prices comparisons are a difficult exercise because soviet ruble was a domestic currency for internal use, the front-end with open market currencies was an import/export trade for the state but didn't translate into the intrinsics of soviet society, very different of regular capitalist society.
A typical measure was to talk in portions of or amounts of monthly salary.
There was a long thread on club.foto.ru about the cost of cameras in the 80's mostly (well, beginnig of the thread before it diverts...): for instance Zenit-E 100rb, salary 150 rb. etc:
Что сколько стоило в Советское Время...
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well, I believed this was the first known trivial fact about the FED... All literature and online sites do remind of this but few do detail a bit further.
there's also a lot of fuzziness in the terms. It was not the russian secret service but the soviet counter-revolutionary service and secret service, Tcheka then OGPU then NKVD then KGB. Agents affected to counter-revolutionary service had specific uniforms, so they were clearly differentiated from the police and from the military. The ones affected to intelligence activity were of course just regular civilians.
Dzerzhinsky was a Polak from the polish-lithuanian eastern-most realm, his birth place is nowadays in Belarus. In polish registries of the catholic church he was under his polish name Feliks Szczęsny.
Many early Bolsheviks were Polaks and from the edges of Austro-Hungarian empire. As well known marxism and modern forms of socialism and communism did develop initially in Germany (Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels...) and propagated into Russian Empire eastwards through Poland and Austria. Karl Radek was from Lwow, Lemberg in german, Rosa Luxemburg from a town between Lublin and Lwow. Etc. Other Polaks as important as Dzerzhinsky in the forming of initial soviet state were Julian Leszczyński and Bronisław Wesołowski. Dzerzhinsky/Szczęsny was active in the polish communist party also.
ok, so the origin of the FED camera is indeed very unusual because it was not from a manufacturer of photographic material. Russian Empire had experienced ten years of war: from 1914 WWI to the end of Civil War around 1923/1924. WWI alone inflicted terrific effects in the country, hence the first february revolution out of social unrest. By beginning 1920's there was a huge amount of orphans and street children. The fresh soviet government was concerned by that of course, and specially Dzerzhinsky. He coordinated measures in order to re-socialize street children and teenagers, end related homelessness , criminality. On the other hand there was a famous pedagogue, Anton Makarov who had experimented with self-sufficient self-managed boarding organizations ie. "communes" with a combined work and educational task. Makarov had also been in contact with Gorki who was a drifter in his harsh youth.
one of this "communes" was founded in Kharkov by Makarov in honor to Dzerzhinsky. There were of course technical personal and supervising engineers. Kids , from early teenagers to youngers in their twenties first producing simple metallurgic objects like bed knobs and oil cans, then moved into manufacture of drills. Workshops improved and tooled as needed. The institution became also a vocational school. Then, once a Leica was brought from Germany, disassembled, and they started making clones, with some slight variations.
it was all hand made until 1935, with lenses individually adjusted to the bodies.
these early hand-made FED, numbered on top plate, with the inscription "Trudkommuna in the name of F.E.Dzerzhinsky" first, then "Trudkommuna NKVD-USSR etc" can be quite expensive. (trud kommuna = work commune). WW2 did suspend production but some batches for the military and these had a 1/1000 speed and are nicknamed "kommandirsky".
After 1935 the marking "Trudkommuna" is replaced with "factory" then "kombinat", as the "commune" was shut down and became a regular factory.
a Trudkommuna NKVD-USSR with the 1/1000s (from an a listing on Avito):
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