RSFSR: Franked Mail in the Free Frank Period

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Most stamp dealers know that Registered postcards are unusual items from more or less any country. Maybe you only Register a postcard if you are worried about the reliability of your postal service or because your postcard contains some very important Secret Coded Message ...

Anyway, dealers know enough to put the price up for a registered postcard, even one as unattractive as this (the picture side is just a photo of a painting in the Hermitage gallery) and for which I paid £35 (50 €) when I found it in another dealer's box. I didn't ask for a discount.

I don't know how much I would have paid to get it because I have never seen one before (unless I saw one and failed to appreciate what it was ...). 

What I illustrate here is a postcard from Bolshevik Russia during the Free Frank period  1919 - 21 when ordinary (non-registered) cards and letters travelled free. Not many travelled - this was the period of War Communism when the Bolsheviks were in a desperate situation with control over only part of the territory of "core" Russia. Even less Registered mail travelled.

Registered mail still had to be franked and the 35 kopeck paid on this 12 May 1919 card from Kozlov to Petrograd (the receiver cancel in red) represents 10 kopecks for postage ( suppressed for an ordinary card) and 25 kopecks for Registration. That was the Tariff set on 1st January 1919 when the Free Post was introduced. 

This card will join an accumulation of 1919 - 21 Franked Mail - all covers - which I have been keeping back to study and write up. That accumulation extends to about 50 items; this is the first Registered postcard. Of additional interest is the Kozlov registration in a smudged printing on a poor quality paper which I think is a War Time economy (or even post - revolutionary ) production. I have seen similar labels from other places.

How much is it worth? That is actually unknown until some early Bolshevik Russia collection appears at a serious auction and serious collectors have to think about what they will pay for things they are lacking and may never even have seen before. At the moment, there is no obvious market in such things. If I was working for an auction house (as I occasionally do ) and obliged to put a Start price on the card above I would Start it at 150 € and would be disappointed to see it sell for less than 300 €. If it went for 1000 € I would think that showed at least two collectors in the world clearly understood what they were competing for.

Added 22 January: Alexander Epstein kindly supplies examples of Registered postcards franked at each of the three Tariffs of the 1919 - 21 "Free Post" period: 35 kopecks, 4 roubles and 10 roubles. The last two show cards franked with kopeck stamps revalued x 100. Note that on the first card, the uprated "10" overprint counts towards the franking; the next three cards are used as Blanks (correctly so - statoneries were invalidated on 1 January 1919); the last card is a Ukrainian formular card. Epstein writes that it took him many,many years to find them. They are indeed rarities and I guess this is now the largest group shown on the Internet:

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Added 3 February 2016: Dr Hans Grigoleit sends me scans of the remarkable cover and card below. Azerbaijan also operated a Free Post system in 1920 - 1921.These items  illustrate the continuing use of Musavat stamps in the early Soviet period:

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Added 3 February 2016: Alexander Epstein now contributes a postcard and a cover from Azerbaijan for the 1920 - 21 Free Post period, both are rare items:

Added 7 February 2016: Robert Taylor contributes this nice Esperanto registered postcard from Petrograd to Switzerland, sent late in the Free Post period (May 1921; Free Post ended in August). Like many items mailed abroad at this period, it is franked at the Inland rate of 10 roubles not the advertised Foreign rate which at this date would have been 7 or 14 roubles.

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Ryazan 1919: Dream Cover or Philatelic Cover?

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Here is one of those rare things from 1919 Free Post Sovdepia: a franked cover. I bought it in auction at www.filateliapalvelu.com and paid 30% of my Bid - only the back was illustrated and maybe other collectors thought it was just too good to be true (as I did when I first looked at it).

It is correctly franked to 50 kopecks, the rate for Inland Registered letters during the RSFSR Free Post period. But the franking includes 5 Postal Savings Bank stamps - quite scarce on cover - and a 25 kopeck imperforate - a stamp which is genuinely rare on cover, both before and after the 1920 revaluations. So is it too good to be true? Is it philatelic? Note in particular that a 50 kopeck franking could have been provided with just two copies of the 25 kop imperforate. So why the other stamps instead?

Look at the cover more closely. It was sent from RYAZAN on 26 5 19 and addressed to Mikhailov in the same guberniya - and there is a MICHAILOV RYAZ. "b" 28 5 19 receiver cancel on the reverse. It's addressed to someone at a War Commissariat, Alexander Nikolaevich Dobrokhotov. The sender gives an address at the bottom of the letter and it's that of another member of the same family

I think the cover is non-philatelic. Philatelists usually send covers to themselves or to friends. They use street addresses or PO Box numbers, not War Commissariat addresses. They put stamps on the front of the cover (even in 1919). They don't open the cover as roughly as this one - which has been cut down at the left (and could have been sewn into a file - which would explain the cut-down).

My guess is that Ryazan post office was genuinely short of stamps. They had used up the much-used 5 and 10 and 15 kopeck stamps. They had lots of little used 4 kopecks which are "uprated" (as it were) to 5 kopecks by being paired with 1 kopeck Postal Savings bank stamps. To save doing this ten times, an odd 25 kopeck stamp at the counter was used for half the franking.

The result, if I am right, is a dream cover. Readers' comments are welcome ...

RSFSR Mail in the Free Post period 1919 - 21

Anyone who collects Russian postal history will have come across postcards and maybe covers from the Free Post period in the RSFSR. For unregistered ordinary inland postcards and letters (first weight step) the period lasted from 1st January 1919 until 15 August 1921. For mail abroad, Free Post was also available from 1st January 1919 but only until 30 September 1920.

However, the RSFSR had no regular mail connections to foreign countries from the beginning of 1919 until late June 1920. None. Extraordinary but true. When mail services were resumed, mail was first of all routed via the Arctic Circle Norwegian port of Värdo, which involved mail being sent up from Moscow to Archangel or Murmansk. Fortunately, agreement was soon reached on a route through Estonia.

These dates imply that there was a three month period (end June - end September 1920) in which people living in the RSFSR could - in reality and not just in theory - send mail abroad for free. I show an example above.

This letter started out in UNDOL VLAD[imir] G[uberniya]  25 .. 20. The month date is not clear on the beaten-up canceller but is almost certainly June because the Moscow three triangle censor mark reads MOSKVA EXSPEDITSIA 22 7 20. Addressed to a doctor, Herman Schumacher, in independent Lithuania ("Litva" in the first line of the address - but helpfully followed by "Kovno guberniya")  it did indeed arrive there, as shown by the new style Lithuanian canceller on the reverse ANYKSCIAI 13 IX 1920. 

There are some remarks written in Lithuanian on the reverse. Can one of my readers translate them I wonder?

Acknowledgement

I used Alexander Epstein's article on RSFSR Foreign Mail Tariffs (Journal of Classical Russian Philately, #2, 1998) to write this Blog post.