Four Generations

Digging in old photos I found three pictures of my father, grandfather and great-grandfather, all wearing military or military-style clothing. I took a picture of myself in my favorite NYPD-style jacket and created this list of four generations of my family. Notice the three repeating familiy names (reflected in first names and patronymics)– Mihail/Michael, Yakov/Jack, and Zinoviy/Zalman.

Lost Generation:
Zalman Mihailovich Krakovskiy, my great-grandfather, civilian, in his late forties.

Greatest Generation:
Yakov Zalmanovich Krakovskiy, my grandfather, Senior Sergeant, Red Army, in his thirties. The picture seems to be taken in front of some crates of Lend-Lease equipment in 1943.

Baby Boom Generation:
Zinoviy Yakovlevich Krakovskiy, my father, Lieutenant, Soviet Army, in his late twenties.

Generation X:
Michael Zinovievich Krakovskiy, myself, civilian, almost 30.

Wartime Booty

There are two WWII trophies in my family. One is a polishing cloth. Another is a fork.

I used the polishing cloth for many years without knowing what it was. Recently, I learned it’s origin. When my grandfather entered Budapest with the Red Army, the city was in ruins. The beautiful Parliament building was not that badly bombed, but all the windows were broken and shockwave scattered much of the furniture around it. So the polishing cloth came from a broken Budapest Parliament chair.
The Parliament

The Cloth

On the Net I found the following reference:
Inside the acoustically superb council chamber are 438 specially
designed leather chairs for the deputies, while the velvet-upholstered
seats in the inner circle are reserved for the ministers of the government.

So I’ve been polishing my boots with a piece of velvet from a Hungarian government minister’s chair.

The second piece of Gramps’ wartime spoils is a German fork. It’s a regular fork with no markings, except that it’s extremely heavy and a bit bigger than regular forks. It’s the most ergonomic fork that I’ve ever ate with. It’s my dad’s favorite fork.

This fork gave me an idea. Why do I keep eating with crappy modern utensils, when I can buy cool stuff on eBay. I’ve decided to replace all of my utensils with WWII era military ones.
Here’s the first arrival: the seller claims that it’s a British paratrooper’s fork.

I don’t understand what GR or SR stands for.


I also can’t identify the metal it’s made out of. It’s too light to be silver, but heavier than aluminum. Maybe some alloy..

Confession of a Stamp Collector

Yes, I am a nerd. It’s very possible that I have a very mild case of Asperger’s. I have to confess: I collect stamps. More than that. I don’t just collect any stamps. I inhabit a very very obscure and narrow niche in stamp collecting. It will probably take a paragraph or so to explain what kind of stamps I collect.

I collect stamps of RSFSR (РСФСР). You see, familiar to everyone USSR (CCCP) was not formed right after the Bolshevik Revolution. That revolution transformed Russia into RSFSR – Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic. RSFSR was created in 1918. In 1922 it became a part of the USSR.

It was a post-revolutionary time. Time of confusion, reform, destruction, civil war, hunger, commissars. Lenin in charge, St. Petersburg is called Petrograd. The whole country is in convulsions. But the post continued to function. More than that, very talented engravers created stamps of amazing simplicity and striking beauty. As a reflection of the times the stamps are sometimes printed imperfectly. A stamp might have had hundreds of small variations, which may or may not affect their value. People spend their entire lives researching this stuff. The cool thing is that these stamps are in their majority very affordable because they were printed in large numbers.

More recently I started collecting another weird type of stamps. This category of stamps is even narrower and they are not even technically postal stamps. They are charity stamps of something called VSEROKOMPOM. As you might have noticed, Bolsheviks very much liked acronims and shortened pharases. VSEROKOMPOM is a shorter version of “Vserosiyskiy Komitet Pomoschi Bol’nim i Ranenim Krasnoarmeytsam i Invalidam Voyni pri Vserosiyskom Ispolnitel’nom Kommitete Sovetov”. I’ts can be roughly translated as “All Russia Comittee for Helping SIck and Vounded Red Army Soldiers and War Invalids with the All Russia Executive Comittee”. VSEROKOMPOM seems easier in comparison, right?

Well, in any case, it was a charity that helped sick and wounded Red Army soldiers (and there were lots of those around after the revolution and the civil war). These stamps were sold all over the country. It would work approximately like that. A boss in some office, store or factory would get a quota of these stamps to distribute. He or she would distribute those stamps among all the workers. And they in their turn would try to sell them. Cashiers often forced customers to accept the stamps instead of change. A bureaucrat would affix these stamps next to revenue stamps on government paperwork and charge the person who submitted the papers. The stamps would be added to movie and theater ticket stubs, money transfers. Well, you get the idea.

The cool thing about those stamps was their design. Bright, expressive these stamps speak to you. They scream at you. They are real works of art. This stamp would make a pretty good poster, don’t you think?

The text on the back of the stamp says: “Forced Selling Prohibited”. Yeah, right.