Collecting Russian postmarks: choose wisely!

I never tire of telling this story because it demonstrates how absolutely clueless I was when I first became interested in Russian philately: I walked into a philatelic bookstore in London and asked for a book on "all Russian postmarks"...

Of course no such book existed or will ever exist, as there are just too many Russian postmarks to collect. So if you are interested in Russian postmarks, which is a natural interest to develop after collecting stamps, what should you do?
Well, first you should decide if you want to break new ground or whether you want to collect something that has already been explored previously. If the latter, then there are not that many areas to choose from, as the vast majority of Russian postmarks is still waiting for a good handbook. There's good literature on St.Petersburg, Transcaucasia, Siberia and the Baltic region, while Moscow has an incomplete book that covers some useful ground. Beyond that, literature is either spotty, outdated or absent. If you're not thinking about geographical areas but about types of postmarks, then railway postmarks and ship postmarks have great books devoted to them and not much else does...

Next you should think very carefully about the availability of material and how much you're willing to spend. For example, the postmarks of Russian offices in China can be collected, but be prepared to pay very steep prices for everything except the most common postmarks. Just trawling through eBay listings for a few weeks should give you a very good idea of what kind of material is available and how much you may have to spend. I will tell you right now that most material you will see is either from the Baltic region, Poland, St.Petersburg, Moscow or some areas in Ukraine. Other regions you will see infrequently, so if you're unwilling to go weeks without finding anything new for your collection, be prepared!
For example, say you've become interested in Pskov province and are thinking about collecting the postmarks of the Imperial period. Check out eBay and you will find a few postmarks from the city of Pskov itself and not much else...So don't make your chosen area too small.

Siberia is another great example. There's a wonderful handbook about its postmarks available and it's HUGE, right? But when you start checking out eBay you will quickly find a few Vladivostok postmarks and everything after that becomes hard work...Plus, Siberia probably had thousands of postmarks, so it's a lot to collect.

With all that in mind, here are a few suggestions for feasible collecting subjects:

1. Kiev or Odessa. Big cities that generated a lot of mail (Odessa more than Kiev) and they had a lot of postmarks. I'm not aware of any literature on either city in English, but I believe there's a book about Odessa in Russian which should help.
2. The Caucasian resort towns: Kislovodsk, Zheleznovodsk, Mineralnie Vody and the like. They had tourists visiting them and that generated mail.
3. The big southern provinces of Terek, Kuban and Don.
4. Town Post postmarks. These are easy to find from the big cities and very scarce for anywhere else, which makes them fun.

Good luck!

Azerbaijan's 1992 mystery issue

Few stamp issues of Azerbaijan confuse me as much as the Other Overprints. Let me explain: one of the first stamp issues of independent Azerbaijan was a set of 5 surcharges on an unissued 15k stamp. The offending text of the stamp was obliterated by bars consisting of horizontal lines. However, the same set of surcharges was also available in the stamp trade with solid bars.
Azermarka, the Azeri philatelic bureau, isn't always helpful when it comes to these early issues, and Azermarka publications just ignore these "solid bar" surcharges altogether. That seems unwise, as they were accepted for postage in Azerbaijan itself, as we know thanks to Trevor Pateman:

Two stamps of the "solid bar" issue on cover from Baku to England. Sure, this is a dealer-inspired cover, and I believe Trevor even supplied the stamps and the envelope but a.) the stamps were accepted and b.) the letter went through the mail and reached its destination. QED. Note that this cover in no way proves that these stamps were available in Azerbaijan itself.

Trevor performed similar useful duties when it comes to those odd early imperforates:

Same caveats but same conclusion.

Coming back to the "solid bars" issue, I've found it to be an order of magnitude more scarce than the regular issue. The regular issue I have in sheets, for the solid bar issue, blocks of 4 is the best I can do and I'm quite pleased with those. I wonder if after so long, we'll ever find out the story behind these stamps...

Fake covers of the Nikolaevsk-on-Amur issue

In the past I have made no secret of my disdain for the so-called Nikolaevsk-on-Amur issue. Briefly, I believe the issue to have been concocted by stamp speculators, and never to have seen use in NNA itself. "Remainders" of the issue (i.e. all of it) were sold in Vladivostok as late as 1922.
Every now and then a faked cover of this issue appears at auction. There was a prize specimen in the 1983 Rand auction, and I've seen one at Delcampe as well. Recently I was able to add one to my reference collection for about $50, which seems about right for a curio like this. Here it is:

You can write a whole list of things that are wrong with this cover from the front alone. Let's see:

• Wrong rate
• Nikolaevsk postmark in Soviet spelling (a backdated Soviet postmark perhaps?)
• Vladivostok "g" used as arrival marking on an unregistered letter
• Address written in Soviet spelling as well
• And of course, the whole cover is far too clean for this period.

