Can anyone explain to me the massive upward trend of the value of Russian stamps in the past 10 years? I remember years ago just putting them aside because they were basically worthless and working on them when I had the time and liked the colorful issues and largeness of the stamps. Now they seem to be very much in demand rendering high prices. I guess the decline of the dollar has some affect- but against Russian currency?
A collector coming of age in the U.S. in the early years of the Cold War was unlikely even to be aware of Russian stamps. I remember being amazed, in the 1980s, to learn about the existence of Russian stamps like these:
Astrophilatelist- Space Cover Collector 20 Jul 2014 08:32:54am
re: Why explosion of Russian Stamp Values?
I also think one reason for the explosion of Russian stamp values can be partly attributed to the fact many of the early issues were CTO'd and when a print run for a stamp is only one million stsmps, that does not leave many mint stamps left.
I have heard, but I don't recall the source, that ordinary citizens in Russia and Soviet-bloc nations could not normally buy commemorative or pictorial stamps to use as postage. Most of the production was for export to stamp dealers. That's one reason, I assume, that many CTO Russian stamps, at least those from the mid-20th Century, are fairly expensive.
I taught ESL to people from what was then the Soviet Union, and most of them had stamp collections. Knowing I was a collector, they'd show me with pride the stamps they had. Most of us would be aghast at the state of those stamps; watching men with laborer's paws pick up stamps between two gnarled fingers would have made me cringe, except for the love that clearly pulsed through them. I miss my students, and, unfortunately for them, I am sure I learned more from them than they did from me.
This has nothing to do with the explosion in Russian prices, as none of them could have afforded spending real money on stamps, but it shows the breadth of collecting interest among the many peoples, not just the Russians, in the USSR.
David
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