An unpleasant man behind some stamps

Most collectors will be aware of the "Western Army" issues, which saw a tiny bit of use (mostly on contrived envelopes sent within Mitau) during 1919. They're associated with a gentleman usually referred to as Colonel (or even Prince!) Avalov-Bermondt.
Very few collectors will know much about this unpleasant character. In the first place, his name is just Bermondt. During 1918 he claimed to be the adopted son of a Georgian prince called Avalashvili, and started hyphenating his name as a result. he also adopted the title of Prince while he was at it. Needless to say, claims like that were easy to make in 1918 and impossible to check.
The appalling story of the Western Army is easy enough to read about but it's only after its final defeat that Bermondt's story starts getting really unpleasant. He hovered around the fringes of various Russian/German extreme right-wing groups in the early 1920s before he went all the way and became the leader of the Russian National-Socialist Movement (usually abbreviated as RoND). Here's a picture of him at a fun little get-together:

That's Bermondt in the middle. To his right is Anastasii Vonsyatskii (Anastase Vonsiatsky in Americanized spelling) about whom half a wonderful book has been written ("The Russian Fascists - tragedy and farce in exile" by John Stephan, which I recommend to everyone). To Bermondt's left is Alexander Kazembek, another interesting case.

Bermondt eventually ended up in the USA, where he died in New York in 1972.

Bah!

The 1928 Spartakiad

Spartakiads were giant, usually international sporting events, usually organized in the Soviet Union. The first Soviet event was the August 1928 Summer Spartakiad in Moscow (also referred to as the All-Union Spartakiad). Here's a wonderful postcard celebrating the event, designed by Gustav Klutsis, who did a whole series of posters for the event that I urge you to Google. They're beautiful examples of Soviet avant-garde photo montage.

Now here's the funny thing. We all know the very handsome stamps issued for the Spartakiad in 1935. Except there was no Spartakiad in 1935, there was a Winter Spartakiad in 1936 in Oslo, Norway. But the 1928 Spartakiad did leave one philatelic trace:

While most pre-war Special Event postmarks are fairly easy to find, thanks to those pesky philatelists, this postmark seems to be a rarity. This is the only one I've ever seen. 

Uzbek ennui

There’s no accounting for taste. I happen to like definitive stamps that are well-designed and issued in a range of attractive colors. The Dutch definitives of my childhood (the beautifully simple “en profil” Juliana stamps) probably had something to do with that, and I still have a soft spot for the recess printed high values of that set. But some definitive sets are difficult to like.

In 1883-1884 Great Britain issued the dullest definitive set in its history. The designs weren’t that great to begin with but the coup de grace was the decision to use just two colors: dull purple for the lower values and dull green for the higher values. What a boring set! I suspect this idiotic decision involved enormous sideburns, syphilis and laudanum.

Which brings me to Uzbekistan. Obviously. The Central Asian republics have spent the past 25 years developing their national identities. Uzbekistan did so under the harsh reign of Islam Karimov, in office since 1990 and one of two remaining “Soviet survivors” among the post-Soviet heads of state. Initially, Uzbekistan overprinted some old Soviet definitives, while four stamps showing the flag and coat of arms were uninspired but functional. When a small definitive stamp showing the coat of arms was issued in 1994 it was hard to predict that it would be the first value in the dullest set of post-Soviet definitives, with bunches of values issued until 2006.

There are a few things to like about this set. In the first place, the way the country name was spelled changed, with values prior to 1998 inscribed UZBEKISTON (Cyrillic)/UZBEKISTAN (Latin) while starting in 1998 it was a Latin O’ZBEKISTON. The currency unit was given as either SUM (Cyrillic), SO’M (Latin, a single value issued in 1999) or nothing at all. Of course high inflation meant that new, higher values were needed regularly. Five values in the set were in a larger format than the others, just to add further weirdness.

But the colors! Except for the first 1994 stamp in the set, all values are in shades of red, blue or green. And usually they’re the same shade. For example, the last batch of values was issued in 2006: 9 stamps. Two stamps are the same shade of light green, three stamps are in an identical light blue and four stamps are the exact same shade of light red. There must have been a lot of cursing and squinting going on in the Uzbekistan post offices as postal officials tried to distinguish between different stamps. Sometimes all the values in a batch were the same color, like 4 values issued in 2004 being the same shade of light green. 

Really?

In all, 57 values were issued and they make a damn dull page in your album, I can tell you. Kind of fun to collect on cover, though.

Incredibly, the set of definitives that followed this snore-fest was even worse…

Hundred thousand!

In the US there's a candy bar called "100 grand" which was once used during a memorable class on how much lawsuits cost the company, so don't get into any!
Which must be a very odd introduction to what is really a note about Ukraine. Ukraine had a fairly rough start to its independence, with high inflation making the karbovanets a currency that was soon spiraling into 6-figure exchange rates against the $. The stamp with the highest face value issued by Ukraine was a single stamp issued in 1995 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the end of WW2: a stamp of - you guessed it! - 100,000 karbovanets. This made me wonder how much postal use this stamp saw, particularly since the currency was switched to the hriven a little over a year after its issue.
The first, rather obvious conclusion is that the stamp was not often used on inland mail, since the inland letter rate peaked at 20,000 krb in 1996. However, mail abroad was a different story. Mail to the CIS countries, particularly airmail, went into the low six figures during 1995-1996 and this stamp must have seen use for such mail. But it is for mail to non-CIS countries that the postal rates get really impressive. Which brings me to this letter:

This is a registered airmail express letter from Kiev to Arnhem in the Netherlands, part of a whole bundle of mail addressed to the CITO (an institution that conducted tests of English as a foreign language for students worldwide) in October 1995. Eight copies of the 100,000 stamp, a 50,000 stamp and four copies of the "V" letter stamp @ 10,000 krb each makes the total franking 890,000 krb. At the then current exchange rate used in postal calculations, this was equal to about $5.13, which is pretty cheap for such a letter. 

