Badge "For Merit In Medical-Sanitary Labour".

[deValcourt]

Actually, Eric, it's Romanian. Strongly based in Latin (Roman-ia, get it?), Romanian is a romance language- not at all similar to Russian- more like Italian/Spanish... when you see it spoken, the speaker frequently uses all the gestures we've come to associate with the Italians.

The only badge I know of that had Cyrillic on it and was associated with Romania was the Danube River badge- a co-operative effort by Romania and Bulgaria (hence the Cyrillic).

Frankly I prefer the "clam shell" style to the blue background of the RPR badge. It reminds me of the backing in some notorious "egg" badges.;)

Eric, as for the language differences, the Soviets sought to create coalition governments they referred to as "People's Democracies" in their satellite countries. Part of doing that and maintaining stability was to allow the local customs (including languages) to remain untampered with for the most part (which is why you generally see Soviet republic documents in both the native language and in Russian). The obvious failure was in Yugoslavia, but the lesser known failure of Poland is one of the reasons they kept the eagle as their national symbol and never adopted the H&S on nearly every award (that I've seen at least). I think you had raised this question about the Polish Eagle elsewhere and I finally got an answer for you.:D

Phillip