NavyFCO

I'm curious as to what his proof is for that statement. I would assume that they'd be in Russia by now.

I think it's a put together uniform by a collector back when these awards were cheap and someone wanted to toss some awards on a jacket for display. I've already told one potential buyer to stay away from it unless the price is equal to the "parts" value of the group, so I would make the same advice here as well. I would bet money that it's not a real group. Dave

Little birdies have told me that they still plan to continue with the auction as-is. Dave

Why not? Prices on Soviet awards these days are what anyone can inflate them to. The real "value" of an award today is what you can sell it for and what someone will pay for it, NOT what it's actually worth. Just my two cents. Dave

Well said. I always do think it somehow strange that I sell awards "wholesale" to one dealer who then marks them up by 75%... while another dealer asks only 10% more than what I'm selling the same award for wholesale. So, who is the market reality? The dealer who makes the 75% mark up or the dealer who makes the 10% mark up over "wholesale"? Some people will argue that the one making the 75% mark up is market reality, because they've already posted that opinion in this thread... so when another dealer asks much less for the same award, does that mean that they are asking below market reality, or is the fact that they too are a dealer mean that there are different market realities as JimZ suggests? For Christian: I think that if we should change the currency that Soviet awards are traded in, it should be to rubles. After all, the awards are Russian and most are being bought by Russian collectors. It would thus be only appropriate to change the currency to these award's "home" currency. Dave

Just my two cents... I (as ususal) wonder what is "market reality"? Igor has a great clientle and he's a super, and honest, dealer. Therefore, he gets a premium for the awards he sells. Were I (or any of us non-dealers) to sell this award, how much could we realistically get for it? If I could only sell it for $6000, is that "market reality"? Or is Igor's price "market reality"? Just a question to chew on.... Dave

Well, I'll reply with regard to the thread in the sale section of mine that actually started this thread. First, I've never seen a Soviet uniform for sale with the original veteran's medals on it. I'm sure it has happened before, but not that I've ever seen. It's actually rare as heck to find a group with the guy's medals and his uniforms - I've owned two like that, and that's out of several hundred groups. (Both of those groups came directly from the veteran's families, otherwise I wouldn't be 100% certain that they were right anyway.) Second, with regard to the uniform that I posted in the sale thread, it was a rather odd compilation of things. It was a submariner captain 2nd rank's everyday uniform with medals, ribbons and a parade dagger. So, he might have worn the medals, but with no ribbons and definately no dagger. He might have worn the ribbons, but wouldn't have worn the medals, and (of course) no dagger. And he would have never worn the dagger because it's not a parade uniform and the dagger is a parade dagger. Therefore, the uniform was put together for the photo in the book by someone who wasn't 100% up on the regulations of the time. The uniform certainly LOOKS cool on display though, but it's not as they would have worn it "for real" back during the War. Much to the chagrin of the original poster, I'm planning on splitting the group up even further as I should be able to clear a higher price for the group selling it in pieces on ePay than I'm asking for it right now all together. The only reason I feel bad about that is because it is the uniform from the book, and it would be cool to keep together because of that and that was honestly the reason I bought it. But, I soon realized that the OGPW1 was a low 5 digit piece and the Red Star was a Finnish War award, so it's worth my time keeping and researching those apart from the uniform and using the uniform to cover some of my other costs from the show. Dave

The little guy isn't maker marked at all. At first, I thought it was a custom-made one-off piece as I've never seen one before (yes, hard to imagine, but...) , but I talked to one of the big Russian dealers and he told me that he's seen about three of them in the past 15 years, all of them awarded to flag/general officers, just like the full sized presentation ones. I saw it and just fell in love with it - it's really just a super piece! Dave

And here's a picture of it next to a "big" brother...

Here's a picture of the engraving...

At the SOS, I picked up a really neat miniature presentation dagger to a Navy General Major Terenti Maksimovich Zubov in 1952. I know that from January through May 1945 he was Commander of the Coastal Defenses for Seskaro (Leningrad area). In 1967, he was in the reserves and Chief of the Tallinn Section of Soviet War Veterans. He did a couple random things in the 1980s (published a book review and was head of the Military Science Society of the Tallinn Officers Club) and was awarded the Nakhimov 2nd. (Info thanks to Biographical Directory of Flag Rank Soviet & Russian Naval Officers, 1917-1999). Does anyone else have any info on his career? Or perhaps a photo of him? I'm going to see if I can get his service history or other info from the archives, but being a naval officer, I'm not counting on it. Thanks for any help in advance! Dave P.S. Yes, before you ask I will post a picture up later!

