The FED is a
Soviet rangefinder camera, mass produced from 1934 until around 1984, and also the name of the factory that made it.FED is indirectly named after
Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, founder of the
Cheka. It was his name that was given to the labour commune at
Kharkiv (
Ukraine) whose manager,
Anton Makarenko, encouraged a workshop education for indigent children and who decided to copy the
Leica in 1932.Large-scale production began in 1934, and in the same year the factory was put under
NKVD control and Makarenko was fired. Production continued until 1941, when German forces destroyed the factory, and resumed in 1946.
See more at Wikipedia.org...