Hmmm…

I don’t get it.

A service in demand will find a supplier. Research appears to be in demand. But finding a supplier of research is like finding an honest man at a political convention.

That is the case in the world of Soviet medal collecting. (Perhaps it’s the same in other collecting pursuits, don’t know.) Part of the draw of USSR medals is the ability to have them researched. This means someone going to the archives outside Moscow and digging through the stacks.

It’s not cheap. A typical group of orders will run US$100.00 to $200.00 to research. What you get are photocopied or scanned pages of Cyrillic text. It may include a small photo (from the biographical file). And that’s it. So it’s not the physical product that’s expensive. It must be the time. But having done some work in US archives myself in graduate school, military archives no less, I have to say that the time to find all the docs to a particular award or group cannot be that great. Of course there’s a learning curve, finding your way around the physical location, the indexing system, the storage boxes or request system, how the clerks operate, and on and on. Not underestimating that. But once you’re no longer a novice there’s frankly nothing to it. There’s just not that much there, and short of a completely botched filing system (which there obviously is not, or nothing at all would be found with any alacrity), it must only take a few minutes to locate what is there.

And to top it all off it’s unreliable, both in time and results. Sometimes research is done in a matter of days – other times it takes months, or doesn’t ever come. Sometimes lots of information is returned, sometimes not.

There must be something more involved. Don’t know what: perhaps bribes, perhaps being connected, perhaps just showing up when the doors open. The latest gossip is that it’s actually dangerous! The illegality of exporting medals has extended to persecution of those doing research. Not sure I buy it. Scratch that; I’m sure I don’t buy it. It’s bullshit. Why? Because if it was illegal then no one would be getting research at all – it’s not like smuggling medals. There’s only one place to go for it, and if it was illegal that place would simply be sealed. But the fact is that the bigger dealers and auction houses have research to die for. And research does come out, occasionally, even for the little guy. Sometimes very quickly. As well, no one *in Russia* has come out and claimed that it’s illegal. Or persecuted, or anything of that sort. The only word is rumor as excuse for no research. No, being dangerous isn’t the problem – there’s no evidence for it, and it makes little sense.

I suspect the issue is simple – there’s not enough demand to make it worthwhile given the cost in hassle and bribes. Petty gatekeepers exercising their authority make it too costly. Many comment that research is expensive now, so the price is inelastic. The worst of it is probably the most mundane: Ivan the Researcher hangs out his shingle, advertising set price research services. (Variable, something along the lines of a charge per hour, would not fly at all if blog talk about the current cost of research is any indication.) He goes to the archive and everything works! He comes out with, after expenses, a modest profit. Not enough to replace his day job, but worth it.

Word gets out – he gets results! So he takes more orders from a hungry collector population. But this time it’s not so smooth – more bribes, out and out obstruction, who knows? He’s committed to a set price, however, so what to do? Not produce, in which case he’s a “lousy researcher,” or produce but make no money, which makes him a great guy to me but a fool in the real world.

So maybe I do get it. Don’t like it, since research is the only reason I got into medals, but get it.