Armenia Fiscal Stamps: A Variety Not Listed in Zakiyan

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The fiscal stamps on this little document have been Armenianised three times over.

First, the Imperial Russian 75 kopeck General Fiscal stamps were perforated in Cyrillic with the initials " E.K.P" standing for the Yerevan Chancellery (or Exchequer) Court. Zakiyan in his 2003 book dates these Perfins to September 1919, so quite early in the Dashnak Armenian period. On the 75 kopeck, the Perfin is listed as #8.

Then the Dashnak fiscals were Sovietised with a lithographic overprint comprising a Coat of Arms (over the Imperial Arms) and a new "1 rf" value in Armenian script. This would be Zakiyan's # 16 but for the fact that the stamp has the E.K.P perfin - Zakiyan does not list the overprint on this stamp, though it makes sense as a way of using up old Dashnak stamps. Zakiyan dates the lithographic overprints to September 1922.

Finally, the stamps have been revalued in Manuscript violet ink to "75 000", written in the bottom tab. Zakiyan dates these manuscript revaluations to May 1923 and this stamp would be his # 23 but for the Perfin variety, The revaluation handwriting on my document matches that on a fine document illustrated by Zakiyan at page 68 of his Fiscal section and since I have seen the same handwriting on other documents I conclude that only a few clerks were involved in the laborious work of writing these revaluations onto sheets of stamps prior to use. In general, the stamps were uprated in sheets before being broken up for use on documents, 

My document appears to date from July 1923 with date endorsements at top centre and in the very bottom line.

Armenianization of Imperial General Fiscals

The last General Revenue stamps of Imperial Russia, issued from 1907 onwards on unwatermarked paper, were printed in sheets of 80, with two panes of 8 x 5 side by side separated by a central vertical gutter. Within each pane the top four rows are organised tete-beche with (as it were) half a tete-beche in the bottom row. Quite why such a complicated sheet make-up was selected, I don't know.

In independent Armenia, these Fiscals were first Armenianized in the Dashnak period with perforated initials - a subject too complicated for a poor old Blogger - and later in the Soviet period overprinted from lithographic plates. I do not know if the plates were "double size" to print a sheet of 80 at one go, or arranged as 8 x 5 plates to print half the sheet - the latter seems much more likely.[ See Footnote] What is clear is that there was one plate to overprint the Fiscals with the Soviet Arms of Armenia and another to print the new value. This is clear from the examples below:

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The first image shows a strip of eight with selvedge at the right showing that it is from the left of the sheet. The Arms are printed low down in the upper half of the stamp but the value is in the middle of the bottom tablet (along with later Mss revaluations which turned Zakiyan # 16 into Zakiyan # 23). In the second image, what is probably a divided strip of eight shows the Arms a few millimeters higher than on the first strip but the value overprints still centrally placed. In other words, the two overprints are independent of each other from two plates.

Closer inspection shows that the form of the value "1 rf" varies from stamp to stamp. In principle, it is plateable and if a plate of 5 x 8 was used, then it should be relatively easy - a plate of 10 x 8 is going to be at least twice as hard!

The Arms must in theory be plateable but the density of the overprint makes it very difficult to attempt in practice. We don't know what the size of the transfer block might be (though Zakiyan suggests a single cliche). If I was going to attempt to plate the Arms (I'm not),then I would start with something relatively clear like the hammer and sickle and look for variation there. But it's possible that if a single cliche was used for the Arms, then all we will find is idiosyncratic variation from the way in which an individual sheet happened to be printed (from a re-inked plate or a dry plate and so on)

Meanwhile, the examples above show how Armenian documents of this period (1923) are often attractively franked with multiples of the same revenue stamp.

Footnote 28 April 2014: I have been looking at a large collection of documents with these Fiscals. Horizontal strips of 8 or broken strips of 8 are quite common. Frankings of more than 8 stamps also exist (the highest I have seen is 20), but in no cases are there any examples of cross - gutter [inter-panneau] pairs. This suggests that at point of use, the sheets of 80 were received in half sheets of 40. That is also a reason for thinking that the cutting in half was normally or always done as part of the printing operation using an 8 x 5 not 16 x 5 plate. A convincing [ genuine] example of a used cross-gutter pair would necessarily modify these claims

A Good Example of Genuine Use of Chassepot Revenue Stamps

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When I looked at this 1923 document, written in Armenian, I immediately concluded it was genuine in all respects on the basis of an entirely incidental feature.

