No.661
I collect military orders and medals and the most interesting stuff I have is a set of rare medals of a Soviet staff liaison pilot who worked before the war as a sky diving instructor in the OSOAVIAKHIM, the Soviet paramilitary organization created in the 20s to train the Soviet civilians for the future war. Also, his wife worked in OSOAVIAKHIM, too, and she was a master of sky diving in the USSR, for the entire existence of the USSR there were only 4 000 masters and she was from the first five hundred of them. Soviet badges for instructors of sky diving, let alone masters, are rare. Moreover, I have fine Soviet documents attached to this badge, most of the Soviet badges had their own types of documents and I saw the master instructor type only twice in my life. The first one looked quite different, btw, so there are sub-types. Unfortunately, collecting such things is not a very common hobby in the West, most of the info is available only in Russian and some of the information I have wasn't even known to the experienced Russian collectors of Soviet paratrooper's militaria with whom I spoke.