Armenia 1921 First Yessayan: Quantity and Quality

Collectors who exhibit in order to win medals have to search for Quality and that usually means rare stamps and rare covers.

This may be one reason why basic philatelic research is sometimes neglected. Old fashioned research almost inevitably involves accumulating in quantity - just to see what's out there and to classify and evaluate it.

Soviet Armenia's first set of pictorials consists of 17 values, prepared imperforate and perforated (Michel II a - s). That's 34 stamps to kick off, to which has to be added Proofs and Colour Trials.

Only some stamps were issued and always with handstamped or handwritten surcharges in a variety of styles and in two colours (black and red). Collect one of each and you are heading towards a hundred stamps.

To deal in this issue, one of my "Specialities", I look at my shelves and realise that over the years I have accumulated five large stockbooks:

1. Genuine stamps from the Original printing carried out at the [Y]essayan Printing Works in Constantinople. A very unbalanced stockbook now. Perforated stamps are generally scarcer and the 25 000 in brown perforated is rare. I don't have one but I have hundreds of others in this book.

2. Genuine overprints, which have to be on stamps of the Original printing, in red and black. Red are generally scarcer (except for the 1 on 1) but some black surcharges are very scarce - the 35 on 20 000 and the 3 on 20 000, for example. There are varieties not listed in Michel (you will find them in Zakiyan). None of them are philatelic - the Armenian Bolsheviks has no time for stamp dealers, and even imprisoned one of them (Melik - Pacher / Pachaev).

3. The common Forgery on bright, brittle paper with shiny gum. So common that they are sometimes classed as Reprints, but actually they just don't seem like Yessayan's work especially if you compare with the Reprints he undoubtedly did make of the Second Yessayan series. A very fat stockbook of little value, but with annoying gaps. You would expect the numbers to be more equally distributed than they are in this bulging stockbook, worth no more than a couple of hundred (pounds, euros, dollars).

4. The scarcer forgeries, of which there are at least two types, on paper and sometimes with gum much closer to the Originals but with much poorer quality printing. Much less common, though I picked up an old Italian dealer's stock of them years ago, including part sheets which you rarely see because most were cut up to fill packets.

5. Forged overprints, generally on forged stamps but sometimes on genuine stamps - and these are usually good ones. Blue-black ink instead of black ink is a common feature of these well-executed forgeries which are often seen in auctions. An interesting stockbook which has involved me in many hours work: assessing "1" and "3" overprints on genuine basic stamps is not easy! An interesting book, yes, but - of course - of virtually no retail value.

In all the many years I have accumulated and traded from this stock, NO collector has ever approached me saying, "I want to research this issue. Have you got a big accumulation that I could study? I'll take thousands if you have got them".

Stefan Berger in Germany ( www.stampsofarmenia.com ) has got his own accumulation, but whether there is anyone else out there with enough stamps to really assess this issue in all its aspects, I don't know. Anyone?

RSFSR Postmaster Provisionals (rouble revaluations) are easy

Yes, it's true

For years I have put these stamps aside thinking Too Difficult, Too Easily Forged.
Now when I study them I realise:

1. For a few issues, there were remainders which were recycled by the Soviet Philatelic Agency. These are the issues for which Michel gives prices for mint * copies. For all the other issues Michel gives mint * prices of - - . These issues are rare, very rare, or simply non-existent mint. If you think you have mint copies, there is a 99% probability that they are fakes. Stop looking at them. Move on ...

2. Postal services in 1920 Russia were still much reduced. Recovery is only really obvious in 1922. Now consider that the MAJORITY of 1920 Postmaster Provisionals are from out-of-the-way places you have probably never heard of. Suppose you are a forger planning to put "p" on used stamps to turn them into Postmaster Provisionals. Your chances of finding stamps with the right cancels at the right date are no greater than finding stamps which ALREADY have "p" on them! That is why forgers end up putting their "p"s on stamps with cancels of the wrong places (Petrograd, Moscow ...) at the wrong time (1915 ...). And it is easy work to eliminate such stamps as forgeries. Move on ...

3. Furthermore, most of the Postmaster Provisionals appear to have been used on Money Transfer Forms and Parcel Cards, where they generally received clear cancellations.

4. CONCLUSION: if the place name is right on the cancellation and the date is 1920, then the "p" or "pyb" that goes with it is almost certainly GENUINE.

5. It could have been even easier BUT: the people who first got their hands on Parcel and Transfer cards franked with Postmaster Provisionals decided that the way to make money was to (a) peel or soak off stamps on the back of the card to sell separately (b) cut up the card to produce single stamps on piece taken from the front (often with clipped perfs from splitting multiples) .... The result is that you frequently find two things of help in assessing a Postmaster Provsional: (1) stamps with pink or brown paper adhering on the back may well have been peeled off the back of a card (2) stamps on small fragments cut very close at top and bottom are the result of cutting up multiples. It's a great pity because it means you only get part of a postmark to study. But often it's enough and the clipped perfs are a clue that you are on to something.

