The stamps of Soviet Russia have special fascinations. In the period after WWII, Russia was still under the rule of Josef Stalin. There is quite a historical debate over who was history’s greatest monster. Stalin may not rank number one in murders, but when it came to vindictiveness and pathological paranoid homicides, he would have to rank in first place. There were very few friends or allies that Stalin didn’t turn on and murder (Hitler was a monster, but at least Goebbels and Bormann liked him). Stalin’s purges fell on ethnicities (like the Georgians) and on his own political apparatus. Even stamp designers could be hauled off to Siberia or shot for “counter revolutionary” crimes such as not having enough smiling workers in a stamp they designed in the distant past. It is this terror of anything new