The 1 rouble Chassepot stamp was overprinted with Soviet Armenia's Arms and simultaneously revalued to "3 rf" (Zakiyan # 17) and then revalued again in ink "300 000" (Zakiyan # 25). It was applied to the document probably on 13 August 1923 - the date in blue - green ink inside the boxed violet cachet at the top left of the document. The same blue-green ink pen cancels the stamp.

The incidental feature is this: the stamp is from the bottom row of the sheet with selvedge:

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Now in my experience, Chassepot stamps from the Original printing (like this stamp) are very rarely found with selvedge. For some reason / s it is almost always removed. It would be most unlikely that a forger looking for a genuine (Original printing) 1 rouble Chassepot stamp to overprint would happen upon a stamp with selvedge, even though 26 stamps in a 10 x 5 sheet begin life with selvedge,

That's the incidental reason which convinced me. On examination, one can also note that the overprint on the stamp has the generally strong and clear features found in genuine overprints and missing on the digital forgeries which I have seen. Compare the 1990s digital forgery which I have now placed beside the genuine stamp (the forgery omits the "3 rf" which is always present on the 1 rouble, but that's another fault with the forgery):

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It's also the case that the 1 rouble Chassepot is the most common of the fiscally used Chassepots and often occurs as a single franking. Multiples are not very common. For this reason, it would be very difficult to plate this issue and I do not think any collector or Expertiser has attempted it. But in an ideal world, an Expert would be able to Plate the stamp on this document as part of a demonstration that it is genuine and genuinely used. Most or all of the ink revaluations appear to have been carried out in batches rather than at the point of the stamp's use, and so only a limited number of inks are found - the violet ink of this revaluation being one of them. 

Assessing and Expertising Revenue Documents - Some Examples from Armenia 3

This is the last of three Blogs about forged and faked Armenian Revenue Documents. In the next couple of Blogs I will balance the story with some genuine material.

In 1920, the Paris Chassepot printing works produced for Armenia's new Dashnak government an attractive and well-printed set of ten pictorial stamps. According to all the authorities, only the low values - in principle 1 to 15 rouble - were sent to Yerevan. The high values never got sent because the Dashnak regime collapsed. The high values were sold off in Paris, along with the balance of the printing of the low values. It is also the case that, for unknown reasons,  the low value 3 rouble green was either not sent or never arrived: see Zakiyan page 59 and Artar page 126. Only the 1, 5, 10 and 15 rouble actually made it to Yerevan.

The best proof that the 3 rouble was not available in Armenia is the fact that when in 1922 the low values were pressed into fiscal use, the 5, 10 and 15 unit-of-currency stamps were not re-valued when overprinted whereas the "1" stamp was revalued to "3" in a separate printing operation. The need for a "1" stamp was met by overprinting an old 75 kopeck Imperial fiscal. Had the 3 rouble green been available then both it and the 1 rouble could have been pressed into service without the trouble of revaluation.

ARTAR's page 126 understanding of the position - that the 3 rouble was just not available - does not stop him from later  illustrating a  fiscal overprint on the 3 rouble green, giving it a $450 and $500 valuation (page 131). In contrast, Zakiyan remains consistent in his fiscal listing (page 66) making no further mention of the 3 rouble green.

Where is all this leading us? Look at this document:

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Here are two copies of the 3 rouble green, apparently overprinted for fiscal use, and apparently used on an Armenian document. Either the authorities have got it wrong or we have here a Discovery.

I won't prolong the story. The forger has taken a genuine document but made three striking mistakes, the last one of them Terminal for the credibility of this item:

1. The document is dated June 1924, by which date fiscal stamps of the Soviet Union were in general use in Armenia. The document appears to be cut down in size and may have originally carried a Soviet fiscal. Late use of Chassepot stamps - used in 1922 - 23 - is very improbable.

2. The forger has copied the overprint used on the 1 rouble, which underneath the Arms revalues it to "3 rf" in Armenian script. The revaluation is redundant on this stamp. The forged overprint is probably a digital one.

