Earliest Known Use of Ukraine Tridents ... Can You Improve on This One?

Click on Image to Magnify

Roman Procyk in the USA has kindly allowed me to publish here the Telegraphic Money Transfer Form above. It shows the earliest known use of  Ukraine trident overprinted stamps at MOGILEV-POD 27 8 18 arriving in KIEV 30 8 18. The stamps are  overprinted with Podillia Type VIIIa 

This genuine use is two days earlier than on the form I illustrated here back on 3 March 2012

Can anyone come up with an earlier date?  It does seem likely that the Podillia Tridents were the first to be introduced anywhere in Ukraine - and with little or no philatelic manipulation in the early phase of their production, distribution and use. 

Claims to beat the 27 August date can be posted here if you send me a good quality scan (email me at trevor@trevorpateman.co.uk). I have to reserve the right to decline (with an explanation) obvious fakes or dubious philatelic items. I am hoping for something as good as this Telegraphic Money Transfer Form! ( I will not be able to respond until 20 September - I will be away from my computer for a week).

Added 20 September: Roman Procyk has now added from his own collection this loose stamp used at NEMIROV on 24 8 18. I would prefer to see a cover or MTF with receiver cancels to help rule out slipped dates, but the example is plausible: it is a perforated high value and these are normally seen with early dates. The stamp is signed Bulat and the Trident type is VIIIb:

Click on Image to Magnify

Added 22 September 2015: Oleg Matveev in Ukraine sends me scans of two parcel cards with Trident stamps cancelled 13 August 1918. Both look to me completely genuine. One has Poltava Tridents and is sent  from POLTAVA 13 8 18 with receiver cancellation of ROSTOV DON 2 9 18. The other is from DZHURIN POD 13 8 18 [the blue ink typical for this post office] with receiver cancellation of TAGANROG 1 (?) 9 18  

I think it will be difficult to improve on these items. Even if there is a date slip from 23 8 18 to 13 8 18 that would still be a day earlier than the previous example posted here ... 

It is now important to find some items sent between the 13 August (the Oleg Mateev items) and the 24 and 27 August of the Roman Procyk items. This will add to the plausibility of the items we already have and may also show more Trident types used at an early date. So far we have Podillia VIIIa, VIIIb, XIIb, and Poltava I (and on the 3r50 it could be Poltava II but I cannot see enough detail). 

Click on Images to Magnify

Added 23 September 2015: Roman Procyk provides confirmation of August use of Poltava Tridents with these examples of 3r 50 perforated stamps with Poltava type I cancelled at NOVYI ORLYK POLT.  22 8 18 (ignore the 20 kopeck stamp for now):

Click on Image to Magnify

Added February 2020: Most of my Ukraine-related Blog posts are now available in full colour book form. To find out more follow the link:

http://www.armeniazemstvo.com/2020/02/just-published-trevor-pateman.html

Ukraine 1917 - 1922: Post Offices in Podilia

Here is a list of post offices in the Podolia guberniya for which I have cancellations from the 1917 - early 1920s period. I have transliterated from the Russian postmarks rather than giving the Ukrainian names of the places where these former Imperial Russian post offices were located. In the past I had a bigger collection of these cancels, with more offices represented, and this list is certainly incomplete. This List was last updated on 13 September 2015.

BAILIN
BALTA

BAR

BERSHAD

BOLSHOI  OSTROZHEK

BOGOPOL

BONKOVTSI

BOROVKA

BRAILOV

BRATSLAV

VAPNIARKA
VENDIN
VENDICHANI

VERKHOVKA

VINNITSA

VINNITSA – ZABUZHE

VISSHII OLCHENAEV

VOROSHILOVKA

ZHVANCHIK

ZHENISHKOVITS

ZHMERINKA

ZAGNTIKOV

ZINKOV

GAISIN

GNIVAN

GOLOVANETS
GORODOK

GRUSHKA

GUSIATIN

DERAZHNIA

DZHURIN
DZIGOVKA

DUNAEVTSI

KAMENETS

KAMENKA

KITAIGOROD

KODIMA

KRASNOE

KRASNOSLEKA

KRIVOE OZERO

KRIZHOPOL
KRUTIE (1922 only)

KUMANOV

KUPIN

LADIZHIN

LETICHEV

LITIN

LUCHINETS

LYANTSK ORUN (Imperial canceller used in 1924)

MEDZHIBOSH

MINKOVTS

MYASTKOVKA

MIKHALPOL

MOGILEV POD[olski]

