Frida Vigdorova, Diary of a Russian Schoolteacher. 1954
Translated by Rose Prokofieva
Original Source: F. Vigdorova, Moi klass: zapiski uchitel’nitsy (Moscow: Detgiz, 1951).
On learning the previous year that there were three ardent stamp collectors in my class I had hunted up some books on the subject and studied them carefully. One thing the authors all agreed upon was that stamp collecting teaches children to be tidy, attentive, systematic, and orderly, besides inculcating various other excellent qualities. I am sorry to say that none of this appeared to apply in any way to Kira Glazkov. He was unusually absent-minded for a boy of his age. His exercise books were a mass of blots and mistakes. True, his stamp albums were an exception in this respect-they were a model of neatness. He would not let anyone touch a stamp with his fingers, he himself used tweezers for this purpose, and he handled the solid heavy pages of the album as if they were liable to fall apart at the slightest touch.
Now Kira bad taken Andrei Morozov’s place at my table and with his brows knitted in a frown of concentration he opened his collection.
“I collect Russian and Soviet stamps,” he began, turning the first page in his album. It contained four rows of small square brown stamps with a white eagle in the center.
“Why, they’re all alike,” Vyruchka remarked with disappointment.
“They are nothing of the kind!” Kira retorted hotly. “Look at them carefully. See, these are perforated and those aren’t. The perforation on this one is smaller than on that one. They’re all different. Look, here’s one with a round postmark and the one next to it has a square one. Do you see postmarks like that nowadays? Look at the postmark on this one-see, it’s all dotted. And here’s a row without any postmarks at all. A fat lot you understand if you can say they’re all alike.”
There was so much scorn in Kira’s voice that Vanya was quite crushed. Shura’s eyes twinkled.
Kira turned over the pages. There were stamps issued in honor of the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty, and issues commemorating the Russo-Japanese war.
“Oh look, those are our Soviet stamps!” Rumiantsev shouted, as Kira turned a page revealing a series of stamps of an entirely different character. Soviet stamps. For the first time in the history of philately the ordinary workingman, peasant, and soldier appeared on the postage stamp. A sinewy arm holding a sword smashing a chain. Smolnyi, in the heroic days of October, 1917. A worker vanquishing a dragon. From year to year the stamps grew more colorful and beautiful, and the variety increased. Like tiny colored stills of some great newsreel they traced the history of our country, the hard but glorious path traversed by its people.
The boys viewed them with awe.
“That’s my favorite picture of Lenin. The one where he is smiling a little with his eyes screwed up.”
“Here’s one of Lenin as a baby of three.”
“Look, that’s the tenth anniversary of the Red Army issue. An infantryman, a sailor, a cavalryman, and an airman-a stamp for every branch of the service.”
“And there’s the First All-Union Pioneer Meet,” cried Gai. “Look, more Pioneer stamps!”
“I have a whole Pioneer series further on,” said Kira. “We’ll get to them soon. This is the famous battleship Potemkin. And here are the barricades in Moscow in 1905. The one with the red flag shows the Krasnaia Presnia District.”
“Oh, look at that wonderful airship! That was when they first began building them here.”
“There’s Maxim Gorky!”
“Yes, that stamp came out in 1932 in honor of the fortieth anniversary of his literary career.”
“Oh, what smashing stamps! What’s this one, Kira?”
“This is an ethnographical series,” Kira replied grandly. “I’ve got all the peoples of the USSR here. By republics. Here’s Uzbekistan. See those buildings, just like the houses on Gorky Street in Moscow. This red one is Turkmenia. They pick the cotton, and haul it by camel and motor lorry to the mills.”
Each new page elicited more excited comments. There were stamps with portraits of the great men of the Revolution-Frunze, Kirov, Dzerzhinskii; heroes of the stratosphere; Ivan Fedorov, the first Russian printer; the great writers-Tolstoy, Pushkin, Chekhov, and Maiakovskii. The series dedicated to the famous Cheliuskin Arctic expedition, the Papanin expedition, and the heroic Arctic aviators, aroused universal admiration, as did the series on the Moscow Metro, the sports series, the lovely airmail stamps, stamps in honor of the twentieth anniversary of the Red Army, showing Stalin greeting the First Cavalry Army.
Impressive too were the anti-war stamps issued in 1934, showing fascist bombs raining down from a dark sky pierced by jagged flashes of lightning; mothers with frightened children fleeing from blazing houses.
Then came more skiers and sprinters, magnificent views of the Caucasus and the Crimea, the underground palaces of the Moscow Metro and other splendid new buildings in the capital, the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition. The smiling faces of men and women, happy and proud of their work, looked out at us from the small colored squares of paper.
And at last we came to more recent days and events even my boys remembered-the war, the victory, the beginning of peacetime construction.
Kira went on turning the pages of his album, giving more and more animated explanations as he went along.
“How do you know all these things?” Labutin finally asked him.
‘Whenever I get a new stamp I find out all about it. If it has a portrait of some celebrated person on it I try to get a book or article about him,” Kira explained.
“That’s a splendid collection you have, Kira,” Shura said. “A priceless collection, I would say. Every stamp is a story in itself. Yes, stamp collecting is a wonderful hobby. Not if you just buy stamps to stick them on, but if you learn something from them, as you do.”
“Do you collect stamps?”
“I used to. When Marina Nikolaevna and I went to school I had a collection, but it was lost during the war. Hold on, Kira! I believe I have just the thing for you. It is one of the few stamps I have kept. It will be just right for your collection-you haven’t got one like it. I carried it with me in my notebook all through the war.”
‘What sort of a stamp is it?” cried the boys.
“I’ll send it to you and you’ll see. It’s a fine stamp. But it’s of no use to me now since I don’t collect stamps any more. I have one for you too, Andrei. I shall send it to you as soon as I get home.”
“I am afraid there are going to be a good many more stamp collectors in our class from today,” I remarked to Shura on our way home.
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” he admitted with a chuckle.
“By the way, what sort of stamps are you going to give the boys?”
“Now then, a secret is a secret. I see you’re just as inquisitive as your boys. You must wait and see.”
Source: Frida Vigdorova, Diary of a Russian Schoolteacher (New York: Grove Press, 1960), pp. 188-191.