Gunner 1

His name is Nikolai Tikhonovich Luk'ianchikov. Podvig Naroda lists a person by that name who was born in 1917 in Leningrad Oblast and who received the Medal for Valor on 20 July 1943 and the Medal for Victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945. His Medal for Valor is listed in a Prikaz of th e 375 Artillery Regiment, 181 Stalingradsk Order of Lenin Rifle Division and was for an action on 15 July 1943 when his section destroyed 4 Machine gun crews and 2 mortar batteries.

331st Fighter Aviation Division

No citation because it is a New Years Honour so I am not sure what the March 1918 refers to to. Wounded at Kemmel in April 1918. Educated at George Watson College and the University of Edinburgh. There is a photo of him on Plate 1 in Roll of Honour of the Pupils and Staff of Dunfermline High School I - The Great War 1914-1919.

My example of a Order of Labor IIIClass with a screw back, number 8678. An example of the Order of Labor, II Class with screw back, number 460. Just two numbers different than the one that Balkan Collector posted.

An Order of the Partisan Star, III Class to a Soviet Army Lieutenant. Lieutenant Anatolii Ivanovich Akul’shin was born in 1910 at Tbilisi, the capital of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic and joined the Red Army on November 10, 1942. He served on the 3rd Ukrainian Front from May 12, 1944 to his death as a platoon leader with the 431st Rifle Regiment in the 52nd Rifle Division. He was awarded the Soviet Order of the Red Star on October 29, 1944 for leading his platoon in the first attack on the Serbian city of Boljevac on October 7, 1944 during which his platoon killed more than 22 German soldiers (he personally killed two of them himself). Lieutenant Akul’shin was killed in action north of the Yugoslavian city of Vukovar on December 8, 1944 and was buried where he fell. On May 5, 1945 he was posthumously awarded the Yugoslavian Order of the Partisan Star, 3rd Class, numbered 2376 by order of the President of the Anti-Fascist Parliament of the People’s Federation of Yugoslavian, No. 190 of April 30, 1945. Akul’shin’s insignia is the variety of the Order produced by the Soviet Mint, Монетный Двор.

Jeff: Is the campaign star on the EAME ribbon bronze or silver? Hard to tell from the photo.

Table 1 from the article by Ed Haynes in the Sept-Oct 2013 JOMSA.

I hate to 'bring rain on your parade,' but a word of caution before you spend much time trying to attribute the miniature group. If all the attribution you have is a seller's statement "that there is potential provenance to a front-line physician" you really do not have an attribution at all. Genuine attribution requires some physical evidence to support the attribution. Even if you find that a medical person received that same group of medals you will never be sure of the attribution unless you can also prove that no other person was ever awarded the same grouping and that may be an almost impossible task. Proper attribution of full-size unnamed groups and miniature groups requires accompanying paperwork that attributes the group; evidence that a miniature group was sold with the full-size group; or some other type of physical evidence that ties the group to a recipient. As a well-known dealer once told me as a young collector: "Spend your money on the medals, not on the seller's undocumented story that comes with them"

To the best of my knowledge there is no website that allows one to find the name of a recipient based on the number on a Soviet order or medal (there are Russian language books that allow one to find the name of HSU and Order of Lenin recipients based on the number). There are researchers who have contacts at the Russian archives who for a fee will obtain for you the name of the recipient based on t he number and obtain his/her medal record card and other documents. If there is paper work with the order/medal that documents the name of the recipient, then one can obtain the award sheet with citation and the order awarding the order/decoration at http://podvignaroda.ru/?#tab=navPeople_search but be aware that the one must search the website in Russian and that the documents are in Russian.

In 1979 when I was giving a paper at a symposium in Warsaw a Polish friend took me to a small shop where some 30 men and women were producing very high quality replica Polish regimental badges for sale to collectors. With the equipment now available I would imagine that the workmanship is even better than it was then.

For those of you interested in Ethiopian medals the feature article in the upcoming July-August 2020 issue of the Journal of the Orders and Medals Society of America is by Owain and describes the medals and combat infantryman's badges issued by Ethiopia for the Korean War and also provides a list of Ethiopians who received United States decorations during that war. The issue went to the printer yesterday and should be out to the membership by the second or third week of July. Cover.pdf

I am not a coin collector so I may be showing my stupidity but are these really "coins"? Aren't they privately-made, unofficial commemorative medals which in the end are only going to be worth their bullion value? My dictionary defines "coin" aa "a flat piece of metal issued by governmental authority as money." To use the term "coin" for the items illustrated above falsely implies that they are officially-authorized money, which is not the case, and may mislead uniformed collectors and members of the public to think that they are official items. Let's call them what they are: privately produced bullion with a nice design to entice the public to purchase them, usually at prices well above their bullion value.

Which war? A perusal of the Army List for the period ought to bring forth possible candidates.

The Bible on British campaign medals is British Battles and Medals, 7th Edition. No British campaign medal collector should be without it. The Medal Yearbook, published each year by Token Publishing, is useful for determining values.

The above coin was produced by the Merrick Mint which specializes in colored coins for the collector (?) market. The are still in stock for $46.95 each. As far as I can tell they have no official connection with the Hillary Clinton campaign. Place "Hillary Clinton Silver Eagle" in Google and Merrickmint.com should be one of the choices. WSG was primarily a grading company for baseball trading cards but now appears to have a coin division. The coin is one of many colorized, commemorative 'coins' sold by so-called 'mints' that sell bullion 'coins' to the public. Silver currently is just over $15.00 per ounce, so at the price they are charging for the coin you are buying an ounce of silver with a nice design (if you like Hillary!) for three times its value in silver. If you try to sell these types of coins to a coin or bullion dealer my experience is that you will get paid a few percentage points below the silver bullion price at that time.