MURAFA

MUROV – KURILOVTSI

NEMIROV

NEMIYA

NIZHNAYA-KRAPIVNA

NOVAYA-USHITSA

OBODOVKA

OKNA

OLGOPOL

PASHKOVTS

PESCHANKA

PIKOV

PROSKUROV

PYATAKOVO

RAIGOROD

RIBNITSA

ROVNO

SARNOV

SATANOV

SLUBODO-LUGSKOE

SMOTRICH

SOBOLEVKA

SOLOBKOVTSI

STARAYA SINOVA

STARAYA- USHITSA

TEPLIK
TERNOVKA

TIVROVO

TOMASHPOL

TROSTYANETS

TULCHIN

ULADOVKA

FRAMPOL

KHMELNIK

CHERNEVTSI

CHERNI-OSTROV

CHECHELNIK

SHATAVA
SHVANETS

JURKOVKA

JUSEFPOL

YALTUSHKOV

YAMPOL

YAMOLINTSI

YANOV

YARISHEV

YAROSHENKA

YARUGA

Added February 2020: Most of my Ukraine-related Blog posts are now available in full colour book form. To find out more follow the link:

http://www.armeniazemstvo.com/2020/02/just-published-trevor-pateman.html

Ukraine 1918 - 20: Forged Cancellations of Podilia

By 1917, the Imperial Russian postal service operated a couple of hundred post offices in the Guberniya of Podolia. A few were in the main towns - Kamenets, Vinnitsa, Zhmerinka, Proskurov - but most were in small towns. If you Google those small towns, most of them show up on Genealogy and Holocaust sites as Jewish shtetls.

Between 1918 and 1920, stamps in the post offices changed as the Ukrainian National Republic introduced the General Issue of 1918 and later in the year the Trident overprinted stamps. But the old Imperial cancellers remained in use. I know of only one distinctive new canceller - and that was introduced by the Polish during their occupation of Kamenets Podolsk in 1920. They produced a canceller with Polish spelling (KAMIENIEC) - this is illustrated in the Fischer Catalog Tom II and on this Blog - click on the Label at the end of this Post to link to the relevant page.

There is also a Kamenets canceller with Ukrainian spelling (KAMYANETS) but this is a Forgery. Though similar in style to Imperial Russian cancellers, it appears to have a fixed date 19. 7 19. It is only found on cancelled to order stamps, some genuine and some forged or doubtful. The ink used for all cancellations is different to the inks generally used in Podilia during 1918 - 20. Here are some examples of the cancellation. At the top it is applied to a genuine 20 Hr General Issue, a genuine type 3 Kharkiv Trident and a genuine type 1a Podilia Trident. Then at the bottom are two examples of Podilia 1a in violet or violet-black ink. These are usually regarded as Reprints or Forgeries though the discussion in the Trident literature is pretty perfunctory.

Click on Image to Magnify

Other forged cancellations exist but are rarely seen. I think this is simply because there is so much used Podilia material freely available. Over the years I have assembled only the small group of doubtful items shown here and on which I comment below:

Click on Image to Magnify

Top left: Genuine Podilia 1a on 50 kopeck with what I take to be a forged cancel of Zhmerinka Voksal. The genuine cancel is oval in the usual Imperial style and rarely seen at this time, though I have one example on a General Issue stamp. 

Top centre: Genuine Kyiv III with what I think is a forged GORODOK POD. cancel. I don't like the general appearance, the ink, the circles instead of stars and the date 10 7 18, well before any Trident overprints appeared - the earliest known dates are at the  end of August.

Top right: Signed Dr Seichter BUT the cancel is in a style with very large letters and numbers quite unlike any known Podilia cancel

Bottom row: Genuine Kyiv II and Podilia overprints, mint with full gum,  cancelled with what I take to be a forged Ukrainian Field Post cancellation. The complete text of the cancel can be seen by looking at both pairs of stamps. The date 18 XII 19 on both items allows a remote possibility that this is a genuine cancel.

____

One other thing: I have had some kind of collection of Podilia postal history for 1917 - 1921 for over twenty years. But - apart from the stamps - it does not feel very Ukrainian. The cancellations are in Russian and it may be that the employees of the post offices were mostly Russians or at least fluent Russian speakers. All their paperwork was in Russian (except at Yampol where the postmaster printed his own Ukrainised Money Transfer forms). Letters to the Courts are addressed in Russian. I suspect that most of the people who used the post offices identified themselves as Russian or Jewish - and from Googling, it would seem that Jews tended to use Russian rather than Ukrainian when they were not using Yiddish or Hebrew. Am I wrong about this?

Added February 2020: Most of my Ukraine-related Blog posts are now available in full colour book form. To find out more follow the link:

http://www.armeniazemstvo.com/2020/02/just-published-trevor-pateman.html

Mysteries of Podillia / Podolia : the early 1920s

I got interested in the stamps and postal history of Podillia in the 1990s when, by chance, I acquired a box of unsold lots and remainders from the 1986 - 87 Schaetzle auctions of the famous Vyrovyj collection. Eugene Vyrovyj had won many Gold Medals for his Podillia collection in the 1930s but though he committed suicide in 1945 the collection did not come on the market for forty years.

