A beautiful girl dressed like a stewardess, a big creepy black car, an elicit phone call and a patriotic medal. What is this stamp selling? Slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
I gave a partial run down on what is going on on this large stamp. Our Russian readers can read what it is really selling and there are even a few clues on the stamp if you look closely. We know that is really a smokescreen. The communist Soviet system of the time assigned workers where they were needed. Would the system really be so foolish to assign a girl that looks like that to do what the stamp claims? Of course not.
The stamp today is issue A2181, a 4 kopec stamp issued by the Soviet Union on September 16th, 1977. The stamp is alleged to be showing aspects of a certain system in the Soviet Union. I will stick to my argument that this is a smokescreen. According to the Scott Catalog, the stamp is worth 35 cents mint. A stamp that is such a great period piece in China would be worth 100 times that. I know that more stamps were printed for the Soviet Union and that most went straight into the collections of young people. It is past time for Russian collectors to get a hold of this stamp while it is still cheap.
The catalog says the car on the stamp is a Moskvitch 430. I think it is actually a 427. The car does have the version of the grill that was export only. Just the thing to slip across the Finnish border to meet up with your warm and lovely contact. They sold a lot there where it was known as the elite 1500. The engine was hotted up and resembled BMW’s famous four that it predated.
Apropos of nothing, in 1977 Vladimir Putin was a KGB operative and his future wife was a stewardess on Aeroflot where she was awarded the honor of serving on international flights. Putin is known to own period Soviet vintage cars. Neither him nor his then wife had any connection to the Soviet postal service.
Here is the rub. The stamp is really celebrating the postal service. We are to believe that she is a postal supervisor and our dapper young hero in emptying a mail bin into the sack which he will then load into the postal delivery vehicle. If this really is what the stamp is about, I am disappointed. The stamp could have been so much better. That’s right John, believe the smokescreen.
Well my drink is empty and I have probably had enough so I will open the conversation in the below comment section. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be imagined from stamp collecting.