Our good friend, Alan Fyffe, gave us these two karabiners a while back and neither he, nor us, knew much about them at the time. We put them here on the website and asked if there was anyone ‘out there’ who knew more. As a result we got this remarkable e-mail from A.S. Vinogradov, read on:

“Irbis” carabiners were manufactured in Khimki, a town near Moscow at “NPO Lavochkin”, a company that designed and manufactured rocket technology and spacecraft for landing on the Moon, Venus, and Mars. It had equipment for processing titanium. Skilled metallurgists worked there, and waste from spacecraft production was used to make the carabiners. They were made from hardened titanium alloy OT4-1. They weighed 78 grams. Their price was quite high: 4 rubles 50 kopecks in 1983. For comparison, at that time, the salary of a worker was about 130 rubles, a qualified engineer 170-180, a surgeon 150-200 rubles, and the director of a medium-sized plant 310. But these carabiners were very popular and rarely stayed in stores. They are still in use and can be purchased from private individuals.

The All-Union Scientific Research Institute for Sports and Technical Products (VISTI) and Master of Sports of the USSR in mountaineering Evgeny Mikhailovich Gorodetsky (1944-1984), who worked there as head of the “Mountaineering” department, participated in the development of these carabiners. At “NPO Lavochkin”, their production was overseen by mountaineer Vladimir Vasilyevich Volonsky, who worked as a department head in the design bureau. In the 1970s and 1980s, the CPSU obliged military factories to additionally produce civilian goods. Volokonsky approached the chief engineer with a proposal to manufacture titanium carabiners. He wasn’t opposed, but he set a condition: a minimum quantity of 10,000 per year. Vladimir approached interested agencies – firefighters, the military, and aviation – and accumulated the required volume of orders.