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.

Ukraine Provisional stamps 1992 - Assessing status

I dealt extensively in post Soviet material in the 1990s. Here are a few things that I learnt:

1. Postal supervision was weak after the collepse of the Soviet Union. You could stick anything on a letter, put it in a box and expect it to be cancelled and the letter delivered. Frankings were rarely if ever challenged and Postage Due marks are rare. I once went through a batch of ten thousand Russian commercial covers, post 1991. I picked out about a hundred franked with used stamps, CTO stamps, foreign stamps and home made stamps. The foreign stamps were amusing: it looked like the senders had raided their childhood stamp collections and picked stamps with lots of zeros, in line with Russian inflation. They were not philatelists; just hard up people wanting to send a letter to a radio station.

Why did I trawl through those 10 000 letters? I was looking for local provisionals and for postal forgeries - proper forgeries of current Russian definitive stamps. I found a few.

But the moral of my research is this: that an ordinary letter has gone through the post and the stamp on it has been cancelled proves nothing about the status of the stamp. A stamp from Upper Volta on a post - 1991 Russian cover does not oblige us to create a category "Upper Volta Used Abroad". Nor does the presence of some supposed post-1991 Provisional guarantee it as a stamp sold over the post office counter.

2. What about registered letters? Well, it is always possible to pre-frank a Registered letter and hand it over the counter. Post-1991, if the clerk did not like the stamps (maybe you had made them that morning), you could offer to pay the full franking cost in cash and even a premium on top. The clerk would then obligingly register the letter, cancel the stamps and put the envelope in the bag. Well worth doing if you were a stamp creator seeking to establish credibility for your domestic productions.

3. The best evidence for the genuineness of a local provisional issue comes from mail going to obviously non-philatelic organisations from private individuals or companies, preferably in large quantities. In the case of Ukraine, there are large archives of material addressed to such organisations as BUNAC or Chessington Zoo or SOON which show local provisional issues in use, sometimes in quite regular and persistent use. These archives have the additional value that they can be used to confront denials: a local postmaster in trouble with national authorities for issuing local stamps might plead that he or she never did such a thing. The archival mail proves otherwise.

Statements form the Ukrainian Ministry of Posts at this time are worthless. The clear fact is that mail franked with local provisionals travelled unchallenged both in the case of internal mail and in the case of international mail. You never see a Postage Due mark.

4. It is normally possible to identify mail going from one philatelist to another in a different city. Addresses, handwriting, PO Box numbers are repetitive. Such mail has very little evidential status.

5. Some covers with bogus stamps, fake registration cachets and fake cancellations nonetheless have genuine backstamps [ receiver cancels]. How come?

Well, you sit at home in Kyiv or Vilnius or wherever making your covers from scratch. Then you walk down to the local post office and a clerk obliges you by backstamping them all. Alternatively, you have received 100 fabricated covers in a parcel from your friend in another city. He has addressed them to you. You open the parcel and again take the covers down to the post office for backstamping.

6. My own contribution in the 1990s was to buy all the envelopes received at the Gas Analyser Plant in Voru, Estonia.This had been an all-Union factory in Soviet times, and post-1991 continued to receive mail from most of the new republics. The envelopes were sent on to me, unpicked. I sold this material as it arrived, something I now regret. But when you see a cover addressed to 59 Kreutzwaldi in Voru, you can be sure it was originally marketed by me.

Collect Transcaucasian Federation Stamps!

I am sure that some collectors avoid the areas I specialise in just because there are so many fakes and forgeries. And I have been Blogging a lot about fakes and forgeries.

If you want to collect something in my area where there are few or no forgeries, try the neglected Transcaucasian Federation pictorial issues of 1923. Just 17 stamps in the Stanley Gibbons listing.

There are no forgeries of the basic stamps or (to my knowledge) of the two overprints, since the overprints are on basic stamps which are at least as scarce without overprints as with.

I haven't yet seen a forged cancellation, presumably because there is no stamp which is really common mint and really scarce used.

However, there are challenges. Not all the stamps are equally common. Some are very scarce mint (for example the 3 kopeck) and some are quite scarce used (for example the 40 000 rouble or the 1 kopeck).

There are imperforates, ungummed, from remainder stocks but these turn up in very unequal quantities - making the three sets is hard!

Finding stamps with Georgian and Azerbaijan postmarks is easy; with Armenian cancellations, it's much harder - here a forger might be tempted. But Georgian cancellations are almost always of TIFLIS/TBILISI in Cyrillic or Georgian script and Azerbaijan cancels are 90% + BAKU. So there is a challenge in finding and identifying other cancellations. There is NO favour cancelled (CTO) material. The Bolsheviks were hostile to the idea at this period, associating it with speculation.

Covers will cost you 100 euro upwards and often look attractive. There are virtually no philatelically-inspired covers.

Sound attractive? Well, I have decided to bring my entire Transcaucasian stock to London STAMPEX where you will find me up in the Gallery area from 15 to 18 September inclusive. Or you can email me: trevor@trevorpateman.co.uk

Podolia Tridents / Podillia Tridents - help please

A dozen years ago, I had far too large a stock of the Tridents of Podilia / Podolia, most of it from remainder lots of the Vyrovyj collection. In addition, I had some Podolian postal history material from the 1915-18 period and the 1921 - 25 period. So while my younger daughter sat and revised for her school examinations, I sat and constructed two large collections: one of Podolia trident sub-types; one of Podolian postmarks 1915 - 25. The latter collection showed cancellations from about 140 offices.

I recently examined the postmark collection in order to establish the date around which Tridents came into use in Podillia. I have no examples of postmarks on Podilian tridents earlier than 7th September 1918 - and that cancellation, from MICHALPOL, is on a favour cancelled block. I then have postally used examples on the 12th (VINNITSA ZABUSHE), 16th (BRASLAV),ZHMERINKA (20th), KRIVOI ROG (26th) and SNITKOV (28th).

