Guthrum
16 May 2015 03:59:17am | re: USSR WWII STAMP BLOCKS 1940's
I'm sure you've found out all about Captain Gastello, Lt. Talalikhin, Maj.-Gen. Dovator, and Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, commemorated on your stamps. If not, check them out on Wikipedia: they're well worth a look. Captain Gastello has his own theme tune (it's on YouTube), and the controversy surrounding Kosmodemyanskaya seems to rumble on and on, seventy-odd years later. Dovator was militarily the most important of these Heroes of the Soviet Union.
Most of their narratives are now disputed by Russian historians. For some time now it has been the trend to assume their heroic exploits have either been entirely made up (Gastello, Talalikhin), skewed 180 degrees (Kosmodemyanskaya) or inflated beyond their actual significance (Dovator). We tend to think of this as a typically Russian way of appropriating truth to the services of propaganda, but of course we (in the UK) were in the same business and no doubt the Americans created heroic WW2 myths as well.
The question, as with all advertising, is how successfully these stamps affected the morale of the populace at whom they were directed - and, as with all advertising, the answer is more or less unknowable.
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Kiwi
The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated. Mahatma Gandhi. 16 May 2015 04:11:57am | re: USSR WWII STAMP BLOCKS 1940's
Hello Guthrum. True, it is difficult to know what impact it had on the populace. Difficult to have people's thoughts and opinions under a totalitarian regime even more when in a state of war! As you know, the Germans had also issued stamp series in 1943-44
and I've got those ones too. It is very interesting to compare those 2 enemies of those times issuing their military propaganda on stamps to encourage war efforts.
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