K is for Kid's Stuff!

Another Russian maker, another new name to blog and new to the English speaking hobby, here at Small Scale World.

It's funny I posted that Krugozor the other day and TJF followed it up with a Russian post of his own (he did the same thing with the previous Polish post), but I'm bringing stuff new to the English speaking hobby, he's telling us about third generation copies of Linde copies of Dom (or Friedel or whoever - I really don't care Deadleaf) (which he had to get from someone else because he's a dealer not a collector), that he doesn't know the name of and which will be all over evilBay for the next 18-months! Yet, apparently, we’re supposed to think this makes him a legend and me the idiot?

This stuff has been around on the Russian sites for years, so I'm not much taking credit for it, although there's the effort of finding it and translating it, but it's in a different league to what TJF does and it's tiresome that all he's got is copying what I'm doing, or what a magazine's doing or what another site's doing! Tiresome and unoriginal, that's TJF.

Anyway, 'Kid' or Malyesh; another of the Moscow firms which were swallowed-up by Krugozor, but unlike MKI, don't seem to have survived the break-up after the Iron Curtain came down . . . well, it sort of fell-down didn't it!

The full translation makes Kid the obvious choice:

Московский завод пластмассовых игрушек «Малыш»

˅

Moskovskiy zavod plastmassovykh igrushek "Malysh"

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Moscow plant of plastic toys 'Malysh'

Малыш» = Malysh = Kid (think: Kiddycraft, Little Tikes, Kinder), otherwise it would be a right mouthful! Although I will tag them as 'Kid Toys Moscow'.

Above is a cross section of their toy soldiers and a sample of the colours, and they are 'toy' soldiers aimed at infants, the small ones were five kopeks when a Ruble was 60-odd cents, so maybe 1½p?

These are worked in the same stable PVC-like rubber material as the MKI cavalry, and one or two other colours exist, including a semi-transparet yellow, but they may be polyethylene production (possibly from one of that Odessa mob!), I've yet to find out.

I thought these two were different, but the red one's lost his plume, they are from a set of four which consisted of two Frenchies and two Russians, I'm missing the Russian with shako, who is similar to the yellow Frenchies seen in this post, but with a shorter headdress.

These only seem to come in the one pose, although there are differences between my two, the bases are quite different (one a squashed ovoid, the other penny-round), as are the bayonets and the way they hold the butts of their muskets. Also one is marked with a price the other isn't, and apparently some carried the bear-logo but I don't have any of those yet.

This was a single lot and when I saw it on feebleBay I wondered if the others I had might not actually be board-game playing-pieces, but the info' from Russia is clear that there's the one set of four Napoleonics and the other larger chap, all sold from counter-boxes I think; you may have been able to get one of each of the Napoleonic set (with or without an aeroplane?) in a little bag?

Added later the same day - when I was picking these up, I kept thinking I'd seen them before and/or that I must have some somewhere, if you're getting the same feeling looking at them . . . it might be because they are the same size and have the same bases as the hard styrene, yellowish GI figures which came with the bigger Pyro boxed sets of dime-store AFV's!