Unoverprinted stamps clearly continued in use for a while alongside trident-overprinted stamps. The last example I have is from SHATAVA on 21st September,and t the penultimate use of unoverprinted stamps is at DUNAEVTSI on the 8th. These late uses are of stamps on Money Transfers or fragments of them, so they are not examples of private individuals using up stamps.

So I conclude that in Podolia / Podillia trident-overprinted stamps came into use in September 1918 and by the end of the month had largely replaced non-overprinted stamps.

Am I right? Does any reader of this Blog have a clear cancel on a Podillia / Podolia trident before the beginning of September? You can scan me a copy at trevor@trevorpateman.co.uk. Thanks in advance!

POSTSCRIPT 23 AUGUST 2010: In his Ukraine Handbook for Podolia, Dr Ceresa illustrates two Money Transfer Forms sent from LETICHEV POD. on 27.8.18 with mixed frankings of overprinted and unoverprinted stamps. This pushes back the date for introduction of Podilian Tridents into August 1918. That is coherent with the August date given for Trident introduction by Bulat in his catalog for several other districts: Kyiv (page 7), Kharkiv (page 38), Katerynoslav (page 46), Poltava (page 74). He does not give a date for Odesa or Podillia.

A Very Big Job for Serious Russian - area Philatelists...

The break up of the Soviet Union transformed the philatelic world. Large quantities of material became available in Western Europe and America, as well as in the former Soviet Union itself, much of it never seen before or never in such quantities. But much of what is now coming out - or being recycled from the USA onto ebay - is newly faked but using as the basis genuine stamps, covers and documents which themselves only became recently available. Alongside this material, old fakes have been given a new lease of life: on his new website [see link at bottom of this Blog] Stefan Berger illustrates the quite extraordinary prices being achieved on ebay for dreadful, amateurish old Armenian fakes. Goodness knows what people will pay for the new and better ones!

It is a big challenge for the collector journals. Unfortunately, not all of them realise how serious is the challenge they face. I have now seen articles in three of the heavyweight "academic" collector journals (all of them North American, as it happens) promoting as "discoveries" doubtful or downright forged material. It is precisely because these enthusiastic articles are profusely illustrated that one can reasonably suspect that something is very wrong.

Everyone likes to make a discovery and everyone can think they have made a discovery when they have simply been duped. We shouldn't be too hard on the collectors. But the Editors of the journals need to be much more alert to the current range of problems. "Discoveries" have to be properly researched, put into context, assessed for probability and plausibility. In some cases, very simple "forensic" tests will demolish a "discovery"; the date is wrong, the cancellation does not stand up to comparison with other known examples, the basic stamp is wrong for that overprint, there is a hinge on the back of this rare stamp on this cover .... Those forensic tests are simply not being conducted and it shows.

We need more dedicated sites like Stefan Berger's, which address just one country and one period. We need one for Zemstvos. We need one for Ukraine. We need many for the old Soviet Union!

ARTAR or Zakiyan? Armenian revenue overprints

I have always believed that when the Paris printers Chassepot prepared the first pictorial stamps of Armenia in 1920, they despatched only the low values in the Eagle design to Yerevan. By the time they got to print the high values in two colours, the Dashnak regime had collapsed. The high value stamps were remaindered from Paris, which is why they are more common in Europe than the low values, many of which had been despatched to Yerevan. (For the later crude Reprints, all values are equally common).

This story would explain why Christopher Zakiyan, in his book Armenia: Postage Stamps, Fiscal Stamps, Postage Cancels (Yerevan 2003, pages 63ff)lists Soviet fiscal overprints on only the 1,5,10 and 15 rouble Chassepot stamps, which are also the only values which appear on the documents he illustrates (There is an unexplained mystery about what happened to the 3 rouble Chassepot stamp).

In the ARTAR catalog, it seems that the same account is going to be accepted from the text on page 126, but then on page 132, we are shown fiscal overprints on all the high value stamps with accompanying high valuations (minimum $450). But if the conventional wisdom is correct, these high value stamps were not available for overprinting because they had not been sent to Yerevan. So any fiscal overprint on these stamps, whether Originals or Reprints, must be a fake. (On page 131, ARTAR also lists the 3 rouble with fiscal overprint and also gives it a $450 valuation).

These overprints on high values were first announced to the philatelic world in an article by Joseph Ross ("Armenian Revenue Stamps and their Uses", The Post-Rider, No 41, 1997, pages 40 - 48). I replied in issue 49 of the same journal (November 2001, page 111). By this time I had seen actual examples of the overprints on the high values, all of which were identical in terms of frame line breaks and so on. From this I concluded that they had been digitally produced on the basis of a scan from just one stamp. Examples I saw included ones on reprints, so necessarily fakes. These stamps had all come from one source in the USA. All were mint, as are all those illustrated by both Joseph Ross and ARTAR.

The conservative and, I believe correct, position is this: there is no good evidence for the existence of fiscal overprints on the Chassepot high values. The best information we have is against the possibility. The stamps listed at page 132 of ARTAR must be fakes. The listing given by Zakiyan in his 2003 book should be retained.

As a general point: Armenian revenue stamps of this 1918 - 23 period are actually more common on documents than as loose stamps. Mint stamps are rare. This is because most examples remained locked in Armenian archives until around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. At that time, quite large quantities of documents became available in Europe and America.

Some of those documents were subsequently "enhanced" by the addition of fiscal stamps, sometimes genuine stamps, sometimes fakes. For example, I have seen a fake fiscal overprint on a 10 rouble Chassepot REPRINT attached to an authentic document. Such a pity: a nice document and a crude fake!