VI. Miscellaneous:
These are stamps that have decorations pictured on them, whether or not they are the main subject of the stamp. For instance, the three stamps to the left picture the Order for Service to the Homeland 1st Class, Hero of the Soviet Union, Hero of Socialist Labor, and Order of Labor Glory 1st Class. These three stamps are a subset of larger issue that has nothing to do with orders and medals or the military. The same goes for these two issues from 1933 and sometime in the 1940's. The 1933 issue pictures an Order of the Red Banner of RSFSR, which was the predecessor of the Order of the Red Banner. The issue below pictures Orders of Alexander Nevsky, the Red Star, the Red Banner of Labor, and Lenin. This also is a part of a larger issue, that has a lot of orders and medals, but the stamps do not commemorate anything particular. So, are the awards in these stamps always correctly drawn? Are they always properly placed? The answer is, usually yes, but no one is perfect. Out of the several hundred stamps I have in my collection, I found one stamp that has an incorrectly worn medal. N. J. Ilin is wearing a defense medal on the right breast instead of the left breast. Whether or not this is the artist's mistake I cannot tell, but it is possible that the original photo of the soldier had the medal incorrectly worn. This picture is not "horizontally flipped", since the Guards Badge the soldier is wearing is drawn correctly, and the buttons on the tunic are also correct.I still have a long way to go to discover all about these stamps, but this is just a start - finding an interesting and previously unexplored link between the two great hobbies.