In Imperial Russia, Podolia was a large guberniya to the south west of Kiev, bordering on Austria - Hungary in the  west and Romania in the south. The population was very mixed, the majority ethnically Ukrainian or Jewish but with Russians and Poles too. It was also an economically lively region and when I first studied the Vyrovyj material I was struck by just how many post offices there had been in the Imperial period and still operating after 1917. Many of these offices were in small towns with large Jewish populations. Because of the extensive Internet documentation of the later Nazi destruction of the Jewish shteltls and populations of these towns, they are quite easy to research on the Internet. On modern maps of Ukraine, most of the towns still exist and mostly with the same names as in the Imperial period, though now with Ukrainian spellings - but it is nonetheless easy to locate them.

When I made my collection of Podillia postmarks, I stopped in 1920. Today I was looking at a couple of later covers, both of which illustrate just how interesting this region can be to the postal historian.

The first cover below was registered from CHEMEROVTSI [ Ukrainian, Chemerivtsi - north of Kamyanets ] 23 6 22 and routed via MOSKVA 7 7 22 to BERLIN 17 7 22. It was fairly clearly subject to censorship - the envelope flaps have been opened and re-sealed. At first, I looked at the franking. According to the RSFSR Tariff of 4 June 1922 you would expect to see a franking of 400 000 roubles. This Charity stamp doesn't do the job unless it has been silently revalued in an idiosyncratic manner. It could have been converted to 100 000 on a regular basis (100 x 100 times revaluation) or 200 000 if its Charity status was ignored and it was counted as 100 + 100. It could be an example of a local tariff of the kind studied by Alexander Epstein: he tells me that he has seen other examples like this one but using the 35 kop Chainbreaker and he thinks they are local revaluations

But then I noticed something much more interesting about this cover. On the front the sender has marked it as ZAKAZNOE, but the actual post office Registry number is to be found on the back "N 337" and underneath, as you would expect for a Foreign letter,  the place name in Roman script. But look at the spelling - not Russian CHEMEROVTSI (as on the postmark), not Ukrainian either - but instead CZEMEROWICE which must be Polish ... and I think that's the first time I've seen a place name spelt that way by a Soviet post office clerk.

The second letter is another Brender cover, again Registered, and this time paid in cash at "10000p [roubles]" on 8 March 1922.  Now 10 000 roubles is correct by the RSFSR Tariff of 2 February 1922 but that was replaced on 22 February with a 30 000 rouble Tariff. The most likely explanation is that someone got lucky - the old Tariff was still in use at this post office. At the other end, in Berlin where the letter arrived 11 4 22, the Postage Due indicated by the blue "T" and Mss "1600" appears to have been cancelled.

More interesting to me is the cancellation on the front STAROKONSTANTINOV "a" 8 III 22. This device is in a style I have not seen before and it is clearly provisional since the date is inserted by hand. The Registry number 511 is to be found at top right of the cover front with "STARAYA" in Cyrillic underneath in the same violet ink. Someone has pencilled "Starokonstant" underneath the Cyrillic but whether this was a different post office clerk able to write Roman script or a later addition by a stupid collector, I don't know. 

Starokonstaninov is now Ukrainian Starokostiantyniv, south west of Zhytomyr.

These covers are for sale at 75 € each, net [ the first cover has now been sold]

Added 12 September 2014: Vasilis Opsimos sends me scans of this lovely cover from Starokonstantinov. I include his description underneath the pictures. He also tells me he has seen a stampless cover like mine from the same period:

8/8/1922  Cover (Brender correspondence) from Starokonstantinov, Ukraine (now in Khmelnitskiy oblast, then in Volhynia) to Berlin (29/8), through Moscow (21 & 22/8). Franked correctly at the 90R rate with blocks of 10 and of 8 of the 5k imperf Arms. Note that the c”d”s of origin is an unusual single-ring one with just the town name and a large “a” at the bottom – the date is written in only once on the front of the cover (post-revolution – notice the absence of the hard sign at the end). The provo label is made out of a rectangular piece of paper (selvage of stamp sheet – notice the lozenges of varnish) with a manuscript notation “314 Staroconstantinov” in Latin script. (Starokonstantinov - Староконстантинов had a large Jewish population, in 1939 amounting to a third of the town’s total population of 20.000). 

Added February 2020: Most of my Ukraine-related Blog posts are now available in full colour book form. To find out more follow the link:

http://www.armeniazemstvo.com/2020/02/just-published-trevor-pateman.html