Finally completed the set Can't believe how difficult it is to complete the set: http://www.gxseries.com/numis/rus_new_type/1961_1992.htm#1k Hope others had better luck in completing the other holes that I don't have.
Hirasha, How up-to-date is the rest of the collection on display? I still have my old binder of those that I am sure I can fill some holes. Let me know what you need, and I will do some looking for you. Scott
Congratulations. I have a pretty good idea how tough some of these coins really are. I was working on the set back in the days that there was no competition and couldn't make a lot of headway on it. The Soviet government discouraged coin collecting altogether and the few collectors that existed hated Soviet era coinage and especially modern (post-'61). If memory serves there were only about 100 people in the Moscow coin club and my source claimed they pretty much all hated moderns. The mint sets are said to have recieved extremely good distribution world wide with relatively few staying in the home market. I suspect this means a lot went to dignitaries in satellite countries. Some of the mint sets were poorly packaged and won't have survived but they used a lot of different types of packaging.
Thanks everyone kuhli, I'll send you a pm of a list of coins of what I am looking for. It's quite a fair bit. cladking, I'm quite puzzled over how these coins were distributed. I'll put the discussion of the commemorative coins aside as it complicates a lot of matter - for now, I'll just discuss about the regular coinage. The main distributor as far as I am aware is Mezhnumizmatika. They only had access to the US market in 1973 and hence mint sets after 1973 are more plentiful than the earlier ones. Anything before 1973 can be said to be relatively scarce except the 1967 commemorative set and mintsets of 1967, 68 and 69 which are plentiful. For instance, the rarest out of all mintset is the 1970 which I have seen 10 sets sold single handily from a single seller in the UK. There also disputes of how some of these coins were packed. I reckon in the early days most of them went to Europe where Mezhnumizmatika had a foothold probably in East Germany and they got spread slowly. Most regular coins I know were either packed in cellophone packaging or in hard plastic cases. Examples can be seen here: http://www.gxseries.com/numis/sovietset/sovietset.htm There is a lot of research to do but I just don't have enough time