I don't have them in front of me, but I think those lists are in SHishov and Muzalevsky's books. Might be fun to post up here! Dave

Gold. If you'd want to reproduce his uniform jacket as it is in the photo, it would not only make a nice display, but one like that should be cheap enough to acquire. Dave

He's been sending e-mail to me for what seems like 10 years. I haven't bought anything from him, though I have corresponded with him a few times about items he has. Dave

Yep, he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel in 2000, probably a few years after the photo was taken. Dave

Beautiful group zook! Combat citations for the war against Japan are tough to find. I've had a few LOGISTICAL citations, especially crossing Mongolia (where there was no water, anywhere) but combat ones are tough to find!!! NICE! Doc - your group doesn't happen to be a Lenin and Red Banner group to an Air Force Colonel, does it? I just ask because the research and some of the documents were split from the group after I sold it and I have them... and am still trying to find their rightful home after all these years!!! Dave

Glad to see it got a good home! I originally purchased it from a seller in Latvia who bought it from a flea market vendor who bought it from the family. Kinda convoluted, but I think that's about as "close" as you can get sometimes being the westerner buying the group on this side of the pond! It's a really smashing group, please do scan and post the rest of it as it's about as complete as they come. Dave

Incidentally, the few officers who actually did wear their Soviet awards after the War wore them all the way through to retirement. One of these men retired as a three star general, who regularly wore the ribbon for the OGPW2 on all of his ribbon racks. I don't know if many of us are historically adept enough to make a real "call" on the "red scare" of the 1950s, but it too seemed strange to me that the veterans who I talked to had no issue with the Soviet awards during that time period. As I understood it, they were awards given by another allied power... even if that power wasn't still an ally, they were at one time (save for the exception of the one fellow who sent his award back!) As far as collecting these, I have the only "complete" (medal + documents) that I am aware of. I estimated in my article that there were around 700 Soviet awards given out. The majority of these were unfortunately undocumented, or their documentation was extremely limited at best. The majority of veterans I interviewed who received their awards in Europe never received a document with the award, and of the documents that people did recieve, it was typically a single typewritten page, very plain and very much without fanfare. Awards to Navy personnel were luckier, as they came with the proper order or medal book, along with the "coupon" book for the recipient's stipend! (Also accompanying that was a letter from the Navy instructing them that they were forbidden to accept the stipend, but they could still keep the book as a momento.) I was lucky enough to either finger or get photos/photocopies of groups that belonged to veterans or that were still in the hands of their families (one was promised me his OGPW2 if his kids didn't want it...I offered him $1000 cash for it, but he wouldn't take my offer on it) Unfortunately, many more of the awards were missing. The Nevsky to Col Wohner (in the photo I posted earlier) was lost, and he had a really bad copy to replace it (horrid copy, in fact!) The three star I mentioned above also lost his OGPW, and two retired Major Generals that had both been awarded the Medal For Military Merit had lost them! (In one occasion, I actually talked to his wife on the phone as she dug through a shoebox of her husband's medals! Wow would I have loved to have been there!) This leads up to why these are particularly rare. First, the only really documented awards (with the exception of the extremely limited and high-end awards given out in 1944 and early 1945 via the embassy to senior generals, and perhaps MOH recpients, etc.) were the Navy ones. The Army awards from Europe had so little documentation to where were the piece of paper misplaced, that award would no longer be documented. Most of the Army vets I talked to really didn't put too much interest into their awards, so yes, the documents were mostly lost. What does this mean? Well, when their awards are sold by the families, the Soviet awards simply become another "unresearched" award, and unless someone invests the money to research an OGPW, FV or MM (all received by US troops) they'll probably never find them. So, as far as documented awards are concerned, the Navy ones were the only really formally documented ones, but even with that there were less than 200 awards made, so but a small handful! The other reason these are rare is because the majority of the recipients were quite senior in rank when they recieved them. Go figure, if a unit was contacted by a Soviet liason officer and they were told that the Soviets were going to give out "X number" of awards to members of that unit, who do you think was going to show up for the ceremony? Duh... That's why a lot of these awards went to senior staff officers. (A rare occurance was with the 102nd Infantry Division, where they were asked by the Soviets to supply bodies from various ranks to receive awards specific to that rank...) These senior staff officers were typically older and thus passed on earlier than the more junior troops. What does this mean? Unless the family took pains to keep everything together, the medals are probably now not just with the kids, but the grandkids and chances are that as the years go by more and more pieces of the medals go to the four winds. Especially considering that these "odd foreign awards" aren't from this country anyway, so what do they really mean? (Heard that before...) Anyway, if you do find one of these awards out there, jump on it quick! They are definately as rare as hen's teeth and if I get word of them, I am offering a considerable bounty for them (A LOT - depending on documentation PLUS a finder's fee) and chances are I'll snap it up. It's a fascinating search! I've spent many many hours over the past several years tracking these vets and their families down and have had a great time doing it. Unfortunately, even some of the vets interviewed for my article are now gone sadly so these guys keep decreasing literally by the month.... Dave

