The Order for Personal Courage was established by Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on December 28, 1988.
This decoration could be awarded to any USSR citizen showing outstanding courage and bravery during life-saving, keeping of public order and safeguard of State property, as well as for fighting crime, environmental catastrophes, and other exceptional events.
The award was designed by A.B.Zhuk and represents a silver gilded silver star with the words "For Personal Courage" and "USSR" written on it. It was replaced in Russia by the Order of Courage in 1994, which has different look.
The order was first awarded on February 3, 1989, to a teacher of school No. 42 in the city of Ordzhonikidze (now Vladikavkaz) Natalia Efimova. Her class was taken hostage and later freed in a police operation.
Famous quotes containing the words order, personal and/or courage:
“England has the most sordid literary scene I’ve ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy’s writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just in order to scrape by. They’re all scratching each other’s backs.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
“We joined long wagon trains moving south; we met hundreds of wagons going north; the roads east and west were crawling lines of families traveling under canvas, looking for work, for another foothold somewhere on the land.... The country was ruined, the whole world was ruined; nothing like this had ever happened before. There was no hope, but everyone felt the courage of despair.”
—Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968)