Well, I haven't kept all the J-3's, I have a few really nice ones, and a few 1949-1952 ones which are superb.
I also don't understand the crazy spending on FSU equipment. It's really fine stuff, beautiful stuff, some of it, and there are some real rarities which appeal to the budding cadres of FSU collectors, but mostly I liked playing with them.
The best examples can give stunning results. Where I lived in Manhattan in the 1970's and 1980's, on East 14th Street in Manhattan, all these Russian guys set up "junk shops" where they gypped people on fake Icons (from churches), Russian "antiques", and so forth.
I bought CAMERAS and LENSES like a lunatic, for literally pennies. (Great WATCHES too, a whole other universe) I had more stuff and knew more about FSU stuff when it WAS the Soviet Union then most people can even imagine today. Nobody else was buying and the sellers didn't know what to make of it. They couldn't understand why anyone wanted that "garbage" when you could buy a nice Canon AE-1 in America. Poor slobs just off the boat from Russia would show up with sacks of cameras they thought they could sell for a fortune here, and they became bitterly disappointed when they found out it was considered worthless junk in New York.
When I read people "discovering" this stuff now like a bunch of naifs, it amuses me. I had 120 format cameras, Kievs, Hasselblad copies of every stripe, the East German Jena stuff, I had EVERYTHING. Mirror lenses. Suitcase enlargers. I fell in love with a Photosniper when I was 22 years old....I shot all over NYC with it. If I tried that now, some cop would probably shoot me down or I'd wake up in an orange jumpsuit in Gitmo...it looks like a rifle.
There was some stuff that was considered "rare", but the early days of eBay brought it all to the surface, fast.
I accumulated because it cost next to nothing and I was mesmerized by the "other worldness" of the stuff.....like some dropped down from an alien planet.
I even corresponded with the factories by mail and got answers and ordered things. Night vision too, 25 years ago.
I can tell you for certain that the FSU gear you see being flogged now on eBay is the bitter dregs. MOST of it has been tampered with or "restored" by butchers, and it's being sold for extortionate prices.
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