Licking Stalin

When I was in elementary school, I collected coins, baseball cards and comic books. Except for the comic books, which I liked reading, my interest was mostly mercenary. I still remember being cowed by the fact that my TOPPS rookie card of Mark McGwire was listed as being worth $3.00. An adult, I forget who, asked me to try selling that McGwire. Considering the fact that everyone I knew had one, no one was buying for more than 60 cents. It was my first economics lesson.

The real pleasure of collecting is or should be an academic one. It's about noticing and reveling in small details. Some 16 years later, I remember two big ones. There was the silver penny cast during World War II, when copper was needed for killing Germans. And there was the faulty rookie card for Al Leiter - a pitcher for the Yankees who later played a key role in Michael Bloomberg's first inaugral ceremony - that had a picture of someone who wasn't Al Leiter. I had a few false starts with stamp collecting, but a recent visit to the Stamp Museum here in Budapest makes me wish I had directed by nerd energies there.

The museum is housed next to a small post office in a sterile fluorescent-lit room, and, except for a few paintings and antique postal artifacts, is almost entirely made up of thousands of drawers of stamps. A few hundred are dedicated solely to the stamps of Hungary. It cost me 200 forints to enter and according to the register the place seems to get an average of one visitor a day. There was a short English guide pointing out collection's highlights - an upside-down misprinting of a Madonna on a 19th-century Hungarian stamp! - but for the most part you just get the years, and the thousands and thousands of small stamps.

I kept flipping through, chronologically, getting a vague sense of Hungarian history as I went along until I was met by a heartbreaking and swift transformation. First, from 1947, there was a series of stamps commemorating Franklin Roosevelt. One each under the headings of his four freedoms, and a few others of the great American hero over certain landmarks. There was at least one Hungarian in 1947 who sent an envelope with a stamp of FDR at Hyde Park. I closed the drawer, opened another, and suddenly it was 1949, the time of Uncle Joe Stalin.

Stamps, before the Internet era, were probably the single most mundane aspect of modern life. Everyone had to pay a bill at some point. And here was the evidence that in two short years Hungarians went from licking Roosevelt to licking Stalin.

On the whole, communist Hungary's stamps contained a bit of propaganda, happy proletarians and Marx and Engels and all that jazz. But it was only an obsession in the early '50s. At some point, even after the uprising of 1956, Hungarians stamp designers gave their customers African masks and innocuous celebrations of the 1960 Olympics. Americans started appearing on stamps again. One from 1962, celebrates the three men who at that point had orbited the earth: Yuri Gagarin, Gherman Titov and John Glenn. It's unclear whether an American would have still enjoyed such an honor if the Yanks had been winning the space race. In 1964, Eleanor Roosevelt, who had been dead for a couple of years, got a stamp of her own, without any Russians crowding her space.

History isn't a neat progression. There were plenty of communist symbols in the '70s and '80s, but there were also celebrations of a Hungarian cartoon fox and folk masks. Life went on, Hungarian stamps, like ours, provided transitory pleasures and fun. Then the other revolution came. In 1996, a stamp commemorating the 40th anniversary of the 1956 uprising was issued. It was the first time I could find evidence of the event in the stamp collection.