If you were growing up in the 1970s, rangefinder cameras from the Soviet Union were a popular route into photography. They were robust, cheap and had impressive optics if you got a good example – but reliability and quality control were very variable. Most of my friends had either a Zorki or a FED at some point, before graduating to a single lens reflex as we started earning more money. The Kiev 4A was less common and only appeared infrequently in the camera shop window. I didn’t own a Kiev at the time – as an impoverished teenager I settled for a FED 3L – but I always wondered about them, so when I saw one for sale for around £40 a few years ago I didn’t hesitate to snap it up.
The Kiev 4A has a complicated background story which covers quite a bit of post-war European history, but here is the short version. At the end of the Second World War the Contax camera factory, which had been a major player in Germany during the 1930s, ended up under the control of the Soviet Union. There are various names for what happened next, but
