Kiev 5

Arsenal · Contax RF mount · 24×36mm on 35mm film · 1968

Also known as: Kiev-5 · Киев-5 · Kiev 5 Arsenal

Variants & identification

Variant	Mount	Years	Serial ranges	Production
Kiev 5	Contax RF	1967–1973	#6800011, #6800124, #6800131, #6800390 — 1968 #6900290, #6900389, #6900585, #6901301 — 1969 #7000621, #7005889 — 1970 #7100454, #7101006, #7102402, #7102622, #7103729 — 1971 #7203133 — 1972 #7300297, #7300905, #7300921, #7300970 — 1973 #0000100 — no year encoded; see the serial notes	No factory figure has been published. Wikipedia gives an estimate of 8,000 to 50,000 — a six-fold spread that is really an admission that nobody knows

WHAT WILL AND WILL NOT MOUNT. The Contax/Kiev mount is two bayonets. Standard 50mm lenses have no focusing helical of their own: they seat in the INNER bayonet and are focused by a helical inside the camera, driven by the saw-tooth wheel on the top plate. Wide and long lenses seat on the OUTER bayonet, carry their own helical, and merely drive the rangefinder ramp. The Kiev 5 deletes the inner bayonet, the body helical and the wheel. So no internal-bayonet standard lens — 5cm Sonnar, Jupiter-8, Jupiter-8M, Jupiter-3, Helios-103 — can be fitted at all. Not "fits and misfocuses": there is nothing for it to seat in. External-bayonet lenses, the 35mm Jupiter-12 and the 85mm and 135mm Jupiters and their Zeiss equivalents, mount and couple normally.
No factory serial-number table has been published for the Kiev 5, and no production figure has been published at all. What exists is USSRPhoto's owner-contributed list of known numbers. It is a record of what has surfaced, not of what was built, and every entry on it depends on a collector having reported the camera.
That list bears on the disputed first year without settling it. Not one of the numbers recorded there begins 67; the earliest year-prefixed camera is #6800011. That supports 1968 as the year serial production began, which is camera-wiki's and Wikipedia's date, and it leaves the 1967 date untouched, because the sources that give 1967 are counting prototypes and prototypes were not numbered by year.
Two specifics here — that the focusing wheel was deleted, and that the outer bayonet is otherwise unchanged from the Contax — rest largely on one detailed collector article by Mike Eckman. Every other source consulted agrees the inner bayonet is gone; only that page spells out the mechanical consequences.

How to tell them apart (expand)

The mount has the OUTER bayonet only — the inner bayonet is absent
No focusing helical in the body, and therefore no focusing wheel on the top plate
A new finder, larger and brighter than the Contax-derived one, on a shorter rangefinder base

Kiev 5:

NO saw-tooth focusing wheel on the top plate: the body helical it drove is gone
Lever wind in place of the Kiev 4's knob
A large combined finder with a projected, parallax-corrected 50mm brightline frame
Uncoupled selenium meter

Serial-range notes

the exception the rule hides: The year-prefix convention is Arsenal's from 1947 and the lens plants' from 1949 — it is not Soviet-wide and it is not KMZ-wide. KMZ's own Zorki bodies of 1948–54 run in a single sequence with no year prefix, so the rule fails there silently and plausibly: a 1951 Zorki 55325 reads as 1955, a 1953 254580 reads as 1925.
the first two digits: THE RULE. The first two digits of the serial number are the year of manufacture: #6800011 is 1968, #7300970 is 1973. What follows is a running number within that year, not a total. Mike Eckman states the rule for Kiev cameras and lenses; camera-wiki states it for the Kiev 4M — "the first two digits show the production year" — and JAPB for Soviet equipment generally. Nothing on this camera departs from it except the number below.
#6800011 to #7300970: THE WHOLE RECORDED POPULATION. USSRPhoto's Kiev 5 page carries a list of known serial numbers, each attributed to the collector who reported it, and on the two-digit rule it spans 1968 to 1973 without a gap: four cameras from 1968, four from 1969, two from 1970, five from 1971, one from 1972 and four from 1973. That is a registry of about twenty cameras standing in for a production run nobody can put a figure on — but it is the only dated evidence there is, and it agrees exactly with the 1968–1973 span the sources give.
#0000100: THE EXCEPTION, and it is the interesting one. The single number in USSRPhoto's list that carries no year. JAPB records a habit kept for the whole life of the USSR: prototypes and pre-production samples were numbered from 00. So a 1967 pre-production Kiev 5 — the reading that produces the earlier of the two first-year dates recorded on this entry — would not carry a 67 prefix in the first place, and #0000100 is the shape such a camera would take. This is a reading of two facts side by side, not a claim either source makes.
the five digits after the year: The running number restarts each year, and in USSRPhoto's list it stays small: the highest recorded within any one year is 05889, in 1970. That is a floor on how many were numbered that year and says nothing about a ceiling, but it sits closer to sovietcams' reading of the total than to the upper end of the 8,000–50,000 spread. A list of twenty cameras cannot settle the figure and is not offered as doing so.

Specifications

Format: 24×36mm on 35mm film
Finder: Combined coincident-image rangefinder and viewfinder with a projected parallax-corrected 50mm brightline; the outer field approximates 35mm coverage
Shutter: vertical-travel metal focal plane — shutter and body taken from a contemporary Kiev 4 · B, 1 – 1/1000
Meter: Uncoupled selenium cell
Country: Ukraine

Larger and brighter than the Contax finder it replaces, and compared by USSRPhoto to a Leica M finder — but on a shorter rangefinder base than the Kiev 4's 90mm.

