Tag: Russia stamp

The Boy Scouts existed in Russia prior to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. It was however the province of White Russian Scoutmasters. So the Scouts were reimagined to fit the new system. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

The visual on this stamp is not the usual fare. Countries like to put their best foot forward on their stamps. So to see a crime being committed, the hooligan on the right is breaking into a mailbox, is surprising. Thankfully the boy on the left is not a part of the gang but rather a Young Pioneer. So he can be trusted to put a stop to this mischief. If only life was so black and white.

Todays stamp is issue A323, a one Kopec stamp issued by the Soviet Union in April 1936. The 6 stamp issue honors  the Young Pioneer scouting organization. According to the Scott Catalog, the stamp is worth $1. An imperforate pair of this stamp is worth $1650.

In the first years of Communist rule there was much questioning if Scouting should be allowed to continue, Many Scoutmasters were supporters of the Czarist regime and many had fled. Others could not be trusted to train the young to be a part of the new system. Vladimir Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, proposed a new scouting system that would promote communist values. The remaining loyal Scoutmasters proposed that the existing Scouting system be taken over and this was done. The new organization began in 1922 and by the end of the year there was a national organization named the Vladimir Lenin Spartak Young Pioneers Organization.

The organization grew rapidly and was open to girls as well as boys. By 1940 there were nearly 14 million members and by 1974 that number reached 25 million. Most of their activities were standard scouting stuff but there was an overlay of preaching about the greatness of the Communist Party. Last year in America it was considered controversial that President Trump spoke to the Boy Scout National Jamboree, so politics no longer mix with Scouting.

This tie in to the Party proved the organizations undoing. When the Communist Party was dissolved in Russia in 1991, that was also the end of the Young Pioneers. There as been a much smaller revival of the Pioneers in modern Russia and a few of the former Soviet Republics still close with Russia.

Well my drink is empty and I have a special surprise for you. Below is a Soviet film about 10 minutes long about a Pioneer summer camp circa 1940. It is in Russian of course but still easy to follow and a window into a different time. Enjoy. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.

With a long war change was in the air and a provisional government must decide what to keep. Keeping the wrong things lead to further revolution. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

The research on this stamp started out very hopefully. Three and a half rubles was a lot of money at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was an oversized stamp that was well printed. The stamp first came out in 1884. The mint version of that one is $1200. That is very exciting but I better check for a cheaper variation. Sure enough, there is a 1902 version with a slight difference worth $55. Still pretty good but the color is wrong as the early versions of the stamp seem to all be black and grey. Oh no, I better look ahead to see if there was an even later version. I was still confident that it was czarist with the imperial eagle on it. Well not exactly, In 1917, there was a provisional Russian government after the last Czar abdicated, but before the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917. This government had time to issue another new version of the stamp in green and maroon. War and revolution had taken their toll on the economy, and 3.5 rubles wasn’t what it used to be. The 1917 version of the 1884 stamp is only worth $1.10.

World War I went very badly for the already shaky government of Czar Nicholas II. The poor performance and very high casualty rate were blamed personally on the Czar. Since Czarina Alexandra was German and was a patron of a strange mystic named Rasputin, it made the Czar seem aloof, weak and uncaring of the suffering the war was causing. In March 1917 the Czar abdicated and was sent to internal exile. A provisional government was set up under socialist Alexander Kerensky.

Much to the surprise of many of the supporters of the revolution, Kerensky wanted to continue the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary. He thought there was still a duty to Russia’s allies and feared the economic consequence of the cutoff of their support to Russia. Kerensky launched a new offensive against Germany that went very badly. He had fired many of the Czar era officers and nobody was really in charge. The officers mocked Kerensky as a persuader and chief rather than a commander and chief. More than 2 million Russian soldiers deserted.

Kerensky believed he had no enemies on the left of him politically and concentrated on crushing Czarist opposition. After all Kerensky and the Bolshevik leader Lenin were old family friends. The Bolsheviks were not in agreement with Kerensky and sensed his weakness.

