Question of uniform availablity- EM versus Officer

[PaulR]

I have noticed that the availablity of quality Soviet Officer uniforms far exceeds that of the enlisted examples. Does anyone have any reasons for this? Were EM uniforms recycled while officers were allowed to retain their uniforms?

[Al-muell]

It depends - soldiers leaving the army would ussually keep their parade/walking-out uniforms, but most of them were modified at the demobilization. The problem is that you can find a EM uniform, but it is likely to be either dembel or unissued. It is hard to find one that would be issued regulation uniform.
On the other hand the everday/field uniforms were sometimes reissued (sometimes as work uniforms) so You will likely find an unissued example, but to find an original issued one is much more rare.
As forthe officer uniforms - officers would keep their uniforms intact as long as they have need for them (in active service, reserve or on retirement if they wanted to). And they were required to keep them in the best condition possible while in service, so why would they change their habits after retirement? So the issued officers' uniforms are ussually better preserved than EM ones, and that is the main reason for officer unifs being more common IMHO.

[PaulR]

Originally Posted by Al-muell

It depends - soldiers leaving the army would ussually keep their parade/walking-out uniforms, but most of them were modified at the demobilization. The problem is that you can find a EM uniform, but it is likely to be either dembel or unissued. It is hard to find one that would be issued regulation uniform.
On the other hand the everday/field uniforms were sometimes reissued (sometimes as work uniforms) so You will likely find an unissued example, but to find an original issued one is much more rare.
As forthe officer uniforms - officers would keep their uniforms intact as long as they have need for them (in active service, reserve or on retirement if they wanted to). And they were required to keep them in the best condition possible while in service, so why would they change their habits after retirement? So the issued officers' uniforms are ussually better preserved than EM ones, and that is the main reason for officer unifs being more common IMHO.

You make some valid points!! I did not think of these! Thank you.

[CtahhR]

I don't know about the Red Army in particular but many armed forces on demob offer the option of keeping your uniform or having a new set of civilian clothes. The choice was very often the new (and usually correct size) civilian clothes. On top of that if uniforms were retained they were often worn whilst labouring until they fell apart. Most demobbed Red Army personnel will have gone into manual labour back on civvy street whereas many of the commanders got themselves nice white collar jobs. Pretty much the same set up the whole world round.

[Tretov]

I can see some other reasons as well:
- No one in the west consider Soviet cold-war EM tunics without any "real" historical importance worth collecting. Hence no demand, no one export them.

- Based on the above, no one in the former USSR see any reason to have them gathered and sold abroad, hence the few EM sets available are tourist bringbacks which are often spiced up (destroyed) and marketed as "generals uniform".

- There are actually EM sets available in the Baltics by the dozens but very few are sold as far as I know and the sets tend to stay there.

- A personal thought - and I may be wrong - may also be that there was little need for anyone back in the early 1990s to sell their personal EM sets to get food. Those that had been enlisted in the years probably had some other occupation and were not necessarily out of work or out of retirement payments when the whole machine came down in 1991. Hence there was no real need to sell the old garments (which wouldn't bring many bucks compared to officers sets) whereas officers who relied more on paychecks from the suddenly gone Soviet apparatus found an urgent need to get money, hence sold their entire uniform wardrobes to get their daily bread.

- There may be other reasons too, a friend in Murmansk used his soldier uniform to clean up oil in his garage. He cut it up to rags - I got the boards and collar tabs 10 years later. I guess he was not the only one who saw little value in his old Soviet uniform.

[PaulR]

Great points... I thought that they would have be reclaimed and reissued to the point of being worn out. I did not think of some of these other options.

I really want a pink EM medical uniform...:(