3. The basic stamps used on this document are not Originals but unauthorised Reprints, made later in Paris, and which would only have found their way to Armenia occasionally in later years in Philatelic Exchanges. They did not get sent to the Ministry of Finance! The Reprints are very easy to distinguish from the Originals - the plate has been re-set with wider spaces between stamps; the printing method is different and leaves white areas in things like the numeral "3"; the shades are different. I try to illustrate this below, using a mint block 4 of the Originals and setting it against the stamps on the document:

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Not even a Nice Try by the Forger. End of story, except for the fact of those $450 - $500 valuations sitting in Artar waiting to tempt another forger to create non-existent stamps.

Assessing and Expertising Revenue Documents - Some Examples from Armenia 2

This Blog is really about The Decay of Forging.

The great forgers of the past - Fournier, Sperati and many more whose names are less familiar - took their work seriously. They were very knowledgeable, they had remarkable craft skills, and they invested heavily in the reference material and equipment necessary for their work. They approached their business as a life-time commitment. They could claim a place on the Roll of Distinguished Philatelists.

Nowadays, forgers are looking for a fast buck (preferably a hundred bucks) on ebay.

First of all, look at this 1920 document from Erivan:

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For this Blog, I am not interested in the question, Do the stamps belong? I haven't even studied them. I am interested in the cachet at the top:

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This is a cachet of the Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Armenia, in this case dated 2 February 1920. I have seen this cachet before and I believe it genuine. It's very well made and here it is clearly struck (the strike repeated presumably to get it the right way up, on the left). The violet ink is in the range of shades and intensities you would expect in an office still probably using (up) Imperial supplies or still using old Imperial period suppliers. The only puzzling thing is that the cachet is in Russian rather than Armenian - maybe the workshop able to make such devices was not able to make them using Armenian script.

If a forger had made this cachet, they would have made more use of it than to decorate this document - they would, for example, have used it to tie stamps to the document since that is always more convincing than manuscript ties.

Now jump forward and look at this June 1923 document:

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This is a rather ordinary looking document, with a relatively common Transcaucasian fiscal on the left [Zakiyan # 8] but a rather exotic stamp on the right: a Soviet War Charity stamp denominated in US dollars (5 cents) and inscribed in English. The stamp has been overprinted to indicate a conversion to Gold [Zoloton] kopeck currency. Interesting.

Now have a look at the cancellation which ties this stamp to the document:

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Could this be the same cachet as I described above, but now struck in black and without a working date line ( just "192 _") even though we know that the Soviets generally hurried to replace old (in this case, Dashnak) official cachets with their own versions

Answer, NO! This cachet is a crude forgery of the Dashnak cachet. You would need specialist equipment to determine how the forgery was made and used, but my guess is that this strike could be computer-generated. You would start with a scan of the original cachet, eliminate the background, eliminate the unhelpful date details and finally print off in black. Along the way, detail has been lost.

So I conclude that the War Charity stamp does not belong to this document. It has been added and rather than tie it with a pen cross, the forger has made a little more effort with this cachet. After all, think of the appeal to the American market of this 5 cents label! 

But in the old days, a forger would have gone to his workshop and made a carefully-crafted replica of the original handstamp and would have tried to get right every detail.

Assessing and Expertising Revenue Documents - Some Examples from Armenia 1

Fiscal documents with revenue stamps attached are not easy to expertise. In many cases, we don't know much about the period of use of particular stamps, or about the tariffs applied and to what kinds of documents - and, in particular, about the cancellations used. We do know that cancellations were often manuscript and we know that manuscript cancellations are easily faked but difficult to detect as such unless you have high-powered equipment to analyse ink. Sometimes a forger will make it easy by using Biro on a 19th century document but quite often they do go to the expense of acquiring a bottle of ink.

Right now, there is a lively Alternative Investment market in Armenia with lots of people looking for old scraps of paper, preferably with old writing on them and even more preferably with dates between 1917 and 1923. To such scraps of paper, postage stamps or fiscal stamps can be added and cancelled. The result is to turn a worthless scrap of paper into something saleable on ebay for twenty bucks (or more).

Have a look at the item below. If you read Cyrillic easily, it is going to be easier for you than it is for me ...

