Today I saw Michel's specialized Russia catalogue. While I was leafing through it, I started to wonder what the use of this catalogue was. In my opinion, any Russia collector cannot be anything else than disappointed because:
- it only contains Russia, meaning Soviet Union is not included
- all areas normally associated with Russia are excluded, like Armenia, Azerbaijan, Transcaucasian rep., Ukraine... as well as the post-Soviet Union/GOS states after the Soviet Union fell apart.
- no zemstvo's (although that is a collecting area that is normally ignored, but one would expect / hope it was included in a "specialized" catalogue).
So why would anyone wish to spend 69 euros for such a flawed catalogue? Is the information about the pre-1917 period and the post 1990 period that good that it warrants its purchase? Or is this a retorical question...
A neo-Stalinist gesture, wiping out the USSR at one stroke, even as the purged elements of bourgeois formalism were removed from 1930s photographs - combined with an anti-Putinist gesture warning him off certain Europhile sovereign states! That's a lot of gesture for a German catalogue company, but the propaganda drive to correct the mind of the average collector from Moscow to Vladivostok starts here!
I do understand why they've opted out the Soviet years and the Republics. It would have made a seriously thick volume (something that Michel seems to be striving away with exception of Deutchland Spezial).