slava1stclass posts an interesting photo. This photo I had in my "archives" and it had been posted on another forum (the WAF) a few years back. When I started writing the article, I really wanted to use the photo, but without being able to track down who posted it, I didn't want to use it without attribution. So I asked the original poster, and he had no idea where it had come from. At the time, we didn't know who it was either. Through a thread now about a year ago on the WAF, we were able to make a positive ID on him, but I still had no attribution as to where the photo came from. I contacted the 45th Infantry Division Museum (a great one, BTW!) and they had never seen the photo before. But, they were really excited to get it for their files, and added it to Slaton's information. I then requested said photo from the Museum, which they were happy to allow me to use for the article, and thus it is referenced to them. Academically proper? I'm not certain, but the image eventually ended up in the hands of the right people who were more than happy to get it for their MOH display. I would love to find out who/where this photo actually came from, so if anyone has any leads.... I loved the photo because of both the early MOH, his OGPW2 and the British MM. Interestingly, I have no record of Soviet awards given to members of the 45th Infantry Division, other than this award to Slaton. This might be because of the limited records accessable for National Guard officers, and I simply haven't run across the notations in their bios yet. In my communications with the museum, they didn't know of any Soviet awards given to members of the 45th either. Rather odd... that's one that needs a little more research. Slaton may also have received one of the handful of awards given out as reciprocal awards for the ones we gave Soviet soldiers through our Military Mission, Moscow (MMM). The 1944 awards given to Eisenhower, Bradley and others were a case in point of this reciprocity. However, I have yet to track down an Ukaz which lists the people who these awards were given to. (You think it's hard to sometimes research Soviet groups... try researching Soviet awards to AMERICANS in the Archives! Oy!) On an unrelated topic, here's the picture I mentioned before of my good friend (the late) Colonel John Wohner, who received both the Nevsky and the British DSO as a young (very, very young) Lieutenant Colonel during the War. This photo is courtesy of his family. Here he is, obviously in a daily type of uniform (note the shoulder holster for his .45) but wearing the Nevsky. Dave