6. SIGNATURES? There are some useful signatures. Mikulski signed these things, so did Pohl and Dr Jem. A useful one to look out for is KRYNINE which I think is reliable. But not a lot of the material appears to be signed, so you have to use my method ...

... and using it you can form a Postmaster Provisional collection even if you cannot afford the four-figure prices which complete Transfer and Parcel Cards obtain in auction.

Problem solved. No charge for my services because there wasn't much of a problem in the first place :)

CMT overprints

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

Today, I am looking at CMT overprints

During and especially after World War One, army officers became addicted to occupying bits of other people's territory in order to issue Occupation stamps. They were nice little earners. They cannot be written off, however, because most of them had not only official legitimation but also some legitimate actual use.

This is true of the CMT overprints from the 1919 Romanian Occupation of Pokutia (the district of Kolomya in what was Austria-Hungary, then in what was briefly Western Ukraine, subsequently in Poland and now in Ukraine via the Soviet Union). Pokutia really was the back of beyond and the local occupation issue was the work of just two people, the Romanian Major Turbatu of the occupying forces and Ivan Cherniavsky, a prominent lawyer in Kolomya - and philatelist (though very much a collector rather than a dealer).

When you read the documentation they left behind, you get the feeling that they were both unusually honest and conscientious in their approach. The issue they prepared was simple, comprising just thirteen stamps, and it was distributed to 6 of the 8 post offices under temporary Romanian control, and largely used up. They clearly did themselves a few favours - just eight copies of the #1 stamp which they would have been crazy not to have bought up on the spot. But as things went at the time, this seems modest.

Cherniavsky's real perk, in due course, was to get the secretaries in the Kolomya district court [he was in charge] to let him have envelopes arriving at the court. He was a cover collector and the CMT stamps distributed across the District came back to the Court on envelopes sent in by small town lawyers.

Except from Lanczyn, where it seems [from my research] that a local philatelist bought up the CMT stamps and stuck them for cancellation on blank covers. So they did not travel back to Kolomya - Cherniavsky observed in 1928 that he did not have covers from Lanczyn in his collection and this is probably the reason why!

Indeed, the modest and undemonstrative way Turbatu and Cherniavsky went about things clearly annoyed stamp dealers and even collectors across the borders in Romania and Austria when they got to hear about what was going on. Here were these people issuing stamps and they hadn't been offered any!

The Major and the lawyer seemed oblivious of the kind of demand for these things which existed at the time. Dealers in Vienna could shift tens of thousands of provisional stamps. They weren't interested in covers which had been genuinely used to the District Court.

Eventually, the dealers and at least one collector got their way - presumably by paying to get it - and the Romanians furnished them with new editions of the CMT overprints, using the original handstamps and even the same ink pads, but applied to a much larger range of basic adhesives - around 50 different basic stamps. They also got "Proofs" in red [which I have seen] and blue [which I haven't] in suitably small quantities.[ Turbatu and Cherniavsky seem not to have even thought of making Proofs ].

As far as I can tell, it is generally impossible to distinguish between mint copies of Turbatu - Cherniavsky originals and mint Second Editions which were produced outside Pokutia at Cernauti, like the Originals, but never taken inside Pokutia.

Used stamps from the Original printing will have a very limited range of cancels - probably from just the six offices which received the stamps - from a limited period (14 June 1919 - 20 August 1919). Reprints which have been cancelled will fail this cancellation test.

There is one small complication to this story. A small part of the fresh overprints were done for a Cernauti Professor, Gronich, and applied to stamps he had taken into Pokutia and had CTOd in Kolomya during the period of the Romanian occupation. These overprints were applied [ acccording to my research which still needs further corroboration] in a very watery violet ink, perhaps to disguise the fact that they were being applied to stamps which had already been CTOd. But the CTO dates, at the beginning of August, are within the right time period for legitimate use and with the cancellation then in use at Kolomya.

Does any reader have further information?

Stop the Scribblers!

I was just sent an Italian auction catalogue. Very lavish. But I couldn't buy any of the stuff on offer. It's all been scribbled on. Experts who not only put their signatures on the cover but right next to the interesting bits. Dreadful. Who do they think they are? It's not even as if they don't make mistakes. They do. Sometimes big ones.

Worse, is often unclear what is being signed. The stamp? The overprint? The cancellation?

I have seen relatively common stamps which have ben signed by an expert as genuine. At a later date, some forger has added a rare overprint. It's easy to suppose that it's the overprint which has been signed for.

Colour photocopies are cheap and accurate. The thing to do is to attach one to a Certificate or Short Opinion (Kurzbefund) and then record what it is you are signing off as Genuine. Ambiguity is removed when you tick the various boxes: Stamp: OK Overprint: OK Cancellation: OK. You can leave a space for comments too, like "Repaired" or "Cleaned".

It's time to kill off signatures, whether on stamps or covers. They are unnecessary. They devalue an artefact, except in very unusual circumstances: Agathon Faberge's pencilled acquisition notes often provide valuable information as well as an indication of provenance.

