Soviet Medals and uniforms - What do you do when displaying?

[JimZ]

As a result of comments in another thread I thought that this could be an interesting area of dicussion. For those medal collectors who also collect uniforms, and I think there are quite a few out there, what is your usual practice for display?

Do you leave original groups mounted on the uniforms or do you remove and frame seperatly creating a "repro" group to replace on the display? When exhibiting your uniforms to the public, do you do so with their original medal groups or with their repros (for safety)?

When you have uniforms that you bought without medals, have you even dressed them with orders and medals for display purposes?

What else do you do? Tell us more!

Cheers

Jim

[Ed_Haynes]

An interesting question. And, maybe, one I shouldn't speak to, as I unloaded all but family uniforms years ago due to limited storage space. Heck, I can't store my medal collection adequately . . . !!

I see several different situations here:

1- When you get a uniform with the wearer's medals. I suspect this is pretty uncommon. This seems a situiation where you have the ABSOLUTE DUTY to keep them together and intact. Frankly, this is the sort of group on which I usually (and usually very sadly) pass. Getting tons of paper is bad (and happy) enough, but the necessity of keeping uniform and medals together overloads storage/display space. You ethically can't split them up and I'd surely display the medals on the (HIS) uniform, where they belong.

2- When you have a named or reliably attributed uniform (do they exist?) and know what medals the recipient had. But you don't have HIS (her?) medals. I guess I'd pay a visit to the fakes -- sorry "reproductions" -- sections of well known websites, drag out a power tool and slice away the fraudulent serial number, scratch in the word "COPY" in its place, and screw the highish-quality fakes into place. It would be pretty eye-candy but zero legitimate history (beyond a maybe interesting uniform). A uniform without attribution where you can see a Red Star or OPW impression on the right raises a more complex issue, especially if you give in to purient fantasy and start to invent delusional medals for the left chest as well. This starts getting dirty and dishonest.

3- You have a random uniform and don't like it naked and want to doll it up with fantasy medals. I shall ignore the extremely dubious ethics of creating this fantasy item (much stronger words come to mind). I would hope folks wouldn't waste real medals on this misbegotten project (what a sad crying waste), but current prices probably make this impossible (one good thing about high prices?). Whether the manufacture of such dubious history even with copy medals is ethically defensible, I leave to others to discuss. But the usual "Walter Mitty" approach of taking a junior officer's uniform, making it into a shameless Haloween costume with every decoration one can imagine seems to me to be somewhere between flagrantly historically dishonest and downright . . .

About some things (very few), I may be a conservative. Guilty as changed, m'lord.

Just my two kopeks worth . . . .

[Riley1965]

For Soviet uniforms that have holes for badges I use a copy or buy a low priced ORS and OPW. I'll also add a few medals. For my North Korean Major's tunic I used a period or other photo and "toned it down" when adding ODMs to it. I've never displayed my uniforms, yet. At least I finally found a use for my Nevsky that turned out to be a fake

Doc

[NavyFCO]

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