LOZ (identification badge) of the RIA soldier of the 1917 model

Brass, galvanized. A fairly rare VINE in satisfactory collector's condition. Guarantee of authenticity.

By the end of the 19th century, the Russian army began to use special tokens to identify military personnel. In the "History of the Life Guards of the Jaeger Regiment for 100 years. 1796-1896." it says that in 1877, when the regiment was preparing to be sent to the theater of military operations in Bulgaria (the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-1878), all soldiers and officers received metal tokens with a drawstring to wear around their necks. Letters were stamped on the badge-abbreviations of the name of the regiment, the number of the battalion, the company and the personal number of the serviceman. The appearance of the first personal identification medallion for all military personnel of the active army in the history of the Russian state dates back to the last days of the tsarist Empire. The Minister of War, General of Infantry Belyaev, signed a special order: "On the 16th day of January 1917, the Emperor ordered the installation of a special neck badge to identify the wounded and killed, as well as to mark the St. George awards of the lower ranks according to the proposed drawing. With such supreme will, I declare by the military department with instructions that the sign should be worn under the uniform on a cord or braid worn around the neck, and the record enclosed in it should be printed on parchment paper." The neck badge was an incense with a blank inside, the size of a tram ticket. The soldier had to write a lot of information about himself in a beaded and preferably calligraphic handwriting. Specify your regiment, company, squadron or hundred, rank, first name, last name, awards, religion, estate, province, county, parish and village. At that time, only a small part of the manufactured signs managed to go to the troops, and a few months later, with the beginning of the October Revolution, the process of equipping with personal identification medallions was actually stopped.