Figures we worked out rather than found: Arsenal had to build a standard lens with its own helical to sell this camera at all: the Jupiter-8 NB 52mm f/2, later the Helios-94 50mm f/1.8 · An existing Kiev 4 owner's 50mm lens was worthless on a Kiev 5, which is a hard thing to ask of a buyer

Where sources disagree

First year of production

1968 (camera-wiki, Wikipedia)
1967 (USSRPhoto, Mike Eckman) — counting prototypes

The usual gap between a camera being built and being sold, argued over in public.

How many were made

Between 8,000 and 50,000 (Wikipedia's estimate)
No figure at all — Mike Eckman finds no conclusive estimates

Better supported: Nearer the lower end, on sovietcams' reading

A range spanning a factor of six is not an estimate; it is a statement that the factory records for this camera are not available.

What reviewers say

Mike Eckman, a 1972 Kiev 5 (blog) — "The significantly larger viewfinder is the most obvious change": modern, with a shorter base that keeps fingers off the window, plus a lever wind and a meter readout. The shutter is still the 1930s Zeiss design with cloth strips that rarely survive, dropping the inner bayonet orphaned every Kiev 4 standard lens, and the price killed it by 1973.

History

The Kiev 5 is the one Kiev that is not simply a Contax. Arsenal redesigned the top of the camera — a new combined finder, larger and brighter than the Contax-derived one, with a projected parallax-corrected 50mm frame; a lever wind in place of the knob; a selenium meter — while keeping the shutter and body of a contemporary Kiev 4 underneath.

And it changed the mount, by subtraction. The Contax bayonet is really two bayonets: an inner one that holds a standard 50mm lens with no focusing mechanism of its own, driven by a helical inside the camera and the saw-toothed wheel on the top plate, and an outer one for wide and long lenses that carry their own helicals. The Kiev 5 keeps the outer bayonet and deletes the inner one, the body helical, and the wheel with it.

The consequence for an owner was blunt. Every standard lens in the system — the 5cm Sonnar, the Jupiter-8, the Jupiter-8M, the Jupiter-3 — physically cannot be fitted to this camera. There is nothing for them to seat in. The 35mm, 85mm and 135mm lenses mount and focus as before, because they were never using the inner bayonet. So Arsenal had to build a standard lens with a helical of its own: the Jupiter-8 NB, later replaced by the faster Helios-94.

It did not sell. It cost considerably more than the Kiev 4, which stayed on sale beside it, and Soviet buyers had little spare money for the top of a range. Wikipedia and Mike Eckman both give price and parallel sale as the reasons; neither mentions the lenses, but a camera that makes a buyer’s existing 50mm useless is asking a great deal of a market that had none to spare.

How many were built is not known. Wikipedia offers 8,000 to 50,000 — a range spanning a factor of six, which is a way of saying the factory records are not available. Sovietcams thinks nearer the lower end. What every source agrees on is that they are uncommon.

Expand Collapse

This history is AI-written, from the sources listed at the foot of the page. Where the record is silent it says so rather than filling the gap — but no human wrote these sentences.

Photographs

Kiev 5 — Kiev-5 with the Helios-94 — Andshel, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Live listings

Asking price, USD: a median of $310 across 10 fixed-price listings on 2026-09-06 (middle half $230–$330). First day tracked.

Asking prices from the listings scanned, not sales; junk-flagged rows and auction lots excluded; other currencies are not converted.

Vintage Rare Jupiter-8 NB 50mm f/2 Kiev-5 Lens USSR Arsenal Black Sonnar — $198.79 · eBay · likely Kiev-5
Vintage Kueb Kiev 5 Film Camera Bundle Original Box, Manual & Case Made In USSR — $199.99 · eBay · likely Kiev-5
KIEV-5 Rare Russian Camera Arsenal Manual+lens Helios-94 #7102339 — $229.00 · eBay · likely Kiev-5
Kiev 5 Camera Lens Jupiter 8 HB 2/50mm w Case — $299.00 · eBay · likely Kiev-5
RARE!!! KIEV 5 KIEV-5 USSR Camera + Jupiter-8NB lens #7104813 — $307.00 · eBay · likely Kiev-5
Rare Kiev 5 rangefinder camera lens Jupiter 8 HB 2/50mm 1972 — $323.05 · eBay · likely Kiev-5
RARE!!! KIEV 5 KIEV-5 USSR Camera + Jupiter-8NB lens #7104775 — $327.00 · eBay · likely Kiev-5
Rare Kiev 5 Rangefinder camera lens Helios 94 1.8/50 mm 1970 year — $332.60 · eBay · likely Kiev-5
Rare Kiev-5 Rangefinder camera + Jupiter-8 HB 2/50 year 1972 + bonus accessories — $332.60 · eBay · likely Kiev-5
Soviet Camera rare KIEV- 5 Lens HELIOS - 94 (50mm f/1.8) Rangefinder camera USSR — $350.00 · eBay · likely Kiev-5
KIEV 5 USSR 35mm film camera #7201247 — €115.00 · eBay · likely Kiev-5
USSR Kiev 5 RF camera w. Jupiter-8 lens 2/50mm NOTTESTED matching case — €199.00 · eBay · likely Kiev-5
USSR Kiev 5 RF camera w. Jupiter-8 lens 2/50mm NOTTESTED matching case — £187.31 · eBay · likely Kiev-5

eBay links are affiliate links. If you buy through one, Glass Bodies earns a small commission from eBay at no cost to you. It does not change which listings appear, their prices or their order — those come from the search and the sort described above.

Listings updated 2026-09-05. Links go to the shop or marketplace that carries the item.