Any help with Soviet ruble coins

Hello all,

This is the first post of mine on this site, i have an interest in coins of the soviet union and have this set from the 1980 moscow olympics

I was just wondering wether anyone could shed light on this set, anything unusual about it or even if its a real set. Dont worry i didnt pay too much for it, for the price i paid they would still be worth keeping. Just some knowledge about this set would be greatly appriciated.

Thanks in advance,
Callum

 

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It is a real set, and I believe they were sold by Paramount coins in the run up to the Olympics in 1980. Then the USA and several other western nations boycotted the Olympics and you couldn't give these things away. Coin collecting was frowned upon in the USSR so there was no interest there.

Now that collecting is encouraged in Russia there is a lot of demand for these sets from the domestic market, which has driven the price up.

 

Thank you, i picked this set up for £25 from a local coin collecting shop to add to my collection

 

There were quite a few different "sets" marketed. I have a 6-coin set which I posted a while back.

https://www.cointalk.com/threads/soviet-era-coinage-post-em.213439/page-2#post-1531826

 

Nice set! Those coins don't seem to show up in OGP that often. From what I have observed a lot of the cupronickel pieces are impaired due to not being well taken care of. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable could chime in, but it is my understanding that the silver pieces mostly went abroad for hard currency while the base metal pieces were collected domestically. My first trip to Russia was only two years after the fall of the USSR, and at that time the souvenir markets were filled with base metal commemoratives.

Even some of those went abroad as Scottishmoney observed. For example, I have a mint set that was sold in the US by Pandaamerica as it has a COA from that company.

 

Back in 1980 coin collecting really wasn't tolerated in the USSR as it was seen as capitalistic "hoarding", later in the 1980s Goznak(USSR, then Russian mint) started producing coins for domestic collectors and occasional circulation. Some of the coins, like the one for the Armenian earthquake in 1988 were used as fundraisers.

One curious feature of leaving the USSR back then was that you were required to exchange all your Soviet currency back into your western currency. Aside from what I smuggled out for my collection I did turn in about 50 rubles and instead of getting Deutschmarks or dollars got a pile of 10 brand new 5 ruble commemorative coins in cupronickel and was told I was good to take them out since they were coins and souvenirs.

The other day I found an old pricelist I received from "Mezhnumizmatika" in Moscow, was interesting to see all the prices in dollars and the prices were high. They were selling early USSR coinage and some of the Baltic states coinages from before 1940 for prices that even now are a rip off.

 

Well, shipping the coins in PVC doesn't exactly help preservation...

 

Handling the coins carelessly during the packaging process didn't help either. My 1977 mint set has major issues due to fingerprints even though it is in a hard plastic case...