USSR Defense of Caucasus Medal

Description

Probably issued in the 1950s.

The Russian Communists started out with an ideology that abolished military ranks and any kind of awards. That didn’t work so they went totally the other way and built a command society with a full compliment of penalties and rewards for unquestioning obedience. There was a period from 1992 and for a few years after when the national medal treasury was pilfered and everyone was broke and selling their medals. Putin subsequently made the trade in original medals illegal, but the horses had already left the barn.

Medals, awards, decoration, insignia, documents, equipment, of military, police, private, and irregular military style organizations. We sometimes sell small weapons but we do not sell working firearms. If a thing happens to be military but is hundreds of years old I stop thinking of it as a military thing and start thinking of it as a relic or an antiquity. I suppose that means that “militaria” really starts around the middle of the 19th century or so, when uniforms became normal. Does that seem right to you?

Over the decades I’ve been selling collectibles my market has been about 97% coins, 2% paper money, 1% everything else.