L is for Leningrad Forging Factory

These are an interesting set of figures - I had been picking up grey plastic sub-machine gunners since before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the tearing of the iron Curtain in 1989, to which a decade or so ago I managed to add a grenade thrower, all in hard styrene plastic to a standard 40mm compatible with Elastolin and Lineol smallies.

I then ran into fellow collector Chris Smith who carried a very wide range of Soviet era figures at the Plastic Warrior show in Richmond for several years, he had a few and we got chatting, he told me there were silver versions (I may have bought one at the time?) and that there were also an officer and flag-bearer but that they were quite hard to get.

The reason for that rarity is simple to see when you get the set complete, there was only one 'commander' and one flag-bearer per set and only two grenade throwers for every six 'automatic men'. With the flag easily damaged it's no wonder they are impossible to locate!

The title of the set is simply 'Soldiers' and you can see from the underside that while so-called experts might mutter "vac-metallised" under their breaths, the figures are just sprayed silver on a conveyor of some kind which prevents the paint covering the base underside, revealing the more common grey plastic colour.