08-31-2008, 03:20 AM
Just over a year ago, I watched someone in a Tashkent bazaar put maybe 50+ Maternal Glories (all three classes) and OPW'85's on a scale to weigh, buy, and melt down for lower-grade silver. That, even now, is not an unusual sight (albeit the numbers of awards are dwindling). I've got a big bag of suspensions that still have the VL and DL ribbons on them because some dude in the Ferghana Valley had ripped them off the medals, and then sold the medals by weight for melting. Another time I went to buy a couple wartime BM's from a guy (we had pre-arranged to meet). When I got there, he had half as many as he had promised. It turns out that the day before he had sold three of them to a local jeweler at the melting price (lower than I was going to give him). I asked him why he did it. He said "it doesn't matter to me who gets them, I just wanted the money." I've got a couple MH's floating around the house missing their gold stars, long since removed for the tooth caps Alexei speaks of above (and judging from the number of gold teeth I've seen, a lot of awards went the way of the dentist). As you roam the former SU away outside of places like Kiev, Moscow, and St.P. (especially in some of the other republics), things are not so prosperous, people are not so well off, and (in some cases) history is being rewritten or even slowly erased.
