It is nice when political promises get specific on a stamp, that way they can be measured by future stamp collectors. There is a joke about communism that the future is always certain, it is the past that is always changing. This stamp touts future steel production, I wonder how that turned out. So 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.
This issue of stamps is titled “Great Decisions of the 22nd Communist Party Congress” held in 1961. I guess Soviet stamp collectors had to wait forever for the stamp issue on the more mediocre decisions. Anyway there is nothing wrong with a little hope and sunshine. I also love that they included measurable numbers to go with goals. It is more than we get from most politicians. It also must be said that the Soviets did a great job making steel production look majestic.
Todays stamp is issue A1362, a 4 Kopek stamp issued by the Soviet Union on December 28th, 1962. It was a 9 stamp issue all in the same denomination that set out goals in various industries. According to the Scott Catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents cancelled to order.
The stamp touts great decisions by the previous years party congress regarding economics. Appropriate to remind the people that the party was working for them. In reality the congress was more about politics. 83 communist parties from around the world sent delegates including the last time the red Chinese showed up. They didn’t like the disrespect toward Stalin including renamings and even moving his remains. Khrushchev was still trying to make the communist system work and proposed term limits on high officials to avoid stagnation. This was rejected. That does not mean the Soviets did not put on a show. There was a brand new hydroelectric station in not Stalingrad but now Volgograd. To demonstrate power there was also the explosion of the biggest nuclear bomb in the history of the world in the artic circle. The 50 megaton hydrogen bomb was called the Tsar Bomba by the west.
The stamp gives steel production in 1960 as 65 million metric tons and says that number will hit 250 million metric tons by 1980. The actual 1980 number was 148 million metric tones. That still made the Soviet Union the largest world producer with over 20 percent of world production. Since 1980, most developed nation steel output as dropped as production moved to India, South Korea, and especially China. Russia in 2018 produced 71 million metric tons, 6th highest in the world. If you include former Soviet republics, that number goes to about 100. So down since 1980 but the same could be said for the USA, the EU, and even Japan, the former rising star of steel. China now makes over half the worlds steel, 928 million metric tons in 2018. This is up from 14 million metric tons or 3 percent of world production at the time of this stamp.
Well my drink is empty and I will pour another to toast Nikita Khrushchev. No the steel goal wasn’t met but at least he was trying to do great things and get the system working. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting