A V Vinner and Soviet Philately

 

I am looking for information about A V Vinner, a Russian philatelist who occasionally signed stamps using a small boxed handstamp with that name in Cyrillic. He was probably born around 1900; probably lived in Moscow in the 1920s but may have had links to Transcaucasia or Central Asia; may be the same person as published a Russian  technical book on mosaics in 1953; may have been a friend or colleague of Dr Paul D Krynine. His first name and patronymic are unknown to me.

If you have any stamps signed by him, then scans of front and back would be most welcome at patemantrevor@gmail.com

Desperate Philately

Stamp dealers and stamp speculators often end up with unsaleable stock. Maybe they just bought too big a quantity. What can you do with it? Well, you can try to pass the parcel or you can wait for better times or you can try to add some fresh touch to what you have.

There were large remainder stocks of the Ukraine National Republic fiscal stamps of 1919, especially the two low values of 40 and 50 Shahiv, which were probably bought very cheap in the 1920s and 1930s by a few hopeful dealers. I have many copies in fresh MNH ** condition. I also have many copies of the fantasy overprints added to these stamps in an attempt to make them saleable. For example, the overprints for KHOLM shown below are usually attributed to a tireless fabricator of fantasies, Captain Schramschenko, and are really only of interest if you are making a collection of Capatain Schramschenko fantasies (I’m not).

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Another story. At one time it was popular to collect picture postcards with a stamp stuck on the picture side and cancelled. The stamps and YOKOHAMA cancels on the front of the two cards below are genuine. What about the backs? I think it’s possible that the Soviet Philatelic Assocaiton imported these cards, but if they did so, the cards would have arrived in one parcel of 100 or 1000 not individually. It’s also possible that the Soviet PA typed its address onto the back of each card, individually – note that in line 4, there is a full stop after per. on one card but not on the other. The SPA did have a Roman alphabet typewriter and the typists did play around with spacing, as someone has done in S O V I E T.

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But clearly these Japanese cards were not that popular. Some enhancement was required and someone (and possibly the SPA but it does seem rather crude) thought of Postage Due. We have one genuine Postage Due stamp on the cards and four different cancels / cachets, all looking as if they have never been used before.. I think they are all fake.

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This is perhaps only interesting because it helps me understand a much more significant item in my possession. Below is a genuine cover sent in August 1924 from Ekaterinburg to Moscow, using a system which allowed a letter to be sent unfranked with Postage Due to be paid at the other end. Already in Ekaterinburg a Postage Due cachet has been applied and I think it genuine. I think it also possible that the three stamps belong to the cover but that they were not cancelled at the time, which sometimes happens to Postage Due stamps. This defect has been made good using a forged MOCKBA 19 cancel dated 28 8 24. If the cancels were genuine, then this would have been a very valuable cover since the first Postage Due stamps are extremely rare used.

Stamps Which Don't Exist

This would make an interesting Exhibit. Here are some categories of stamps which don't exist:

(1) Stamps which did once exist but of which all copies have been lost or destroyed and only descriptions or photographs remain. You can always hope ...

(2) Typographical errors in catalogues which tell collectors to look for a 1 Dollar Blue when they should be looking for a 10 Dollar Blue. Dealers who accept Wants Lists soon discover these catalogue errors.

(3) Chinese Whispers. In the past, not every stamp issuing authority had a philatelic bureau or even answered the telephone. Collector A is looking at a set (?) of stamps in the same design and with values 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,9,10. Puzzled, A asks B Is there an 8? Says B, Probably. So A asks the local stamp dealer for a copy of the 8. Is there one? says the stamp dealer. Oh, I think so, says A. The dealer does work for a stamp magazine, helping list New Issues and so includes in the next list sent off a set containing  1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 values.

(4) The Fraudsters. In the old days, you could send stamps to weekly magazines or catalogue makers, giving details and they would get listed. So you could write:

Dear Philatelic Paper,

I enclose four stamps which have just been issued here. In addition to the 5, 10, 20 and 50 overprints on the old stamps, there are also overprints of 100 and 200 which I could not afford to buy but the details of which are these ....

When the Philatelic Paper duly prints the details, the fraudster starts to produce the 100 and 200 high values which everyone will now be looking for. Similar scams still occur. In the 1990s, fraudsters (in California, I think) noted that four values of the 1920 unissued set of Chassepot stamps of Armenia were overprinted in 1923 for fiscal use. The fraudsters saw an opportunity: they decided that all ten values of the set had been overprinted and set about producing the missing scarce values for gullible collectors. It's really that simple.

(5) Catalogue Fraudsters. This is the one that interests me at the moment. Suppose you are a company or  organisation which both produces catalogues and sells stamps. Why not insert a few extra stamps into the sets you are listing, and in particular ones which you could easily produce using surplus stock and even handstamps which have found their way into your offices? I have a suspicion that something very much like this occurred in the Soviet Philatelic Association in the 1920s and 1930s, with or without official sanction. More on this in a future Blog ....