Post-Soviet Meter Frankings

Click on Image to Magnify

Some of us are slower to adapt to changes than others. Here is an office clerk stuck with a Soviet-era meter franking machine which only goes up to 9 rubles 99 kopecks. But he or she is trying to send a large envelope from Moscow to Estonia in July 1973. I count 86 individually-applied labels at 900 kopecks and 2 at 300 kopecks, yielding a total franking of 780 roubles. The Catch 22 is that the weight of these labels and the glue used to apply them probably altered the weight step for this letter ....

In other offices,clerks dealt with the inflation problem by removing the "k" for "kopeck" on the machine and inserting a "p" for "ruble". In this case, the franking could then have been applied by using just one label. 

This is by no means the most exotic item you could find from Russia's 1990s inflation.

Grodno, Belarus 1992: Strange but True

Back in 1992, I had a correspondent in Lithuania who often visited Grodno. So I sent him some of my Belarus New Issues (I had too many ...) and asked him to use them on covers to me.

One day - 3 OCT 1992 according to the Lewes cancellation on the reverse - I received the cover shown above. I was very excited. I had not seen anything like this before. It was overfranked (I think 15 roubles was the rate) but this time I did not care.

For a time, I collected Grodno "brown paper" provisionals and, in fact, anything from post-Soviet Grodno. One of the things I noticed was that Grodno post offices seemed to have no black ink available - either you saw purple ink (as on the Registration cachets and canellations on this cover) or red ink.

I forget who bought my Grodno material from me, but I kept this one cover as a souvenir. ( I have covered up my old Lewes address to which you can no longer send letters. My present address is: Unit 10, 91 Western Road, Brighton BN1 2NW, England)