Among the plates of special issues we would mention toy-disks and souvenir disks. Mini-sized toy disks with children's and pioneers' repertoire appeared already in early 1950s. Here you see a plate for 78 rpm, diam. 150 mm (label 65 mm) with verses for children.

  This plate from 1950s of Leningrad Works (78 rpm, diam. 150 mm, label 55 mm) with pioneer songs bears only a special number of toy-disks nomenclature that makes its exact dating difficult.

  In late 1960s "The All-Union Theater Association" turned out a series of souvenir plates diam. 100 mm without paper labels. According to the inscription on the envelope the producer was The Theatre Factory of the above association. Mini-sized disks could be played on cheap toy-players which appeared on sale at that time. Having small diameter of the exit groove such plates disrupted functioning of the auto-stop mechanism of the turntable. Warning of its switching off before playing the disk was placed on envelopes.

It is surprising that there was practically no information on such plates (except the title of the song and the factory logo, the pressing on the disk reveals nothing more).

In 1960-1970s "sounding magazines" such as "The Krugozor" and "The Kolobok" (for children) were being issued. Between pages of those magazines there were insertions in the form of flexible disks of many colors, which, apart from music, also contained poems, talks, interviews, fairy tales, etc.

Besides lectures, lessons and sounding digests, in 1960s "Melodija" company was producing plates with sound accompaniment to diafilms. Now very few people remember that children's fun of that time - viewing a short film of slides shown on an improvised screen or a wall with a simple projector. In those years TV sets (especially color ones) were not widespread and color diafilms based sometimes on the plots of popular animated cartoons were of much interest for children. There were also educational diafilms. Every frame had subtitles, but by end-1960s diafilms were supplied with a small gramophone disk with sounding accompaniment and beep-commands for the diascope operator to change the frame.

The All-Union Company "Melodija" also produced specific testing and measuring plates for adjusting playing devices. Measuring plates contained special tuning signals - those of frequency and noise. The cited disk (left) was designed for demonstration of stereo effect and optimising of placing and phasing of loudspeakers and regulating the amplifier. The first side includes musical and noise fragments with commentaries, the second one - musical examples. Such disks were included into the set of playing apparatus for sale.