I'm still looking for even higher frankings of the 100,000 stamp but I don't think I'll find many.

A call for help!

Dearly beloved readers (both of you!),
I am in the middle of writing an article about Azerbaijan, 1992-1994 and I would very much like to include information about postal tariffs. However, I have never seen any publication about these tariffs and can only reconstruct incomplete information from the covers in my collection.

So here is my call for help: if you know anyone in Azerbaijan who might have this information, please ask them to contact me! I have long wished for contacts with collectors in Azerbaijan itself since I appear to be the only person outside Azerbaijan who collects modern Azerbaijan! So: all contacts welcome, and contacts who are interested in postal tariffs 1992-1994 even more welcome!

Thank you!

Ivo

An impossible Civil War cover

No cover has ever baffled me as much as this one. I have zero doubt that it is genuine. For one thing, it's part of the Zhdanovich correspondence - a large correspondence addressed to members of the Zhdanovich family, mostly living in the Crimea - but it's also too odd to really be a forgery. And that's not even mentioning the censor marking, etc.
Let's start by taking a look at the front:

It's a registered letter, sent in March 1919 from Vladivostok. It's addressed to Simferopol' on the Crimea.

What?

Obviously, the direct mail route from Vladivostok to the Crimea through Siberia and European Russia was no longer available by then. Mail from Eastern Siberia to Europe generally went via Japan, the USA and Great Britain. But it's very much unclear if there was any way to get mail from Britain to the Crimea, and that's not even mentioning the fact that the Crimea was about to get its (second) period of Soviet Rule in April 1919.

But the puzzle just gets weirder when you look at the reverse:

We see the usual Vladivostok censor marking, and a cachet indicating that postage was paid in cash, as entirely normal for inland registered letters from this period. The rate should be 1.05 ruble. But! There's also a Simferopol' arrival marking! And a manuscript note that the letter was received on 13 September 1919...Somehow, the letter got to its destination, half a year after it was sent. At least 3 months of that delay were probably due to the second Soviet rule over Crimea, which ended in late June/early July.

The great problem the Whites faced in the Civil War was that their zones of influence and staging areas for attack were such disjointed, peripheral areas. No two zones of White influence (West, North, South and Siberia) ever succeeded in making much contact, let alone coordinating their military activities. As a result, the Red Army could (and did) defeat them one by one. Kolchak, Yudenich, Denikin...they all failed, one by one.

Another result of this geographical disjointedness is that I have NEVER seen an item of mail that went from one zone of White influence to another. Except for this letter.

It may not look that exciting but this may be the most unusual letter from the White side in the Civil War.

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Another pleasing Civil War item from the Crimea

I make no excuse for showing yet another Civil War item from the Crimea, as they are so fascinating and so scarce. This is an October 1919 postcard from Dzhankoi to Simferopol':

Slightly overfranked since the correct rate was 35k (and the 5k postcard was still valid for postage, as shown by some 1920 items), but utterly non-philatelic. Addressed to a Irma Ottovna Zeel (clearly a German, as borne out by the text of the reverse), but I'm stumped by one line in the address, just before the name of the addressee: "Neft Poosa" is my best guess...? Anyone? Help?

Edit: Pavel Pavlov points out that what I misread as "Neft Poosa" actually reads "kvart Grossa", short for "Gross' apartment". 

Those damn Town Post offices...

I have already spoken a few times of the unpleasant discoveries that await the unwary postmark collector, and Town Post (sub-)offices are among them. They're not listed in any postal list that I know of, and I suppose it would take painstaking sifting through the Post-Telegraph Journal to find hard information on their opening and closing, let alone existence.
Here are a few Crimean examples, to set the scene:

This is Sevastopol' Town Post sub-office, one of two postmarks I know from that place and definitely the oddest. I found it in Bristol while visiting Ian Baillie.

A nice registered cover from Simferopol' Town Post sub-office, serial letter "a", but the same serial letter was also used for a smaller postmark:

Incidentally, under that British registration label is a Russian label identical to the label on the other cover. 

What brought all this on? Well, eBay spat out this:

A nice old postmark of Odessa's second Town Post sub-office. First time I've seen one, although Odessa specialists may have done better.

But you see the problem here...Town Post postmarks are like landmines for postmark collectors: you don't know where they are and how many there are. But they're very nice to find!

The "Kiev-Odessa railway"? What?!

This post is mostly a call for help as I am truly baffled by a postmark. The conundrum in question is on this cover:

This is an 1872 letter from Kiev to Germany. The 10k stamp is canceled with a postmark reading KIEVSK.P.O./KIEVO-ODESSK.Zh.D. and I'm just not getting that. Let's start with the obvious: the postmark is recorded in a 2002 Kiryushkin & Robinson update, so at least I'm not the only one hallucinating. The part where I get puzzled is the concept of a Kiev-Odessa Railway in the first place. Any look at a railway map (like map S4 in K&R) will tell you such a line would be a bit of a beast. The TPO postmark of line 47-48 tells a bit of the story, being used on the line Zhmerinka-Volochisk and station number 1 being Zhmerinka also makes sense. From Kiev to Zhmerinka, then from Zhmerinka to Volochisk at the border and on to Germany (also note the rectangular German TPO mark on the front). So was the line from Kiev down to Zhmerinka (and on to Odessa in 1872) truly called the Kiev-Odessa Railway?

On one website I found the following schematic detailing the mergers of railways in Ukraine:

Note: no mention of a Kiev-Odessa railway... Help?