Telegraph postmarks from Vladivostok are not that scarce, since the telegraph office apparently processed quite a bit of registered mail, even during the Civil War. But complete telegrams are a different matter. This is an example from October 1920, showing the very scarce postmark with serial letter "a". Nice enough already.
The telegram was sent from Kharbin to Vladivostok, by a Mr. Pogrebetskii. And if you're a banknote collector, you know that name.
A.I. Pogrebetskii was the author of a very fine book on the monetary history of the Civil War in Siberia and the Far East. The book, published in Kharbin in 1924, gives a very detailed review of prices, banknote issues and redemptions during 1917-1923 and let me tell you, it's a complicated subject! Pogrebetskii was a dealer in banknotes in Kharbin, and it's possible he dealt in stamps as well. His book actually mentions the Civil War stamp issues of Siberia too, but it's not very detailed on that subject.
Before he became an emigre banknote dealer in Kharbin, Pogrebetskii was a politician, a member of the SR party. In fact, he was an SR member of the Far Eastern Republic parliament. The FER allowed multi-party politics and the bolsheviks, mensheviks and SR were all represented in the FER parliament. How much of a sham this was is demonstrated by the events of November 1922. With the defeat of the final White enclave in October 1922 and the withdrawal of Japanese intervention forces (except from Sakhalin), there was no longer any need for a "buffer" state in Eastern Siberia, and the FER government asked the RSFSR for permission to be absorbed. The vote in the FER parliament was unanimously in favor of this proposal....mostly because the menshevik and SR members of parliament had been arrested a few days earlier. Except Pogrebetskii, who was away in Kharbin on business at the time...
Pogrebetskii also wrote a book on Chinese banknotes and was still active as late as 1930. I can't trace what happened to him after that, but if he was still around in Kharbin in 1945 he probably met a messy end.
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