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.

Soviet Georgia 1923: new handstamps

(Introduction: my old friend Peter Ashford passed away a number of years ago. We had corresponded about the Soviet Georgian handstamped definitives of early 1923, but it wasn’t until I acquired his collection of these stamps that I realized Peter had identified a new handstamp type that was unrecorded in the literature. This note is me acting as ghostwriter for Peter)

When the Georgian Socialist Soviet Republic switched to the Transcaucasian ruble in early 1923, the available definitive stamps – issued in 1922 – became almost completely useless. With postal rates in the hundreds of thousands of ZSFSR rubles, the five stamps with face values from 500 to 5000 rubles were clearly inadequate, and handstamped surcharges brought the stamps into closer – though far from perfect – alignment with postal rates.

Philatelists were quick to realize that multiple handstamps for each value had been used during this operation. How many handstamp types you recognize depends on your desired level of obsessiveness. The simplest subdivision is simply to talk of “large” and “small” types for each value, with “medium” thrown in if you want to get pedantic, but the truth appears to be more complicated than that. Various authors through the years identified different numbers of handstamp types:

Reference	10.000 on 1.000	15.000 on 2.000	20.000 on 500	40.000 on 5.000	80.000 on 3.000
Golovkin (1927)	3	5	5	3	4
Filatelia (19XX)	5	5	5	5	6
Ceresa (1993)	6	6	6	6	6

Peter Ashford had organized his very fine collection of these handstamped definitives by the Kohl handbook (which copied the information in Golovkin(1927)), but Peter had already spotted that there were more types than Kohl had published, as we would expect. Even so, it was quite a surprise to see a page in his album devoted to a subtype that appears to have escaped identification or recording by all other authors.

The handstamp type in question – an 80.000 handstamp -  is different from the 6 types identified by Ceresa and the Filatelia Handbook and is therefore a new seventh type. It is easily identified by the large gap between the last zero and the word “man”.  Ashford’s collection contained 12 examples: 8 loose stamps and a strip of 4. All are postmarked Tiflis Vokzal. It is hard to escape concluding this is a handstamp type that was only used at Tiflis Vokzal. Once I knew what to look for, I found a 13^th example in my collection, also postmarked Tiflis Vokzal.

The new "Type 7" for the 80.000 handstamp

All this is reminiscent of a rare 10.000 handstamp identified by Ceresa (his Type 4): only known from two loose stamps, both postmarked Tiflis Vokzal. That type is also distinguished by the large distance between the last zero and the “man”, so perhaps we are dealing with a Tiflis Vokzal “house style” here.

The next step was to look for examples on cover, and Robert Taylor came through with two items: a registered letter from May 1923 and a postcard from June 1923. The postcard also bore an 80.000 stamp with one of the previously identified handstamp types, so clearly this new seventh type was not the only type for this particular value to be used at Tiflis Vokzal.

Registered letter from Tiflis Vokzal to Germany, May 1923. 4 copies of the Type 7 handstamp

The registered letter has four 80.000 stamps as part of a 350.000R franking, and the examples of this new type 7 handstamp are the crispest of all known examples – early usage date? Of the two 15.000 stamps that complete the franking, one is one of the known types but the other is another unrecorded type, also identifiable by the large distance between the last zero and “man”.

The new "Type 7" of the 15.000 handstamp

So for 3 out of 5 values in this set of stamps, we have a rare handstamp type, which is only known used at Tiflis Vokzal, and only known so far in violet. Remaining questions are:

•  Were there also Tiflis Vokzal types for the other two values in the set, the 20.000 and 40.000 stamps?
• Does anyone have a mint copy of any of these stamps?
•  Does anyone have an example handstamped in black or any color other than violet?
•  Does anyone have examples of these types used in places other than Tiflis Vokzal?

"The early days of a better nation..."

23 years ago, philatelists were given a wonderful gift: the birth of 15 (or 16 or 17, depending on how you count) new nations when the USSR fell apart.
Yes, I know that's a grotesquely shallow way to look at an event that brought a lot of misery to a lot of people, but this is a philatelic blog, what do you expect me to write about, Sumerian grammar?
The new nations were faced with the giant task of constructing a functioning state out of the wreckage of the USSR. Some inherited structures were more hindrance than help - how many former Soviet republics found themselves saddled with a Soviet-oriented parliament?
Postally, the main ingredients were:

1. Outdated postal rates (7k letter rate of April 1991) which rose quickly after independence;
2. A large supply of USSR postal stationery, which was uprated - usually with overprints - on a massive scale;
3. A large supply of USSR stamps - mostly definitives - which were used without overprint, used with overprints and even used with manuscript revaluations;
4. Not much of a local logistical structure - new post-independence stamps had to be printed abroad quite often, and supplying stamps to the post offices was a continual headache, with stamp shortages the frequent result;
5. Sharply reduced control over postal operations, with speculators taking advantages of the chaos in many places.

This transitional period lasted anywhere from a few months (Russia) to several years (some Central Asian republics), and it gave us an almost infinite field of interesting things to collect. Whether the post-Soviet republics are indeed "better nations" is not for me to say, but speaking as a philatelist, YIPPEE!