His rank is Praporshchik, roughly equivalent to a Warrant Officer.
In the 1970s, the non-commissioned officers serving under contract and holding Starshina rank were reassigned to newly-created Praporshchik rank; starshina was reserved for conscripts only.
Real ones? Yes. Even the counterfeiters on ePay don't try it very often. There's a good section on these documents and the transition ones from the Soviet to early RF versions that is quite interesting at the beginning of Uniform [Standardized] Departmental Medals of the Russian Federation by Kuzmichev and Trifon. They crossed over nicely for a while because the only thing that they had to change was the ID booklet as to which government, and then which department was awarding the medals because the medals themselves didn't have any real obviously Soviet symbols (except to people like us ;)).
