I was rummaging through some old albums and found a little stash of Single Frankings. I collected these quite avidly for the 1924-1940 period at one time, but got rid of most of them after awhile. I did keep the examples from the Second Standard issue, or the Large Heads as we westerners think of them.
Most of the middle values in this set are easily found as single frankings (which is defined as an item of mail franked with one example of a stamp, paying the correct rate and preferably in the right period), although the 50k starts getting a little more difficult. But it's the extreme values of the set that present the most problems.
The 80k is hard to find as a single. Here's a cheat:
This is a scarce postcard from the extensive correspondence between professor Popov in Irkutsk and E. Colaco Belmonte in Sydney, Australia. Most of this correspondence consists of very nicely franked airmail covers, but there are a few postcards too, this being one of them. So why is it a cheat? Because 80k wasn't the right rate: this registered airmail postcard to Australia should have been franked with 70k.
Here's how to do it properly:
By 1935 the rate for a Speshnoe letter was 80k, so this is the correct franking. 1935 is a bit late for a Large head, but the stamps of that issue can be found used normally throughout the early/mid-1930s, so I'm saying it's acceptable. This, by the way, is the easiest form of an 80k single franking.
On the other end of the spectrum there's the (also orange) 1k stamp. As far as I can tell, this would have paid for local printed matter, which has a low probability of survival. But, we all get lucky sometimes:
Life is good! And with a table of postal rates at your side, this way of collecting stamps on cover is a lot of fun.
