michael78651
20 Apr 2015
01:06:03am | re: Russian Die Proofs
That set is a hard one to figure out if you don't know or can't speak Russian. Who would think it is a semi-postal set? Special delivery, parcel post, yes, something like that seems to make better sense from what is depicted on the stamps.
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Guthrum
20 Apr 2015
04:05:27am | re: Russian Die Proofs
Good work, Adam, for using a search-engine translator for 'golodayushchim'. If there are any Russian speakers in this group they haven't identified themselves, but if you are going to collect Russia then making a note of the Cyrillic alphabet is a great help (I made a set of flash cards which I flick through from time to time when my computer is slow!).
Here is the complete set. You'll see that there is no value indicated - owing, as Stanley Gibbons explains, "... to the rapid fluctuations of the rouble". (Remember Vera Dubasov's boots cost a billion of them!) The catalogue designation is "Famine Relief" - I wonder if golodayushchim is the blunter, more direct word that the automatic translation suggests.
This pre-Soviet period ("R.S.F.S.R.") is interesting to collect and you can make a good start on some very cheap sets. You should be able to pick up that aeroplane easily enough. I haven't found out how successful these stamps were in raising funds for famine relief, but the availability of mint sets suggests they might not have been.
Lastly, as with so many Russian stamps, there can be uncomfortable echoes. This set is dated 18th November 1922. Ten years on there was another, more terrible famine, deliberately engineered by the Stalin regime. It is known as the Holodomor. Countless millions died; Ukrainians remembered it when the Germans came through in 1941, and you may be sure they do not forget it today.
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