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OK then. It's a receipt, written in Russian and accounting for items priced in roubles and kopecks.There is no date. There is a 1923 Transcaucasian Federation revenue stamp at the left [ # 6 in Zakiyan's listing], tied with violet ink. The question is this: Does the stamp belong?

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My first question is this: How come the stamp is dirty in comparison with the surrounding piece of paper? Was a dirty stamp used? But fiscal stamps don't usually get this dirty before they are used.

My second question is this: Look at the manuscript "2" at the bottom of the stamp. If you get something like this at the bottom of a fiscal stamp it's normally a date. So where's the rest of the date? Answer: on some other document to which this stamp originally belonged.

If you enlarge the image above you can see that the "2" does not spread onto the document but stops at the perforation. If you wanted to pursue the question of whether the ink lines cancelling the stamp are recent or original you would probably need some equipment - enlarge the image now and it is not 100% clear what the answer to that question is. You have to ask the question: Has someone inked in lines on the paper to match original lines on the stamp or are all the lines added?

Is there any other support for my conclusion that this stamp has been added (recently) to the document? Look at the bottom line of the receipt. Correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to add the cost of a fiscal stamp to the other receipted items ("Za gerb. marki" - for the fiscal stamp). But then the cost of the stamp is missing. So too is the entire bottom right of the document. Doh! On that bottom right corner, I think there was once a fiscal stamp and a date (probably not 1923) and that some collector tore off the stamp for his collection - leaving a scrap of paper.

Do you agree?

ARTAR or Zakiyan? Armenian revenue overprints

I have always believed that when the Paris printers Chassepot prepared the first pictorial stamps of Armenia in 1920, they despatched only the low values in the Eagle design to Yerevan. By the time they got to print the high values in two colours, the Dashnak regime had collapsed. The high value stamps were remaindered from Paris, which is why they are more common in Europe than the low values, many of which had been despatched to Yerevan. (For the later crude Reprints, all values are equally common).

This story would explain why Christopher Zakiyan, in his book Armenia: Postage Stamps, Fiscal Stamps, Postage Cancels (Yerevan 2003, pages 63ff)lists Soviet fiscal overprints on only the 1,5,10 and 15 rouble Chassepot stamps, which are also the only values which appear on the documents he illustrates (There is an unexplained mystery about what happened to the 3 rouble Chassepot stamp).

In the ARTAR catalog, it seems that the same account is going to be accepted from the text on page 126, but then on page 132, we are shown fiscal overprints on all the high value stamps with accompanying high valuations (minimum $450). But if the conventional wisdom is correct, these high value stamps were not available for overprinting because they had not been sent to Yerevan. So any fiscal overprint on these stamps, whether Originals or Reprints, must be a fake. (On page 131, ARTAR also lists the 3 rouble with fiscal overprint and also gives it a $450 valuation).

These overprints on high values were first announced to the philatelic world in an article by Joseph Ross ("Armenian Revenue Stamps and their Uses", The Post-Rider, No 41, 1997, pages 40 - 48). I replied in issue 49 of the same journal (November 2001, page 111). By this time I had seen actual examples of the overprints on the high values, all of which were identical in terms of frame line breaks and so on. From this I concluded that they had been digitally produced on the basis of a scan from just one stamp. Examples I saw included ones on reprints, so necessarily fakes. These stamps had all come from one source in the USA. All were mint, as are all those illustrated by both Joseph Ross and ARTAR.

The conservative and, I believe correct, position is this: there is no good evidence for the existence of fiscal overprints on the Chassepot high values. The best information we have is against the possibility. The stamps listed at page 132 of ARTAR must be fakes. The listing given by Zakiyan in his 2003 book should be retained.

As a general point: Armenian revenue stamps of this 1918 - 23 period are actually more common on documents than as loose stamps. Mint stamps are rare. This is because most examples remained locked in Armenian archives until around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. At that time, quite large quantities of documents became available in Europe and America.

Some of those documents were subsequently "enhanced" by the addition of fiscal stamps, sometimes genuine stamps, sometimes fakes. For example, I have seen a fake fiscal overprint on a 10 rouble Chassepot REPRINT attached to an authentic document. Such a pity: a nice document and a crude fake!