Order of Personal Courage awarded to Leonid Aleksandrovich Lavrishchev

Bob · December 23, 2020

A forum friend was finetuning his collection whereas my collection was expanding 'back' into new territories (Soviet Awards, mainly civilian, something I had stepped away from 15 years ago to focus on Mongolian/Albanian) and it presented an opportunity to add a cased, issued and researched but unfortunately undocumented Order of Personal Courage to my collection. Something I'd had on my list for a long time but shied away from for financial and 'authenticity' reasons.

The order (nr 005771) was awarded in 1989 to Leonid Alexandrovich Lavrishchev (born 1960), instructor of the MINSTROYA, Donetsk region, Donetsk, "for courage and selfless actions shown during the liquidation of the consequences of the earthquake in the Armenian SSR"

Lavrischev was (is?) an instructor-rescuer of the club of climbers "Donbass" of the regional council of the voluntary sports society of trade unions (in Donetsk).

Above would refer to the Spitak earthquake of 1988

1988 Armenian earthquake - Wikipedia

Research (incl. pics of documented awards) confirms 5774 and 5775 were also awarded to Ukrainian rescuers helping in the recovery efforts. Presumably more awardings were made for the same reason.

Having trouble posting pictures so will have to do so in a followup post.

And pics