ABOUT THE AUTHOR

     A few words about myself, the author of this site. I was born at the end of WWII in USSR, in Ural, and I lived several years in the city of Magnitogorsk.  Then I lived in several villages in Bukovina, a former Romanian territory that became a part of the Soviet Ukrainian Republic after WWII. In 1956, my parents decided to quit the USSR to go a bit to the West, to the then communist Romania, a country in which I lived until 1983. 

   It was the reality of life under the dictators Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and Ceausescu (both shown above, on stamps) that opened my eyes about what was actually happening around me. After a hard, long and dangerous fight with the Romanian authorities, I was finally permitted to emigrate, and I established myself, with my family, in the free Switzerland. Here I got access to as much information as I could process, and I was profoundly influenced by Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago", and then by the works of Ayn Rand, Frederic Bastiat, Arthur Koestler, Ludwig von Mises, Jean-François Revel, to cite just some of them. Thanks to them and to many others, this site isn't influencedjust by the hatred that I experienced over 20 years ago against the Communist regimes, but to my deep philosophical convictions about freedom that I have built up thanks to all these thinkers.

   I have studied electronics, physics and computer programming, and I hold a master's degree in physics. I have worked as a meteorologist, physicist, electronic engineer, researcher, IT specialist and technical director. I presently work in academic research.

   My reading about Communism was facilitated by my knowledge of several languages, three of them belonging to those spoken in the former Soviet empire: Russian, German and Romanian. I also had the privilege to read the works of Ayn Rand and Frederic Bastiat in the original languages in which they were written.

    For over  45 years I have collected stamps, mainly those related to arts. My Arts on Stamps site (which hosts a stamp collectors club with over 650 members from 67 countries, and a large free database), as well as Romanian Stamps site were internationally awarded, among others by the International Philatelic Association (FIP).

   I am the founder and the current president of Philatelic Webmasters Organization,  counting at this time over 250 members. Some stamps of my youth, as well as some humor related to stamp collecting, can be found on the site dedicated to Spanish Africa. My other hobbies are reading, listening to music and digital photography (see above my strange "self-portrait in a shop window", processed on the computer shown to the right of it). Sometimes I "design" my own stamps, like in the example shown below. The nice girl accompanying me is my daughter.

   I will extend as much as possible this site, which I consider the most important of all those I have created during the last eight years. It will probably also be the last big one, and in a certain sense "the swan song of my philatelic webmaster's soul".

  If you wish to contact me by e-mail, please click here.