Soviet city badges: how to build a geographic series

Badges · 4 September 2026

City badges are the largest theme in Soviet faleristics, which is exactly why collecting one badge per town leads nowhere. The sense appears when badges form a series: a coat of arms, a tourist route, a town jubilee, a hero city or a resort. A series shows what is missing and turns a handful of metal into geography.

Five types of city badge

1. Coat of arms. The town's arms on a shield, often with a ribbon and the name. The most recognisable and the most frequent group: the archive holds 36 of them, from Mozhaysk to Krasnoyarsk and Alma-Ata.
2. Route badge. It belongs to a tourist ring rather than to a single town: the Golden Ring, the Northern Necklace. Such badges share a frame and a style because they were made as a set.
3. Jubilee badge. It carries the town's age: Kirov 600 years, Yaroslavl 975 years. A badge like this states its own year of issue.
4. Hero city and military glory. Obelisks, stars, siege dates. The hero city title was formally settled in 1965, and badges of this group are almost always tied to an event or a Victory anniversary.
5. Resorts and landmarks. Sochi, Pyatigorsk, Mineralnye Vody, monuments and viewpoints – a souvenir of a trip rather than a sign of a town.

The date on the arms is not the badge's year

This is the main confusion in the theme. Coat-of-arms badges often carry a date: Lodeynoye Pole – 1702, Usman – 1781, Grayvoron – 1841. That is the year the town was founded or its arms were granted, while the badge itself was made in Soviet times, most often between the 1960s and the 1980s. The badge's own year comes from the fastening, the material, the lettering and the series it belongs to.

Routes that come as a set

Tourist rings are the most rewarding way to collect geography, because the series has an end. Two such lines are visible in the archive.

• The Golden Ring – 9 badges: Alexandrov, Galich, Kineshma, Kostroma, Moscow, Plyos, Rybinsk, Tutayev, Uglich. The route through the ancient towns north-east of Moscow took shape in the late 1960s and grew a souvenir series at once.
• The Northern Necklace – 5 badges: Belozersk, Veliky Ustyug, Kirillov, Ustyuzhna, Cherepovets. A rarer line that takes longer to complete.

A route badge is recognised by the shared frame and the route name along the edge. On its own such a badge matters only as part of the set – that is the whole point of geography.

A jubilee is a ready-made date

The jubilee badge is the only type that dates itself in one step: add the number of years on the badge to the town's founding year. Kirov 600 years and Yaroslavl 975 years were struck for specific anniversaries rather than as generic souvenirs. Once such a badge is in the box it anchors the rest of the local geography: other badges of the same town were usually issued for the same jubilee.

What geography the archive holds

The open archive holds 3,332 Soviet badges. The geography inside them is easy to see: 36 coat-of-arms badges, 9 from the Golden Ring, 5 from the Northern Necklace and a separate group for Leningrad as a hero city, including a 1985 badge. Moscow and Leningrad account for the most pieces – and for most of the duplicates in any box.

Open the sections: Soviet badges, postcards, matchbox labels.

How to build the series at home

• Start from a route, not from the alphabet: the Golden Ring and the Northern Necklace have a finite list of towns.
• Keep coat-of-arms badges apart from jubilee ones – they are dated by two different principles.
• Collect a town in full: arms, jubilee, landmark, sport – that shows the whole local story.
• Do not discard Moscow and Leningrad duplicates: they are the best trading stock for small towns.
• Write notes on the card under the badge, never on the metal itself.