First All-Union Pioneer Rally

The Soviet Union issued two commemoratives on 18 August 1929, the opening day of the First All-Union Pioneer Rally in Moscow. Domfil catalogues them as 929.3/4 «Corneta / Bugle».

Both carry the same design by Dmitry Golyadkin: a Young Pioneer in neckerchief blowing a bugle, with ВСЕСОЮЗНЫЙ ПИОНЕРСКИЙ СЛЁТ — All-Union Pioneer Rally — and the year 1929 set around the figure and ПОЧТА СССР beneath. The 10 kopek is olive-brown and the 14 kopek blue-grey; both are photogravure, 26 × 37 mm, comb perforation 12¼ × 12, on paper watermarked with a Greek border and rosettes, in sheets of 100 made up of two panes of 50. The printings were small — 400,000 of the 10 kopek and 500,000 of the 14.

The pair marks the point where the two Russian traditions had already parted. Scouting had been founded in Russia in 1909 and was suppressed after the revolution; the Pioneer organisation was established on 19 May 1922 to take its place, borrowing the outdoor programme, the neckerchief and the bugle while replacing the movement's promise with a communist one. By 1929 it was large enough to fill Moscow for a national rally, while the Scouts who had refused it were abroad, keeping the older movement alive in exile.

The bugler on these stamps became the template for the Eastern-bloc Pioneer issues that follow it in this catalogue, from the Romanian anniversaries of the early 1950s to Poland's Warsaw rally of 1952 and Romania's education-reform stamp of 1958. Beyond the references above the stamps are listed as AFA SU 374–375, Soloviev 312–313 and Zagorsky 226–227.