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 Beyond that, literature is either spotty, outdated or absent.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!