1917 saw a second revolution in October. The only military unit in the capital of Saint Petersburg that was willing to fight for the provisional government was a company of a woman’s unit and their resistance was wiped out in a day. Kerensky’s family faired better than the Czars as he was able to escape first to France and later to America. The newly declared Union of Soviet Socialist Republic finally let this stamp with it’s imperial eagle be retired, having been issued in various forms for 33 years.

Well my drink is empty and so I will open the conversation in the below comment section. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.

A beautiful girl dressed like a stewardess, a big creepy black car, an elicit phone call and a patriotic medal. What is this stamp selling? Slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

I gave a partial run down on what is going on on this large stamp. Our Russian readers can read what it is really selling and there are even a few clues on the stamp if you look closely. We know that is really a smokescreen. The communist Soviet system of the time assigned workers where they were needed. Would the system really be so foolish to assign a girl that looks like that to do what the stamp claims? Of course not.

The stamp today is issue A2181, a 4 kopec stamp issued by the Soviet Union on September 16th, 1977. The stamp is alleged to be showing aspects of a certain system in the Soviet Union. I will stick to my argument that this is a smokescreen. According to the Scott Catalog, the stamp is worth 35 cents mint. A stamp that is such a great period piece in China would be worth 100 times that. I know that more stamps were printed for the Soviet Union and that most went straight into the collections of young people. It is past time for Russian collectors to get a hold of this stamp while it is still cheap.

The catalog says the car on the stamp is a Moskvitch 430. I think it is actually a 427. The car does have the version of the grill that was export only. Just the thing to slip across the Finnish border to meet up with your warm and lovely contact. They sold a lot there where it was known as the elite 1500. The engine was hotted up and resembled BMW’s famous four that it predated.

Apropos of nothing, in 1977 Vladimir Putin was a KGB operative and his future wife was a stewardess on Aeroflot where she was awarded the honor of serving on international flights. Putin is known to own period Soviet vintage cars. Neither him nor his then wife had any connection to the Soviet postal service.

Here is the rub. The stamp is really celebrating the postal service. We are to believe that she is a postal supervisor and our dapper young hero in emptying a mail bin into the sack which he will then load into the postal delivery vehicle. If this really is what the stamp is about, I am disappointed. The stamp could have been so much better. That’s right John, believe the smokescreen.

Well my drink is empty and I have probably had enough so I will open the conversation in the below comment section. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be imagined from stamp collecting.

Marx is the father of communism. Russia in 1932 was working to turn communism into a working system for Russians. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your fist sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

Todays stamp displays Trier, Karl Marx’s birthplace in Germany. It is a beautiful ancient city with ruins that go back to Roman times and a large Lutheran Cathedral. It is perhaps for the best that the printing on this stamp is so bad. If Trier’s beauty and prosperity had been better displayed the point of the stamp might have been obscured. Instead of hope for what Marx’s ideas might do for the average Russian, they may wonder what Trier is doing right that the Soviet city of Stalino is doing wrong.

The stamp today is issue A141, a three Kopek stamp issued by the Soviet Union in March 1933. It was part of a 3 stamp issue marking the 50th anniversary of the death of Karl Marx. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth $1.80 used. A mint copy of the 35 Kopek stamp in the issue is worth $67.50 mint.

Marx was born into a well off Jewish family. They were not religious although they converted officially to Lutheranism to avoid anti Semitic rules. His father was a lawyer and owned an interest in several vineyards. His mother was from a rich Dutch Jewish family that founded Philips Electronics. Marx was excused from Prussian military service by claiming a weak chest. He spent a great period of time in higher education pursuing the study of law and philosophy. He married a baroness.

