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.

More new handstamp types from Tiflis Vokzal

Well, sometimes eBay just exceeds all expectations. You will recall that I wrote about new, unrecorded types of Georgia's handstamp surcharges of 1923 that seemed to be used only from Tiflis Vokzal. Ceresa had already identified a 10.000 handstamp, and the late Peter Ashford had found an 80.000 handstamp, with a 15.000 handstamp added by me. All are characterized by a wide space between the last zero and the word "man" so this seemed to be a Tiflis Vokzal "house style". The question was if there were also Tiflis Vokzal types of the other two values, 20.000 and 40.000.
Cue eBay!

This is a loose stamp that turned up on eBay. Note the postmark! Here's a close-up of the handstamp:

Sure enough, an unrecorded type with wide space between the last zero and the word "man". To add further glee to what was actually a really good eBay week, the same seller also sold me this stamp:

NOT Tiflis Vokzal but the Tiflis-Dzhulfa TPO serial "zh" The handstamp?

Wide space between last zero and "man"... So I'm going to assume this is the fifth value of this group of handstamp types, since the link with Tiflis railway station is reasonably clear.

Who knew? Frankly, it makes me wonder what else is lurking in the (by now ridiculously large) number of Georgian handstamp issues I haven't looked at yet...

LATE UPDATE. As an illustration that I really should take a better look at the stamps I already have, it turned out that my hoard of used 20.000 stamps also contained a example of the Tiflis Vokzal type:

In praise of vanished countries

23 years after the fall of the USSR it's becoming hard to remember that the Baltic States were once considered to be "dead countries" by stamp collectors: countries whose stamp-issuing days were deemed to be over. Oops!
The atlas is just littered with vanished stamp-issuing entities. Not just independent/renamed/reshuffled colonies but entire constellations of countries which no longer issue stamps. Kenya-Uganda-Tanganyika anyone? (yes, this used to be one stamp-issuing entity...)
There is a parallel to this concept in postal history, even in the pre-stamp area. The map of Europe was just as unstable before stamps were introduced as afterwards, especially during the Napoleonic era.
Prussia initially did quite nicely out of Napoleon, thank you very much. Prussia gained enormous slabs of territory along the Rhine and became the largest of the reorganized "German States". But it all went terribly wrong in 1806, when Prussia decided enough wasn't enough and Napoleon opined that on the contrary, perhaps enough was too much! Prussia lost all territory West of Magdeburg and two new states were created out of the wreckage: the Grand Duchy of Berg and the Kingdom of Westphalia (not to be confused with the Duchy of the same name).
For Russian mail to the West, this was a disaster! Before 1806, Prussia could be relied on to transport Russian mail all the way to the borders of France, the Netherlands and (what was to become) Belgium. Now these two new enormous lumps on the map were in the way. The new states (which lasted all of 7 years) introduced new currencies, postal rates, town postmarks and transit markings, all of which have been admirably documented by obsessive German postal historians.
The first sign that Russian mail had run into a new border came at Magdeburg, where Prussia ended and Westphalia began. The Westphalians applied a new transit marking "PRUSSE P.M." which stands for "(from)Prussia via Magdeburg". This example is particularly crisp:

March 1809, St.Petersburg via Memel and Magdeburg to Frankfurt

The reverse reveals that the sender prepaid 13 gute Groschen foreign postage. Prussia kept 7 1/4 g.G for the Memel-Magdeburg trip and passed the remaining  5 3/4 g.G on to Westphalia (magenta notation at lower left). After that, things get fuzzy but Westphalia felt it got enough money to stamp the letter FRANCO and sent it on to Frankfurt.

This is a simple one: only one of the new states to deal with. mail to France and Holland had to pass through both Westphalia AND Berg and the resulting puzzles are maddening, particularly as borders shifted a few times...

But still! Westphalia may be a "dead country" but it offers a lot of postal history fun, even without stamps.

There were these two Norwegians....(not really)

If there's one thing I regret it's that my command of Russian is so wobbly. Simply not enough hours in the day to do much about that now, I'm afraid, and at least Google Translate makes life a lot easier. But it does make me prone to embarrassing linguistic blunders when it comes to Russian.
Having grown up in Northwestern Europe, I know the country of Norway as Norge (or Noreg, confusingly), and instead of Norwegian I'm inclined to think of Norsk as the adjective. So when I spotted the word Norskaya in Russian I fell victim to a classic faux ami: a word that looks familiar but means something completely different. In Russian, of course, the word for Norwegian is Норвежский...
And so to my two (non-)Norwegians. The first to come my way was Norskii Sklad in Eastern Siberia:

How odd: a Norwegian Warehouse in the Amur province! Must be one of those odd "colonies" you find dotted all over the Russian Empire. Well, no.... The PTO there was opened in 1916. Norskii Sklad is now simply known as Norsk and it's not exactly a Metropolis.

Then came Norskaya Manufaktura:

Of course, Norskaya Manufaktura (PTO opened in 1891) has nothing to do with Norwegians. It was founded in 1859 by the Khludov brothers as a factory of linen products in Norsk settlement, which later became part of the city of Yaroslavl'. The factory was renamed Krasnyi Pereval (Red Pass) in 1922 and survived all the way to 2011 when it finally went bankrupt. The building still exists and is now leased to smaller establishments, one of which has adopted the Norskaya Manufaktura name, I'm pleased to say.

Incidentally, the reverse of that cover is pretty too:

So no Norwegians. How embarrassing!

A matched pair

This pair of cards is probably unique in the postal history of the Civil War. On September 7, 1919, a mother in Simferopol' wrote to her daughter in Evpatoriiskia Dachi, the card arriving the next day. The daughter wrote back to her mother on the day it arrived, and her reply got back to mom in Simferopol' on September 9. Both cards are franked at 35k: the postcard rate for the Denikin regime during this period.

I defy anyone to find a similar matched pair of postal items from the Civil War period.