Most of the vets that I talked to who received screwback awards either 1) never wore them or 2) rarely ever wore them. I never encountered one who actually wore his award on a regular basis (though unfortunately my sample size was admittedly rather small... it's tough to find surviving vets when you only have a few hundred to choose from!) Part of the reason they didn't wear their awards was because it was mostly due to the fact that they'd have to poke holes in their uniforms, or if the award was a hanging one, they couldn't mount it with their other US awards. There were two "en masse" awardings of Soviet awards, both happened immediately following the War, with the first one in May/June 1945 amongst Army troops on the Soviet frontlines. These awards were rarely documented by the dispersing Soviet unit, or if they were documented, the documents aren't findable in the Archives (though some are, so conspiracy theorists take note!) The most common of these awards to Army troops consisted of the OGPW1, with 38 documented cases of this being awarded. Other awards frequently given out were the OGPW2 (24 awards documented) and the Red Star (10 awards documented). (Please note that I say "documented"... this means that the instances of the decoration's awarding has been documented either in the soldier's/officer's biography or by their unit history or the Russian MOD Archive listing. I estimate that there may have been upwards of 3 times as many decorations bestowed, particularly that of the Red Star, that weren't documented in sources that I have had access to.) So, the Army guys received their awards. The units which received these awards included the 1st, 3rd, 9th and 15th Armies; 5th, 7th 12th, 13th and 18th through 22nd Corps; the 2nd, 4th, 8th, 11th and 13th Armored Divisions and the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 9th, 26th, 29th, 30th, 45th, 65th, 69th, 71st, 76th, 80th, 82nd, 84th, 102nd and 104th Infantry and Airborne Divisions. Other units may have been represented, however I have not been able to find other awardings through sources available to me. All this to say that the Army fellows who received their awards rarely ever wore them, save for while in theater. One vet that I interviewed recalled wearing his OGPW2 (he was a full Colonel when he received it) for the rest of the time he was in theater, and only removed it when he returned to the US. Another veteran that I interviewed received a Nevsky and though he didn't remember wearing it, his family loaned me a fantastic photo of him wearing it in his Ike jacket while on Occupation duty. After the War, however, the awards were rarely worn, mostly due to the difficulty of pinning them through material. In the case of the Suvorov 2nd to MG Terry de la Mesa Allen, the CG of the 104th Infantry Division, he converted it to clutchback for wear after the War. However, that was the exception rather than the rule. I often found that the vets would wear the ribbon for the award on their ribbons, but sometimes didn't wear that, mostly due to the fact that it was difficult to purchase during the Cold War (duh!) Some people have proposed conspiratorial theories that veterans might have been "afraid' of wearing their awards due to the "Red Scare" in the 1950s. That was a question that I asked every veteran that I interviewed and not a single one told me that they even considered that as a factor to wear or not to wear their awards. One veteran did tell me though that in 1949, he packed his award up and returned it to the Soviet Embassy because he couldn't in good conscience keep an award from an enemy state! The other en masse awarding was that to Navy personnel by an Ukaz dated in July 1945, wherein the Soviets produced a by-name list of USN, USNR, USCG and USCGR personnel and awarded decorations to these personnel. These awardings were made by mail to officers (all of them recalled receiving in the mail without fanfare) or via a local awards ceremony to enlisted personnel. Why the difference, I don't know, but that's what the vets told me. Of the recipients of these awards, I only found one veteran who actually wore the decoration after the War (he was enlisted) but the majority of recipients never touched theirs or removed them from their fancy issue boxes (which were really neat to handle - absolutely mint, unworn awards!) Hope that sheds a bit of light on to who wore or didn't wear them. Dave

I have actually seen a certificate for a Guards badge to an individual US soldier. Unfortunately since that hasn't been within the scope of my research, I haven't concentrated on that, nor do I know where in the tens of thousands of jpgs on my two hdds that pic might be! My theory, from what I've seen from US veterans, is that they were individually awarded the Guards badge, and not awarded en masse to an entire unit. I've never seen any documentation to support that, but we're all still learning. Below is a picture of BGen Woolfley, who was the 76th Infantry Division, wearing his one Soviet award, the Guards badge. Dave

Oooooooh! Good stuff slava1stclass! Thanks for posting it!!! (I've got to get a copy of that section, or even the book!)

That's a good theory, and may be correct. However, it's a little odd though as his staff was decorated in June 1945 during the en masse awardings of Soviet awards all across the US-Soviet lines. Waiting till September would be a bit strange, but it is possible (odder things have happened). Dave

I don't recall if I asked them or not. I think I did, but never received a response and didn't think about it again. Interestingly, the most responsive people regarding information about awards (other than the exception of the Eisenhower Library, they were GREAT) were the Canadians and Brits. Eventually I'll do an article on Soviet awards to Allies..... sometime... I found the quote I was looking for from Patton regarding the wearing of his Soviet awards: ?When you win a ribbon at a horse show, it?s best to accept it, even if you don?t like the judge who gave it to you.? That's from Hirshson, Stanley P. General Patton, a soldiers life. Harper Perennial, 2003 Eventually, JOMSA will publish my article about these. It's now going on 8 months since originally submitted and two months after it was promised to be published. Sometime...eventually... Dave

Gerd- not yet. The resercher who did that research is very expensive with citations ($45 a pop) and there was really no rush to get it done. Maybe sometime down the road. Dave