Forgotten Ukraine Trident collections

Just as most novels are forgotten and we remember only the novels of the great writers, so most collections are forgotten and we remember only the names of the great collectors.

 But the forgotten novels and the forgotten collections provided an important context for the work of the major novelists and collectors.

They learnt from them and they provided inspiration for them.

 Ukraine trident collecting was a serious area of philatelic activity from 1918 until (say) the 1950s. As late as 1960, the Ukraine - Philatelisten - Verband (U.P.V.)in Germany had 84 members with Oskar Peters and Rudolf Seichter as Honorary members and such "ordinary" members as Gustav Seefeldner, Waldemar Pohl, Julian Maksymczuk, Eugene Kotyk, Cecil Roberts, Simon Tchilingirian, and John Bulat.

 Recently, the collection of another UPV member from that period, Philipp Schmidt, re-appeared after maybe thirty years in storage and was sold at auction by Christian Arbeiter in Bamberg. Schmidt was born in 1900, and became an engineer living in Munich.

He was collecting Trident overprints at least as far back as 1943 - see how he writes to Dr Seichter to ask about the Kyiv I overprint in black on the 10 rouble imperforate (Bulat 49a). Dr Seichter replies on the back of the half sheet of paper (this was war-time!).

 Collections of the "second rank" like those of Schmidt provide useful information about what was available to someone whose collection would never equal that of Dr Seichter but was nonetheless a serious collector. They also sometimes contain surprises - things which even Dr Seichter might have been pleased to have.

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Postscript 1 October 2012: I discover I have an envelope (without contents) sent from Dr Seichter in Soltau to Philipp Schmidt in Munich postmarked 25 1 37, so I assume Schmidt had already begun collecting Ukraine at this date - and [ added 17 April 2015] Michael Kuhn has now found this cover from Schmidt to Dr Seichter which takes their connection back to 1932 when (interestingly) Schmidt (an engineer) seems to have been working in Soviet Ukraine:

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

Russia 1990s Inflation

Commercial covers can be more exotic than anything fabricated by philatelists. The three shown here must have involved an awful lot of work. If you think philatelists are obsessive, what about the guys who franked these covers?

601600 ALEXANDROV VLADIM.O[blast]. 16 04 93 to VÖRU [Estonia] 15 05 93 franked 1991 Reprints of 1984 Soviet 3 rouble definitives, 4 on the front and 30 on the back (= 102 roubles) + a possible but unlikely contribution from the 7 kopeck imprint and the unclear kopeck uprating beside it

432002 ULYANOVSK 08 04 93 to VÖRU 27 4 93 franked 44 x 900 kopeck cut-outs (totalling 396 roubles) from a Soviet-period franking machine. At this period, some offices modified their franking machines by scratching out "KOP" at the base and inserting "RUB".

The Winner at the top of this Blog:

390072 NOVOVORONEZH 05 03 92 to VILNIUS [Lithuania] 10 04 92 franked - as far as I can tell - with 148 x 10 kopeck stamps which are cancelled together with 2 x 1 kopeck stamps which may have been originally applied to uprate the postal stationery envelope and have probably been ignored - or which may have been silently revalued to 10 kopecks to complete what was intended as a 15 rouble franking.

Armenian Overprints on Turkish Fiscals?

In collections and accumulations of world-wide fiscals, you quite often find old stamps with Arabic inscriptions "overprinted" typographically in Armenian script.

These are in fact Ottoman Turkish newspaper tax stamps which were applied to the sheets of news - paper before printing took place. This can be seen on the example here of a complete 1887 newspaper which consists of four broadsheet sides of print on a single sheet of large news - paper

The newspaper is AREVELK published at Galata, Constantinople, by Han Noradounghian. It was founded as a daily newspaper in 1884 by Arpiar Arpiarian and was published continuously until 1915. It is probably the source of most of those fiscals found in old collections.

Katerynoslav Tridents: Work to Do?

Trident collectors will know that Katerynoslav Type I was (normally) applied in a horizontal handstamp holding five Tridents clichés, so that 20 impressions were required to overprint a sheet of 100 kopeck value stamps. But how many handstamps were there? And were they modified when a Trident fell out or deteriorated?