It gets even better when you see the reverse:

A ship postmark from a very scarce line used as a transit marking? Except this particular postmark has never been seen on anything except these fake covers...

I'll add that the Vladivostok "g" postmark was used extensively for backdated covers. Judging from its state of wear, these strikes are from 1923 or later: in 1921 this postmark looked a lot cleaner.

As desperately poor as these faked covers are (and there are at least 3 of them in existence), they're masterpieces compared to this nonsense:

which was offered by Gaertner a few years ago. How wrong can you get?

© Ivo Steijn, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ivo Steijn with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

A complicated Crimean cover

I find the Civil War postal history of the Crimea fascinating. All three years (1918, 1919 and 1920) offer their own challenges to the collector, but it is 1920 that's probably the most challenging because material is so scarce. We know the final Wrangel administration raised the postal rates drastically, to 5R, with 5R for registration, and thanks to Pavel "Duck" Pavlov, we finally have complete information on these final White rates and know they were effective May 1st, 1920 to October 9th at the latest.
Which brings me to this cover, a registered letter sent from Evpatoriya on August 7, 1920 to Sevastopol' where it arrived on August 11. Franked at 10R (correct rate) and with impeccable (though sadly lightly struck) postmark of Evpatoriya and Sevastopol', it looks genuine, and has a censor marking on the back as well, that you typically see on Crimean covers of this period.

Of course, the franking raises eyebrows. One perforated and one unperforated stamp? Too good to be true? But I can't fault the cover...

It was Pavel Pavlov who put the pieces together. First, note that the cover is addressed to Aleksandr Nikolaevich Sredinsky, and the name Sredinsky should ring all kinds of bells. He was the evil genius behind the "Russian Refugee Post" nonsense as well as the final Crimean "issue", the 100R/1k surcharge that was prepared but never issued (but marketed vigorously by S.). I will not reveal his findings here, since they are so interesting they deserve a long article of their own, but these stamps were not distributed to Evpatoriya at all. The only person who could have access to them was Sredinsky. So it looks like this cover was sent by Sredinsky or one of his minions. Philatelically inspired then, but still legitimate.

I don't know of any other frankings like that, but feel free to surprise me!

© Ivo Steijn, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ivo Steijn with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Transient province: Odessa Guberniya

These days, Wikipedia is a very useful reference for something that used to be almost impossible to keep track of: changes in the provinces of Russia/USSR. There was a lot of restless tinkering with guberniya borders during the Imperial period but it wasn't until the 1920s that large-scale change became common, making it hard to keep track of what province any particular city might be in.
Odessa guberniya is a great example. There was no such animal in the Imperial period, Odessa being in Kherson guberniya, but in 1920, Odessa guberniya was created during the split of Kherson guberniya (the other bit becoming Nikolaev guberniya). It lasted until 1925 when all guberniyas were abolished and the map of the Ukrainian SSR was redrawn, in okruhs this time, so Odessa guberniya became Odessa okruh. That lasted until 1930 when the okruhs were abolished and everything went to oblasts, so we got Odessa oblast'.

Attentive postmark collectors can actually track this process in postmarks, although the postmarks did sometimes lag after the reorganizations. The card below shows a nice bilingual postmark from the Odessa guberniya period, from a place called Bilyaevka. I'm sure there are lots more but I rarely see them.

Unpleasant surprises while collecting postmarks...

Today I celebrated a milestone in my decades-old pursuit of Crimean postmarks: I now have 250 Imperial-period (excluding prestamp) postmarks on file, and 252 Soviet-period (up to 1945) postmarks. And I still find new postmarks almost every week, and certainly every month.
To give you some idea of how incomplete this little database must be: I am aware of 110 post offices (of various classes, excluding town post sub-offices) that were active during the Imperial period. I have recorded postmarks of 53 of them. The Soviet period is even worse. There's a 1937 listing by Andrew Cronin that lists 273 offices, of which I've seen 75. Clearly, I have a lot more collecting to do!
However, every now and then I find out the job is even bigger than I thought.
Let's start with multiple serial letters. It's a well-known phenomenon that you can have multiple postmarks with the same serial letter for a given location. The later-Imperial double-circle postmarks are often found in a "large" and "small" version sharing the same serial letter, and of course, postmarks had to be replaced sometimes too. Even so, some places on the Crimea drive me nuts. Baidary is a good example. I have 4 double-circle postmarks in my files. ALL FOUR WITH SERIAL "a"! I mean, come on! If that multiplicity is typical, then I'll be collecting postmarks until I die.
In the Soviet period, the 1930s can be a little like that too. Most postmarks seem to exist in two versions. The older version (early 1930s) has (placename) KRYM in the top half in Cyrillic and (placename) in the bottom half in Extended Latin. The later version has KRYM (or rather, QRbM) in the bottom half as well. So for any given serial letter you are likely to find two postmarks.
But Gurzuf added insult to injury!

