This set of six stamps features six men and women named as Heroes of the Soviet Union. The stamps were issued between 1965 and 1969, and primarily featured intelligence agents and communist partisans who were killed during World War II
Nikolai Ivanovich Kuznetsov - 4 Kopeks - Kuznetsov was an NKVD intelligence agent and partisan who operated in Nazi-occupied Ukraine during World War II. He is credited with personally killing six high-ranking German soldiers and civilians in occupied Ukraine before he himself was killed in March 1944. He was named a Hero of the Soviet Union and even has a minor planet (2233 Kuznetsov) named after him.
Imants Sudmalis - 4 Kopeks - Sudmalis joined the Communist Union of the Youth of Latvia at age 16 and later worked as an editor and partisan. After Germany invaded and occupied Latvia in June 1941, he fought in defense of Riga and later was in charge of an underground Komsomol resistance cell. In February 1944, he was executed by the Germans and in 1957 was posthumously named a Hero of the Soviet Union.
Anna Afanasyevna Morozova - 4 Kopeks - Morozova worked as a spy at an airfield near her hometown of Seshcha after it was captured and occupied by the German Luftwaffe. She worked as a laundry woman and passed information back to the Soviet Air Force which allowed them to target German aircraft. Later she joined the Red Army after they recaptured the area around Seshcha and was killed in battle inside of Poland in December 1944. She was posthumously named a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1965.
Filipp Strelets - 4 Kopeks - Strelets joined the Red Army in 1939 and was later reassigned to a partisan battalion. In January 1942, while leading an attack on a German position in the Bryansk Oblast, he was killed in battle. There is now a monument in his honor at the military academy he graduated from in Kiev, Ukraine,
Tikhon Pimenovich Bumazhkov - 4 Kopeks - Bumazhkov served in the Red Army from 1933 - 1935. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, he was recalled to duty and served as a political commissar in a partisan detachment called Red October. He was killed in action in the Poltava Oblast in Ukraine in December 1941.
Richard Sorge - 4 Kopeks - Richard Gustavovich Sorge was a German-Russian journalist and Soviet military intelligence officer who was active before and during World War II and worked undercover as a German journalist in both Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan. While serving in Japan in 1940 -1941, he provided information about Adolf Hitler's plan to attack the Soviet Union. Then, in mid-September 1941, he informed the Soviets that Japan would not attack the Soviet Union in the near future. A month later, Sorge was arrested in Japan for espionage. He was tortured, forced to confess, tried and hanged in November 1944. He was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union in 1964.
This set of six stamps will be shipped in a protective stamp display card.
