Dear Vlad,
I am very pleased that you are interested in this thematic and want to set order in the chaos of what happened in turbulent post-war years.
Without going into details it looks like this:
1945 Soviets dismantled the rests of Contax production in Dresden and sent it to USSR. Only limited part of these devices was used since during the transportation through Poland and Soviet Union many equipment was lost or damaged or was no use for new factories. A batch of Dresden Contaxes was sent to Kiev. Some optics or optical parts were sent to USSR as well. Probably soon it was realized that lenses with Contax mounts are of no much use in USSR in 1945. The rests of optics from Dresden warehouses were sent to Jena in order to convert them into LTM mount lenses. Here comes disagreement with data from H. Thiele. According to him these lenses were produced with Contax mount but one finds them in LTM mounts. This happens I assume because of this modification. It can be that Zeiss left no notes in their archives. Soviets tried to keep secret many things. An example of such Sonnar you can find here
http://ussrphoto.com/Forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2774.
Late 1945 Jena factory makes lenses and optical devices for USSR. They exported o USSR optics on 2 million Rubels. Most probably these lenses are almost all Sonnars 2/50 or 1.5/50 in Contax mount. These lenses you can find e.g. on TSVVS.
As far as I remember this year begins the first dismantle of the factory. All equipment that was used for military optics production and laboratories were dismantled. Military optics was brought to USSR. Soviet military administration said that no other dismantle was foreseen and workers of the factory should produce reparation goods. This was a lie since Ustinov (folk komissar of armarment) and his people actively started to prepare places for factory transportation into USSR.
1946 Work on Contax and Volga/Kiev project. Reconstruction of blueprints and drownings from films and Dresden Contaxes, manufacture of tools. Most probably this prototype
http://ussrphoto.com/Forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2827 among other was created. Proposition of Schrade, Schomerus and Sandman to create an analog of Zeiss and Schott factories in Volga region from the scratch. Shortage of money and other plans of Soviets made this idea unheared. Decision to produce Kiev cameras in Arsenal instead of Volga cameras. Creation of the first Contax Jena and probably no-number Kievs from available rests of Dresden Contaxes
http://ussrphoto.com/Wiki/default.asp?WikiCatID=20&ParentID=1&ContentID=1635&Item=Early+Kiev+-+Dresden+%2F+Jena+samples.
November 1946 100 years of Carl Zeiss. Instead of celebration the full demontage began. The dismantle lasts almost one year. The production of Contaxes (and later also Kievs) continued. On the request of German communistic party Stalin allowed to leave 6% of all available in fall 1946 equipment in Jena. I expect that this was not enough to continue further mass Contax production.
Black market Contaxes (lenses?).
1946 Workers taken from Jena factory and transported to Kiev Arsenal to start preparing for production of Kievs there.
1947 The first Kievs appeared in Jena. Bold font, Zeiss+Soviet serial numbers. The second batch of Kievs with only Soviet engraving.
1947' Kievs were assembled in Kiev from Dresden Contaxes that were brought in 1945. Italic font. (I see that conkie says that these Contaxes were assembled in Jena as well. Maybe I am wrong that these cameras were modified in Kiev).
Black market Contaxes (lenses?).
1948 Rests of Contax Jena and Jena Kievs brought to Arsenal. 1948 Kievs made from these spare parts.
Late 1948 Arsenal cameras made from Dresden Contaxes. Usually with italic font of Kiev logo.
1949 The first Arsenal cameras appeared. Still some spare parts were used from (Dresden) Contax.
Somehow Jena managed to continue Contax cameras production until 1951 or even later. But the demontage made this process a real pain. When Soviets decided that the reparation politics is more or less completed the production of Contaxes was dropped. As I understand these cameras were allowed to produce in SBZ and later in DDR in order to sell abroad. Soviets needed the foreign currency and Contaxes were partly sold as reparation payments.
I reconstructed here the time line as good as I can based on documents and historical investigations I've read. If someone would correct me I would be very appreciated.
with best regards
altix