At the same time, it's time for collectors to tell dealers they don't want to buy something with twenty five pencilled prices rubbed out and a twenty sixth one written in. All covers should be sold in a plastic protector and the place for the price is on the protector. That is, unless you are selling all your covers at one price, in which case you just need one placard to announce the fact. Full stop end of story.

Unmounted mint stamps command a premium over mounted mint, often a large one. Covers which have not been scribbled on ought also to command a premium.

Doing Mental Arithmetic

I am working my way through a heap of Russian covers and cards from 1921 - 23, a period of high inflation. Postal tariffs were frequently changing, for much of the period gathering noughts. Supplies of appropriate stamps lagged behind the tariffs, leading to multiple frankings and revaluations - and the revaluations were sometimes complex (revalue your kopeck stamps upwards x 100; leave your rouble stamps unchanged)

The task is apparently simple: identify the tariff period and then check to see if the correct postage has been applied, and if not, whether postage due was raised. It involves a lot of adding and multiplying (and as currency is revalued, dividing). It can be fun.

More than that, you realise things like this. (1) Faced with a tariff for which they had no obvious combination of adhesives, clerks applied an approximate franking. (2) News did not necessarily travel fast. The Circular announcing new tariffs may not have arrived or, if it had arrived, hadn't been read and passed on to the front line clerks. So old tariffs continue to be used past their sell by date. (3) There were zealots who without a calculator, and probably working in poor light and a stuffy room, but clearly with a taste for mental arithmetic, managed to spot a deficiency and slap on Postage Due.

British Society of Russian Philately

I am down to present a display at the annual meeting of the British Society of Russian Phlately in London on 23 - 24 October.

It's a display largely made up of material you would find in dealers' boxes rather than in serious auctions: 1917 - 1919 Russian covers and cards franked with Imperial Arms stamps in the IMPERFORATE versions issued by the Provisional (Kerensky) government in 1917 and later by the Soviets.

I am looking only at the period in which these stamps are used at face value. Some of them, like the 4 kopeck, are more common used at the later period (1920 - 22)when they were revalued into roubles.

Most of the exhibit comes from other dealers' boxes, a few have been pulled from large auction lots of mixed covers and cards, and just one item was bought as a single lot in an auction - a cover which shows imperforate stamps locally perforated. I got this from Cherrystone.

Anyone reading this with stuff to sell in this category, then I am interested :) The exhibit is only the beginning of what I hope will be a larger project.

How (Some) Modern Forgers Work

There are different kinds of forgers.

There used to be things called "Packet Maker Forgeries" which, as the name suggests, were forgeries (often of basic stamps, not just overprints)designed to fill sixpenny packets in Woolworths. Sometimes these forgeries were printed in very large quantities and the quality could be really very good. Such forgeries are normally encountered as single stamps, since sheets were separated for the packets. Occasionally, one comes across packet makers' remainders which allow one to see, for example, how sheet format is sometimes wrong.

I doubt many forgeries of this kind are now produced, since the packet market hardly exists any more and there are plenty of stamps otherwise available to fill packets.

Then there are bespoke forgers, who make forgeries to serve specific markets. The advent of the Internet has made it easier for such forgers to target very specific markets and even single individuals. They can respond swiftly to changing demand.

There are plenty of well-off but gullible collectors, sometimes elderly, and I have seen whole collections put together from "made to order" fakes, bought on ebay or offered directly on scans attached to personal emails.

This does little harm (except to the collector's bank balance) until such forgeries are presented in serious collector journals as new discoveries or find their way into catalogues. It is especially easy to be fooled when the material is from an exotic or under-researched collecting area. So in recent years I have seen articles, profusely illustrated with fakes, announcing new discoveries of Armenian revenues, Zemstvo usages, and Ukrainian overprints. And I can think of one catalogue whose well-intentioned editor had fakes or fantasy issues slipped past him and given catalogue status.

If it is happening in the areas with which I am reasonably familiar, it is presumably happening in many other areas. It just adds to the work serious collectors and dealers have to undertake.

The work is generally not that difficult; I call it "elementary forensics". You start by looking at the stuff, comparing it to other material you have, setting it in context (dates, places), assessing it for probability. You don't need microscopes or carbon dating equipment. A pair of spectacles is much more useful. When it comes to covers or documents, you jeed to ask the question: how could a basic item worth X dollars get transformed into one worth X + Y dollars for a lot less than the difference between X and Y.

I will give one example. Postcard markets are full of picture postcards which at some point have had the adhesive peeled off. Collectors sometimes stick an adhesive back on - but that's easy enough to spot UNLESS a larger adhesive is chosen and you tinker around with the cancellation (or entirely refresh it). Of course, you are then making a fake.

In Russian philately, old postacrds which once had ordinary 3 kopeck stamps on them now come with larger 3 kopeck Romanov stamps in their place - or even Zemstvo stamps. It's amazing what this permits, especially if the forger is knowledgeable enough to find a card with a roughly appropriate date and address. It's so convincing that you can fill pages of collector journals with such stuff.