Soviet airborne and parachute badges.

[Watchdog]

Good afternoon gents,

On a rest day and it's too wet to be outdoors so I thought I waould begin a thread where we can show and discuss Soviet airborne and parachute qualification badges of the entire Soviet period.

I think it would be best to post and title each item separately but within the thread so that we end up with a "pocket reference" covering the subject rather than a lot of separate threads with one badge in each if that makes sense?

I began to take photographs of badges I have but the light is pretty bad here today for good images and I rely on daylight so I will just post one here now to get us started.

Please post what you have or anything you wish to ask about / discuss and let's see if we can build something for reference.

First badge follows;

Regarfs

Mark

[Watchdog]

This is a graduation badge for officers completing the course and is worn on the right tunic breast and this one dates from the 1930's (I believe?)

There are variants in both light and dark blue which may indicate a time line but I admit I don't know if that is the case or if it is just that they were by different makers.



I will post more when the light allows decent images to be made.

Regards

Mark

[Watchdog]

Here is another from the immediate pre-war period. I am unsure if this is Para-Military (OSOAVIAKHIM) or purely Soviet Forces. Can anyone clarify this please? Also, any information regarding the timeline of this badge would be very helpful.

Regards

Mark

[Marcel Banziger]

Not sure if this post is allowed here but I consider this good reference material regarding parachute badges:

Парашютисты предвоенные - Воинские знаки - SAMMLER.RU

[Watchdog]

Not sure if this post is allowed here but I consider this good reference material regarding parachute badges:

Парашютисты предвоенные - Воинские знаки - SAMMLER.RU

Thanks Marcel, that is welcome information. For my part I only have a few words of Russian (I think I recognise the words "Military Badges") but I can usually work my way through such things and there is always the old Internet translator if all else fails

Regards

Mark

[Marcel Banziger]

Same here. I also know just a few words but both my wife and google translate will do the trick haha. Plus, the pictures speak for themselves

[Kapchynskyi]

The topic is old but it seems to me there's not enough information in English on the OSOAVIAKHIM and Soviet paratroopers, so I am gonna update this thread.

The OSOAVIAKHIM and the Soviet forces shared their badges. Yours badge is not official and I have never seen official badges of such a poor quality, even obscure badges for winners of various socialist competitions that were produced locally in 30s had superior quality. The Soviet recruits, as all soldiers, had way more free time on their hands than normal people, so they could produce a handmade version of some badge, this habit was especially widespread among paratroopers. I suppose your badge was produced by a bored conscripted paratrooper using whatever he had at hand, this badge is certainly no workshop's product. You can look at other handmade paratrooper badges "samodelki"/"самоделки" if you follow the link in the end of this post.
Btw, there were no "masters" with only 20 jumps, the earliest badge of the master of parashuting/sky diving of the USSR was awarded to people that had at least 100 jumps, with time it took larger and larger amount of jumps to earn the master badge. My grandma earned one in 1946 only after performing 300 jumps (picrelated, that's hers), it's known that by the end of WW2 there were around 297 people awarded with this badge.



In the 3rd pic you can see the rare document of master of parashuting of the USSR, I tried to search for any other examples in the web but I met only one collector with it, and it was looking quite different, meaning there are several subtypes of the document.


Sammler is not very good for this topic, I would recommend instead this Russian forum where experienced collectors published dozens of pages of various documents and badges linked to sky diving in the USSR, this is the place with biggest concentration of collectors of Soviet airborne related militaria. Several of those people are former paratroopers themselves or have relatives who were serving in the Soviet airborne forces, there's barely any information outside of Russian forums. Don't buy anything pricey like badge of master of parashuting of the USSR unless it was verified on a Russian forum or auction, most of the Soviet experts (and fake producers as well) are from the former USSR, while Western born experts are scarce and weak, they don't keep themselves updated on production of new Russian copies.