Turkmenistan's Officially Damaged Olympics Stamps

First of all: A reader of this Blog asks me about Turkmenistan postal rates since 1991. I have no idea! Does anyone know? Are they published somewhere? If you can help, please use the Comment box to help. Thanks.

A year ago I blogged about Turkmenistan's officially damaged stamps, but I did not have a scanner able to show them properly. Now I do. See the cover and the enlarged section - and look at the right margin of the stamp.

Some stamps sold at post office counters in the 1990s had perforations cut off on one side. Stanley Gibbons says this was done to the 1992 Barcelona Olympics set and the 1993 overprints on this set. Maybe other stamps were also treated this way.

The idea was to protect the revenues of the official New Issue sellers. You could not compete by going to the post office and buying stamps because you would be supplied with pre-damaged copies.

This idea was not a new one. In Hungary in the 1920s, stamps sold over the counter had three pin holes punched in some of the stamps in the sheet. So if you bought a sheet of mint stamps, some of them would be damaged (the Perfin was regarded then as a form of damage).

Of course, today Hungary collectors pay a premium for stamps with the three hole Perfins, especially when used on ordinary commercial covers.

In the case of the Turkmenistan stamps, it is not really possible to collect the damaged copies in mint condition or used off cover - they need to be on cover and used at the time.

Why? Well, it's just too easy to fake the interesting stamps by cutting off the margins of any loose stamp you happen to have.

That reminds me of a story. Once upon a time, a man walked in to a stamp shop in England and said that a dealer had once sold him some really rare stamps. And now the man wished to sell these really rare stamps. He had bisected stamps from the German Occupation of the Channel Islands - unmounted mint!

Turkmenistan since 1991

Today I was asking the question, From which former Soviet Union republic is it most difficult to find mail?
In the 1990s, several of the ex-Soviet republics experienced some disorganisation at some point and mail - internal or external - becomes very scarce. I think this is true for Georgia in the early 1990s for example.
But over the ten year period from 1991 to 2001, my guess is that mail from Turkmenistan (internal or external) is the most difficult to find. Maybe this is only true for someone living in Western Europe - perhaps there is lots of Turkmen mail going East and I haven't seen it.
Anyway, I have only about 20 items of mail from the 1991 - 2001 period, all going out of the country and only two or three items from a place other than Ashgabat - one is shown at the top of this page.

The country has issued very few stamps compared to the other ex-Soviet republics. At first, there was a philatelic agency involved which protected its New Issue revenues by issuing stamps locally in a damaged state (see my previous Turkmenistan Blog for an example). Later stamp issues were often simple in design and imperforate - I show a couple of examples above.

There have also been postal stationery revaluations which I am sure are interesting. I can only show two examples above.

Armenia 1993 Currency Change: provisional revaluations

Click on image and use Magnifier to enlarge

Today I am tidying up accumulations of post - 1991 commercial mail from ex-Soviet republics. There are many thousands of covers still sitting in boxes, mostly for the period 1991 - 2005. All the Belarus, Estonia, Moldova and Ukraine have been sold but I still have lots from Russia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia. I have very little from Tajikstan and even less from Turkmenistan. (In Turkmenistan, I discovered from browsing on the Internet today, they are still damaging stamps before selling them at post office counters. This practice began in the early 1990s.It is done to protect the revenues of official philatelic agencies: private individuals cannot acquire undamaged stamps for resale. The officially damaged stamps used on cover are highly desirable since there is so little commercial mail).

[There is a typo in my old write-up of these two covers: both covers are from 1994 (January and June), not 1993, with clear Yerevan backstamps]