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Old 26th May 2011, 18:15
Carl-Fredrik Geust Carl-Fredrik Geust is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2005
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Carl-Fredrik Geust
Re: Ot kolhoznika Koneva

The question put is not at all stupid, but the situation can not be compared to that in a Western economy. After the Battle of Stalingrad the Soviet authorithies wanted to support all sorts of patriotic movements. After a number of - more or less spontaneous - appeals by individual and collective (personnel of various factories, kolkhozes, trade unions etc) to donate money to the State Defence Committee, some letters were published in Pravda (iuncluding even grateful anwers by Stalin himself), the matter virtually turned into an avalanche! Symbolic price tags were put on various weapon systems (bombers, fighters, tanks, cannonns etc), and lists of donations filled the pages of Pravda, Izvestiya etc from 1943. The donators were allowed to have patriotic slogans of their own painted of the aircraft, and weere invited to the hand-over ceremonies.

Naturaly the communist regime utilized the situation in order to drain the country of surplus circulating money (there were far more roubles around than goods available for coinsumption). Especially in some parts of the country there were still really rich people (including some Kolkhoze farmers), who may well have been able to donate the real cost of an aircraft. Even the Orthodox church participated, donating money for "purchase" of tank units named "Aleksandr Nevsky" and "Dmitriy Donskoj", and also various types of aircraft, which were then appropriately blesses by Orthodox Bishops. It estimated that far over 1.000 aircraft were donated in this way, and apparently also several hundred tanks. In the 1980s special literature on this topic started to appear in the USSR, and today it is a popular theme in aviation history journals.
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