Bulat (page 46) illustrates just ONE handstamp of 5 but says that there were THREE different handstamps. Dr Seichter in a 1956 pamphlet says that "ungefähr 70 verschiedene Kombinationen" [about 70 different combinations] have been identified - not by him but (from the context) by C W Roberts. However, Seichter even in this specialised publication just about Katerynoslav illustrates just TWO variants: a "feiner Aufdruck" and a "grober Aufdruck" - a thin and a thick overprint, roughly as illustrated above from my holding of these Tridents.

Well, frankly, this is not impressive. These stamps are not rare even in multiples and it ought to be possible to produce a guide which gives us the same kind of information as we have for Kyiv II or Poltava I.

It may be that there were actually a small number of physically distinct handstamps but that individual clichés in the handstamp were frequently replaced due to them falling out or because of wear. In this way, THREE and SEVENTY might be brought closer together.

I am not going to do the work. If someone is interested, I have here an accumulation (ex Zelonka) of 22 complete sheets, representing 22 of the 26 values overprinted including the 35 kopeck perforated and imperforate. Some of the sheets are a bit toned. Anyway, the Bulat catalogue value is around $2870 for the basic stamps (no premium added for the multiples). I reckon 500 €uro a reasonable price for the Lot. And if a buyer succeeds in making progress on classifying the Handstamps, then he or she is invited to announce the results on this Blog to tell us how many Katerynoslav I handstamps there really are.... Get in touch if you are interested ( I may not reply before 112 September).

Transcaspia, Bukhara, Khiva and Tashkent before 1924

You come across postal material from Russian Central Asia so infrequently that you forget the geography and the history between one item and the next.

I have just tried to improve my background knowledge by reading Seymour Becker's Russia's Protectorates in Central Asia, Bukhara and Khiva 1865 - 1924 . This is an old book (1968) re-issued in 2004 with minimal changes. So it does not make use of any archive material released after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, I found it interesting and helpful.

For example, it gave me an explanation of why stamps with Bukharan (and to a lesser extent) Khivan cancellations are quite common - compared to previous periods - from the period of the First World War and even immediately after. The War disrupted the supply of American cotton to Russia. As a result, Russia turned to Bukhara and Khiva and their cotton production very significantly increased after 1914. So there would have been more commercial mail.

Becker's brief account of the evolution of Bukhara and Khiva in the years immediately after the Bolshevik revolution, when short-lived People's Soviet Republics replaced the Emirate and the Khanate, also helps situate the popular Bukharan fiscal stamps of this period and the rare stamps, apparently prepared for postal use, which come from Khorezm (as Khiva was briefly re-named).

In the Imperial period, Russian fiscal stamps would have been used in enclaves and activities under Russian jurisdiction. But neither the Khan of Khiva or the Emir of Bukhara used fiscal stamps in their own jurisdictions which were, for most of the nineteenth century, without any kind of printing shops.

Before the fall of the Romanovs, neither Bukhara or Khiva ran independent postal or telegraphic services; these were provided by Imperial Russia and stamps used in Khiva and Bukhara are classified as "Used Abroad" (for example, in Part Three of Tchilingirian and Stephen's Stamps of the Russian Empire Used Abroad (1958)). But as supposedly independent people's republics, from 1920 to 1923, both Khiva and Bukhara operated independent post and telegraph services, though how extensive those services were I do not know.

The Bukharan fiscals of the early Soviet period belong in the context of the modernisation of Bukhara's independent administration.(I am always a willing buyer for these stamps)

From the period before 1900, and except for Tashkent, material from Central Asia is pretty scarce. Someone had to point out to me the significance of the cover below. It was sent from MERV ZAKASPS OB[last] 6 NOV 1888 to Finland. Well, Merv [Mary] an oasis of a few thousand people in the fairly lawless and Turkoman Kara Kum desert was only annexed by Russia in 1884. The Central Asian railroad from Krasnovodsk through Ashkabad only reached Merv in 1886, so this is a very early cover from the interior of the Transcaspian Oblast.

