Pin made in the Soviet Union. The text on the pin reads:”Chita”. Chita is a city and the administrative center of Zabaykalsky Krai, Russia, located on the Trans-Siberian Railway route, roughly 900 kilometers (560 mi) east of Irkutsk.
Pyotr Beketov’s Cossacks founded Chita in 1653. When Richard Maack visited the city in 1855, he saw a wooden town, with one, also wooden, church. He estimated Chita’s population at under 1,000, but predicted that the city would soon experience fast growth, due to the upcoming annexation of the Amur valley by Russia. It was occupied by the Japanese military from 1918 to 1922 as part of the Siberian intervention.