FINE! Two postmarks with serial "v", both in the older type. And yes, I am aware the bottom of the two has the dodgy dots that denote NKVD censorship, but still!

Now let's talk about city post sub-offices. Even during the Imperial period these just pop up like odd surprises. On the Crimea, Sevastopol', Simferopol' and Feodosiya certainly had them, because I have the postmarks, but were there any others? Dunno!

The Soviet period is even worse. Take a place like Saki, a small town on he Southwestern coast.  Why on earth did Saki, of all places, have this:

SECOND town sub-office, no less! And then this pops up from Feodosiya:

Very nice, and now I know what "gorodskoe" looks like in Crimean Tatar, but damn....

I'm going to be collecting these postmarks until I die, and I'd better be long-lived!

Modern CTO stamps: not stamps at all?

Sometimes a simple used stamp can raise a lot of questions.

The stamp in question is actually a souvenir sheet: Scott 5879, issued for the Stamp World London exhibition in 1990. It’s obviously cancelled-to-order (CTO), with the impossibly crisp postmark reading simply MOSKVA – POCHTAMT that is never seen on any normal piece of mail and probably isn’t a real postmark to begin with.

CTO stamps have been around for over a century, and for almost a century in Russia, with CTO stamps making an appearance in the early 1920s. Originally, existing postmarks were used to cancel stamps in sheets, but around 1930 we see special postmarks pressed into service, often (but not always) inscribed “D.K.” which is presumed to stand for “For collectors”. However, these are cancelling devices applied to sheets of the same stamps that were available in post office. In other words, they were valid postage stamps, cancelled to order after their printing was finished.

The souvenir sheet shown here betrays a quite different process. It’s a funny feature of printing processes that silver and gold inks have to be printed last, and this sheet has both silver and gold design elements. A quick look through a magnifying glass shows that these silver and gold elements are on top of the MOSKVA-POCHTAMT postmark. In other words, the “postmark” was printed onto the stamps before the stamps were even finished.

So what are these things? They’re not postage stamps that have been cancelled to order. They’re a kind of stamp facsimile, except instead of the word “facsimile” to distinguish them from real stamps they have this bogus “postmark”.

A case could be made that “CTO stamps” produced in this fashion are not postage stamps at all and should not be listed in self-respecting stamp catalogs.

You may think this is a subtle distinction, but mint sheets that are postmarked after their printing is finished were, at least for a brief time, valid postage stamps. These modern CTO things were never valid stamps.

Wish I never see this place again....Popov Island

The postcard below is clearly a souvenir. The franking makes no sense and the reverse is filled with a long message, with no addressee or destination, let alone further postmarks. So my best guess is that it was sent in an envelope as a souvenir postcard from a very, very sad place: Popov Island in Arkhangel'sk province.

If only it had gone through the mails! December 1918? Here's a closer look at the postmark:

Popov Island is still around although it seems to have changed its name a few times. It's close to Kem and for awhile it was home to one of the sadder places on earth: KemPerPunkt. KemPerPunkt was where you caught the ferry to the Solovetsky Islands, and if you caught that ferry after 1920 or so, chances were that you never came back, for the Solovetsky islands were home to one of the earliest and nastiest bits in the Gulag archipelago: the Solovetsky Camp of Special Purpose or SLON to use the Russian acronym (which also means "elephant" oddly enough).

But all that was still a few years in the future when this postmark was struck on a souvenir postcard...

Avtozavod

I recently became the delighted owner of a collection of Avtozavod postmarks. Avtozavod, I hear you ask?
Ever heard of a Russian car make GAZ? It stands for Gorkovskii Avtomobil'nyi Zavod or Gorky Car Plant, an absolutely giant car manufacturing and assembly plant in the city of Gorky. When it was built (in 1930-1931) the city was still called Nizhnii-Novgorod and the factory complex (complete with housing for - eventually - 60,000 people) was built on the site of a village called Monastyrka.

Construction started on May Day 1930 and production in the plant started on New Year's Day 1932. While the plant was the result of an unprecedented contract between Autostroy (the Soviet government agency in charge of car manufacture) and the Ford Motor Company (who supplied plans, parts, tools and dies for manufacture of what were essentially Model A cars and Model AA trucks), actual construction was supervised by the Austin Company. A fair number of US engineers and managers were on-site to oversee the gigantic project but this was a true US-Soviet collaboration.

The earliest postmark in the collection is from January 1931:

Obviously sent by one of the Americans working on the project. It's interesting that an Avtozavod post office was already in operation, even though only a third of the project's construction time had passed. Here's a close-up of the postmark:

Note that prior to 1933 the province (and the city) were still called Nizhnii-Novgorod. Has anyone seen any earlier examples?

I can recommend a great book on the subject: "Building Utopia" by Richard Cartwright Austin which can be bought for a couple of bucks on amazon.com. I'll try to find time to write up this wonderful collection.