Baku Court Revenue Stamps before 1917

I don't enjoy plating stamps, but I make an exception for Baku Court Fiscals. They were printed in vertical strips of six, like raffle [lottery] tickets - on the left was a counterfoil [receipt] and on the right the stamps. The stamps are always imperforate on the right side. The stamp in # 1 position is also imperforate at top and the stamp in position # 6 is also imperforate at the base. So, in fact, there are really only four stamps to plate :)

Complete strips do exist, but if you do not have them, you can still plate using overlapping smaller multiples. This is how I worked when I first acquired a stock of these stamps about 15 years ago - see an example of my working notes above showing how I used overlapping pairs as the basis.

In a 1996 article, Jack Moyes listed 13 different styles, all produced in the lottery ticket format, but only four of these are normally encountered - these are the ones shown at the top. In all cases, the counterfoils (the left hand parts) are rare - I have never handled a single example. Complete documents with these stamps are also rare which is the main reason why it is not easy to date the different types accurately. Cancellations are generally undated so little information is available that way. But with patience, it might be possible to make more progress.

At some point, it seems, someone clipped hundreds of these stamps from original documents and they ended up (inevitably!) in the collection of Agathon Fabergé. He passed them to his son Oleg, who did not do much work on them, and from Oleg they passed to the great collector of Finnish revenue stamps, B. E. Saarinen who died this year at the age of 90. He sold his Russian revenue collection many years ago and I was (eventually) one of the buyers for parts of it.

Reference:
Jack G Moyes, "Russia - A Classification of the Baku District Court Stamps", The Revenue Journal of Great Britain, vol VII, No 2, September 1996, pages 27 - 33

Armenia: Postally Used Dashnak Stamps 1919-21

Postally Used Dashnak Stamps? Mission Almost Impossible.

Over the past twenty years, I have handled thousands of Dashnak stamps - and maybe six commercial or philatelic covers and cards, which can only be obtained as expensive single item Lots in auction.

At one point, it occurred to me to look at my stamps and take out any that looked postally used as opposed to Cancelled to Order (Favour cancelled).

CTO stamps normally have neat, full cancels "socked on the nose" or they have neat quarter cancels. Only four places seem to have cancelled to order: Alexandropol, Erivan [ maybe 90% of the total], Elenovka and Katarsky Zavod (the copper mines at Giryusy). The last two places favour cancelled only a tiny number of stamps. Most CTO stamps will have gum but, of course, this can be washed off and sometimes is.

From my stocks, I picked out maybe thirty stamps. A few were on pieces and one had a violet Censor cachet across it. These I sold. The rest are shown above.

Given the Tariffs at this period, you would expect to find mainly rouble value stamps or stamps with rouble surcharges. However, early on there was a 60 kopeck tariff and a 1 rouble 20 tariff. Since there is no 60 kopeck Imperial stamp, then a 50 Kopeck + 10 kopeck would have been an efficient two stamp way of reaching 60 kopecks [ 25 + 35 is also possible but no other combination]. For 1 rouble 20, 1 rouble + 20 kopeck is one of two ways of obtaining that rate; the other is to use two 1 kopeck stamps with 60k Armenian overprints. [At Katarsky Zavod the local 1 r 20 overprint on 1 kopeck would have also served].

This reasoning leaves some puzzles in relation to the stamps shown above which include a 2 kopeck and 3 kopeck imperforate with unframed Z. These stamps could have been soaked from philatelic covers, like those sent by Souren Serebrakian to his brother in Tiflis. These are normally correctly franked, but with a variety of low value adhesives.

I also have some doubts about the 3r on 3 kopeck and 5r on 2 kopeck imperforate shown in the top row on the right. These have ERIVAN "k" cancellations which are associated with the speculative activity of Paul Melik - Pacher / Pachaev / Pachaian about which I have Blogged before. It's possible that these two stamps are also soaked from philatelic covers.

This perhaps shows that though they exist postally used Dashnak stamps are needles in haystacks or hen's teeth.