCO even called Makarenko one of the four people who defined the way of pedagogical thinking in the twentieth century. However, in the USSR Anton Semenovich's contemporaries for some reason considered his methods not quite Soviet. Makarenko was criticized by the widow of Lenin, Deputy people's Commissar of education Nadezhda Krupskaya. As a result, in 1928, a talented teacher had to leave the commune named after Gorky. However, soon he was able to lead The children's labor commune of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR. F. E. Dzerzhinsky, located near Kharkov. Among the pupils called their colony "country fed" — the initials of the most famous in the Soviet Cheka. It is the forces of minor pupils of the commune began production of a compact, very durable and inexpensive domestic film camera, which also received the name of fed.

There is an opinion that the fed camera is an exact copy of the German Leica apparatus of 1925. Allegedly, our engineers just dismantled the German mechanism and the tyutelka in tyutelka copied it. According to another version, the direct ancestor of the kommunarovsky Fed was collected in Ukraine before the revolution. Indeed, in the shops of the Kharkiv optical Society in 1906 collected a small-format camera "Cyclops", created by a craftsman Cornelius Yevtushenko. It is likely that it was "Cyclops", which, by the way, used even at the court of Emperor Nicholas II, and was the prototype of the Soviet Fed.

In 1932, the first power tool Assembly plant in the Soviet Union was launched under the commune. Pupils easily and quickly mastered the production of electric drills, which were previously imported mainly from abroad. So the roots of the well-known domestic electric drill go to Kharkiv, to the community named after Dzerzhinsky. First good luck on the electric field was soon greatly complicate the task of the commune dared to collect the cameras. Engineers, optics designers wondered, inexperienced boys are going to do such a complex technology? Lenses down to a micron? The camera consisted of hundreds of parts, and some of them had to be made with an accuracy of 0.001 mm. But the Communards did not disappoint. By the end of 1932, the first 10 cells had been assembled. They say they were presented as a gift to the country's leadership. And when experts confirmed their excellent quality, cameras from Communards went to mass production. So, in 1934, was released 1800 portable Fedov, and in 1935 — 15 thousand. It is noteworthy that the devices of this type at the same time failed to master the production of Leningrad, referring to the bad city climate, which influenced the quality of the lenses. In General, the camera " fed " was in the 30s a real miracle of technology. And collected it 13-year-old boys, having at the disposal of the most primitive tools. By the beginning of the Second World war, the volume of their production was more than 160 thousand per year.

Thanks to the successful production, the community, which was self-supporting, lived quite comfortably. To arrive from the sale of Fedov that it covers the cost of maintaining the plant, dormitories, schools, and each year brought the state Treasury of five million rubles. At the expense of the earned money Communards traveled around the country, went in the summer to the sea, visited the Kharkov theaters. However, the successful economic experience of Anton Makarenko again fell to the court - by
the mid-30s, the NEP and self-financing in the country began to collapse. The commune was soon turned into a plant, and the matured Communards — into workers. Makarenko in 1935 left teaching work, went to Moscow and engaged in literature.