01-02-2008, 12:38 PM (This post was last modified: 03-05-2012, 06:07 PM by CtahhR.)
Purchased this on Ebay a while back. I showed it to a former east german colleague and she reckoned it was a forgery. Claimed the language was gibberish. I thought the Gramota was common and the need to fake one minimal. I'm not bad at spotting fakes (paper and ink seem genuine, paper too, etc) but she got me on the language.
Gibberish is no way to create a convincing forgery of an already existing and common certificate.
If you need one which includes the full body of text I will take a hi res pic.
Thanks for looking. Fascinating website. Will hang around a while.
Yes, Telsarian is right about the actual gramota "blank" being in Ukrainian. For a guy like me with only basic conversational Russian, I spot Ukrainian quickly from fairly minor differences in spelling (but with Russian under your belt, you can still often get the gist of it). "Kharkov" has the letter "i" in it, which is found in Ukrainian but not Russian. You'll also see the UkrainianSSR flag in the background on top (broad red strip above narrower blue stripe).
diplomas printed on the same model as the first one in this thread, but lightly different on the lower part:
the first one is issued to Emelianov Mitrofan Semenovich, in 1964, "for high production results in socialist competition, in relation to the 47th anniversary of the great socialist revolution of october"
the second one is issued by the ukrainian communist party of the district of Sumsky and the soviet of the local district to Levchenko Mikhaïl Alexeievich, best propagandist of the district, for "excellent results in propagandist-ideological education work"
