Russia: The Office for Government and Diplomatic Correpondence

Howard Weinert in the USA sent me a query about the cancellation used by the Office for Government and Diplomatic Correspondence, in St Petersburg and then in Petrograd. When did the cancel go out of use? Iain Baillie and Eric Peel in their work on St Petersburg postmarks record no Petrograd-version examples after 1916. However, it can be found used in 1917 even after the Bolshevik Revolution - I have two examples as shown - and Howard Weinert has an example from 1918, also shown below. So the question is, When did it go out of use?

The Soviets moved the capital from Petrograd to Moscow in March 1918, largely because of the vulnerability of Petrograd to German attack. Even before, some embassies had moved out to Vologda with Soviet assistance. Despite this, the cancel is still in use in April 1918 on the Weinert cover.

How long did it continue in use? Was a new office created in Moscow and did it have its own cancellation?

My November card is addressed from Station Vyiya on the Bogoslov railway to the Italian Embassy in Petrograd, where the Government and Diplomatic office handled it on 6 November 1917. My December card is addressed to the Swedish Mission (or Legation) from Sukhrinskoe in Perm guberniya and was handled by the Government and Diplomatic office on 10 December 1917. Howard Weinert's 1918  item is fully written up below:

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Added 9 November 2016: Here are two more I found, one from September which is addressed personally to Alexander Kerensky - it's from a provincial lawyer who fancies a job in Petrograd. The other December card is another Swedish Legation item:

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St Petersburg Numeral Cancellations - Relative Scarcity

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One of my oldest and most loyal clients, M Jacques Vigneron, collects the Numeral Cancellations of St Petersburg. As a researcher, interested in all aspects of the use of the Numeral Cancellations, he buys nearly everything that he finds so that his collection probably gives a very good idea of relative scarcity. At the last count, he had 1556 items in his collection, and with his kind permission I reproduce below the breakdown by Numeral, but ordered from most common to least common:

# 1     536 items    = 34.4%

# 4     148    = 9.5%
# 9     148    = 9.5%
# 6     136    = 8.7%

# 7     109    = 7.0%
# XI   109    = 7.0%

# 5        87    = 5.6%
# 8        84    = 5.4%
# 3        83    = 5.3%

# 14      54    = 3.5%

# 2         31    = 2.0%
# 13       22    = 1.4%

# 15         7    = 0.4%

# 31         2    = 0.1%

# 16         0    = 0%
# 17         0    = 0%

A notable feature of the Numeral Cancellations is that though they are found on letters, cards and banderoles, their use is confined almost entirely to cancelling low value stamps so that a numeral cancel on a stamp above 20 kopecks in face value is really very uncommon.

Added 31 January 2015: Kaj Hellman kindly contributes the following Comments from Helsinki:

It is  very interesting to see these statistics about SPB numeral postmarks !  Most probably nobody has ever done it before.

I had a collection of these already when in secondary school  (that is a long time ago !) .  Then I even exhibited them in the AMPHILEX 1967 youth class.  I had never found the highest numbers , but my dad found the number 16 on a fragment in an antiquarian shop -  that was a lucky day !  This number 16 is perhaps the rarest.  I believe that Oleg Fabergé did not have it. To see in these statistics  that #14 is in scarcity so close to #3 ,  #5  and  #8  is a bit astonishing.  I was always thinking that I can always find the numbers between 1 - XI ,  even in quantities, but that  2, 13, 14 and 15  are the difficult ones .   And the highest numbers  16,  17 and 31 are rarities .  

There was plenty of mail between  St.Petersburg and Finland .  Therefore these numbers can still easily be found here on cards and covers.  Also they have been a very popular field of collecting among Finnish collectors -  especially because there are so many different types.

By the way,  Numbers 16 and 31 I will have in my big March Auction in Helsinki!

Kaj Hellman

 
               

Early St Petersburg Postmarks

It is not unusual in Western Europe to see pre-adhesive international mail from St Petersburg before 1830 and with cancellations in Roman letters: SANCT PETERSBOURG or ST PETERSBOURG. But Cyrillic cancellations, used on internal mail, are rarely seen outside Russia.

The cancellation shown above only rates a "4" on Manfred Dobin's 1993 rarity scale (it runs from 1 to 10, with 10 the rarest). But this is only the second example I have seen in 20 years.

Maybe ten years ago, I bought the collection of the late George Henderson and with it the example of this cancellation of which Baillie and Peel say, "We know of only one example, on an entire ... with a message dated 16 11 1820, addressed to Narva." I sold this entire to a collector in England.

The example above is an outer letter sheet with nothing to indicate the date. The paper is unwatermarked. Someone has pencilled "1818" bottom left and it may be that the person who made the pencil note had access to the letter enclosed in this outer sheet, otherwise the date is a guess. Dobin gives 1815 - 1830 as the period of use for this cancellation and always in red.

St Petersburg Numeral Cancellations: Number XV

There are lots of collectors of St Petersburg Numeral cancellations, but not everything about these cancellations is known. For example, Baillie and Peel in their book St Petersburg: the Imperial Post (2001)list the dates of introduction of the different Otdyel numerals according to different authors. For number XV Wortman and Prilutzki give the date 1894, Imhof 1899, Ratner 1899, Kiryushkin and Robinson 1894.

I illustrate above strikes of Number 15 on three postcards, the first postmarked 19 May 1898, the second with Finnish receiver cancel for 9 XI [19]01, and the third with St Petersburg postmark 30 X 1902.

The 1898 strike looks like a strike from a brand new canceller, with sharp lines and no build up of old ink. So I make the following hypothesis: this numeral 15 canceller was introduced probably in 1898 but maybe a little earlier.