The Soviet Union had been a Communist nation for 15 years. There had been a big push to industrialize and with that a large relocation to the cities. The forced collectivization of the farm land had not gone well and left the cities short of food. Both rural and urban areas were full of strife and shortages. The Soviet leader Stalin was ruthless in trying to bring order. He was also demanding much authority from the Communist Party to stamp out doctrinaire Marxists who might have other ideas as to what needed to be done.

Given this, it seems to be personally revering Marx as a man with a well off non Russian background is strange. Communism is supposed to be about building up the working man and through him building a nation. Thus his ideas should be promoted with special reference to what they can achieve for the average citizen.

That is not what this stamp does. It celebrates the man Karl Marx, who was without a nation or a church. He survived on the patronage of rich friends and family. His ideas were just untried theories. Nothing that will get the Soviet Union through the crisis it faced. There are a lot of stamps like this from Communist countries. Marx thought each country should have a separate communist party. He would probably also agree that their heroes should be local.

Well my drink is empty so I will open up the conversation in the below comment section. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.

Welcome readers to todays offering from The Philatelist. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take the first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. We haven an interesting story to tell. A story of, as the late Casey Casem might have said, of keeping your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars. With of course a stop at Seventh Heaven.

The stamp today is a dramatically tall stamp. As well it should be. How better to depict the then newly opened tallest structure in the world, the Ostankino Television Tower. If that isn’t enough, our Soviet friends threw in an early space satellite, a Tupelov 144 “Concordski” jetliner, and a pretty space age bus I cannot identify. All that is missing is the space age kitchen sink. The Kremlin is also shown to remind you who brought this to you.

Todays stamp is issue A1595, a 4 Kopec stamp issued on November 19th, 1966. It was issued in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the 1917 revolution that brought the Bolshevicks to power and created the Soviet Union from the former Russian Empire. It was the only stamp in the issue. According to the Scott catalog, it is worth 25 cents in its sort of cancelled state.

Lets talk a little bit about what I mean about it’s sort of cancelled state. It is what I like least about the stamp. The stamp as you can see has a near perfect cancellation in it’s bottom corner and yet it also still has gum on the back as it as never been used. The Soviet Union, as well as many Eastern European and African countries, had licensed Mincus, the American stamp dealer, to produce stamps in their name to sell to collectors. Thus the stamp as never seen the Soviet Union. The Philatelist can sort of see why a poor country would sign on to such a thing but that a then superpower would is just beyond me. Should a good communist really sell out for money, even convertible foreign exchange?

Enough about that. Lets bask in all the visual treats that were fitted on this huge stamp. The Ostankino Television Tower is the biggest thing. The tower opened in 1967 after only taking three years to build. It was the tallest structure in the world, 1772 feet high, for eight years until it was surpassed by the CN Tower in Toronto. Besides the television equipment, it housed an observation deck and The Seventh Heaven Restaurant. There was a fire in the tower in 2000 that cost the lives of four fireman and cut tower transmission. The top part of the tower even took on a lean after the fire. Russian President Putin used the incident and a spate of similar mishaps to encourage better preservation of the nations vital facilities. In contrast to three year initial construction, rehabbing the tower took 16 years with the 2016 reopening of The Seventh Heaven Restaurant. The USA apparently is not the only country that can’t build anything anymore.

The Moliniya 1 satellite was also a great success of the Soviet Union that matured in 1967. It was a model of military communication satellite. The type of orbit it flew was great for coverage of northern latitudes and that type of orbit is now called the moliniya orbit after these advanced satellites. Later versions also carried satellite TV to remote areas of the Soviet Union.

This is really a great stamp! Showing all this world class stuff accomplished by the Soviet system is a great way to celebrate 50 years. Many will rightly point out that everyone did not share in this progress and perhaps even that the resources expended would have been better spent on raising the living standard of the average Soviet. Not me, I am a sucker for progress and achievement.

Well, my drink is empty and so it is time to open up the conversation in the below comment section. Do any of our Russian readers or lucky tourist know how the view from the tower is or how the food is at The Seventh Heaven? Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.