The Emperor’s Mail Synopsis Purpose of the exhibit. All Imperial Russian postal history exhibits to this point have concerned themselves with some aspect of the general postal system, i.e., that part of it to which large segments of the population were subjected (like censorship, for instance) or had access, such things as postage stamps and stationery, the various postal services offered to the public, railroad and ship mail, the zemstvo posts, and so forth. This postal history exhibit, however, addresses a comparatively tiny but critical part of Russia’s Post, a part that under the tsars initially served only a few hundred people at most, Muscovy’s innermost circle. It is the first of its kind to do this, and traces how the list of those who benefited from this exclusive service expanded, first from the Emperor and his extended family (and some tutors and personal secretaries) to the Imperial Court and a few of his ministers, and then, under the duress of war, even to foreign diplomats and attachés. Finally, after tsardom’s overthrow, this postal service began handling government and diplomats’ mail in general. The period it covers extends from the 1820s to 1917 – the end of the Provisional Government that had replaced the autocracy. No examples of a Soviet postal counterpart have been recorded for the RSFSR. As a counterbalance, the exhibit also delves into other chancelleries maintained by Imperial family members that did not qualify for special privileges due to the nature of the mail they handled. Importance of the exhibit. The subject is important for the fact that this was an elite and highly efficient postal service supporting the topmost rung of Russia’s government and Court. Difficulty of acquisition. Given the very limited “clientele,” the items shown here range from scarce to one known, with the exception of petitions and pleas for money from peasants and petty bourgeois to the Tsar, which are relatively common. Research. Primary sources are remarkably reticent about this postal service, usually limiting themselves to the fact of its existence and perhaps a barebones listing of its functions, which in many cases are borne out by the philatelic record. Secondary sources in Russian and English are limited to a small number of facts and a lot of educated guesswork based on empirical evidence. We do not know exactly how this mail was received or delivered or how it was processed and recorded. The situation is further exacerbated by the fact that we are not even certain of when the Postal Director’s Office itself was established. (See below under Outline of the Exhibit.) Highlights of the exhibit include: page 3/2 (3rd 11x17” page, second item) - a discovery of the Postal Director’s Office Type 1b date stamp, recorded here for the first time; page 4/1 – a Type 3 “cross-date” postmark. With their short six-year range, these are very rare. Page 5/1, a postcard handled by the Imperial Mail Delivery Section (IMDS) with two-country franking; page 6/1, an envelope mailed from the IMDS to a foreign military officer, and using a date stamp with the now-obsolete “St. Petersburg” (extremely rare usage); page 7/1, a pre-printed postal stationery envelope from the Imperial Petition Office, bearing its paper seal (only known example); page 7/2, a postal waybill for mail addressed to the Emperor. This was part of a small trove of postal documents apparently “liberated” from the Vil’na Post Office by the advancing Germans in WWI, and is thought to be unique.
Outline of the Exhibit. The exhibit is structured around two major periods and three distinct iterations of the “special office,” and accounts for all seven known 1 postmark types from the 1860s on, the first time all of them have been shown under one title. I.
Imperial Mail in the First Half of the XIX Century. (Prior to the advent of the Postal Director’s Office (PDO) circular date stamps. A “special chancellery” was established in 1824 under Postmaster General Golitsyn, and it is suspected that this might have been the beginning of the PDO. It may also have started during a major postal reform in 1830, but there is no hard evidence.
II.
The “Special Office” and Its Postmarks. (Period covered: 1870s to 1917.) A. The Postal Director’s Office. (From 1864 to 1907. Encompasses four postmark types.) B. The Imperial Mail Delivery Section. (From 1908 to 1917. Two types, St. Petersburg and Petrograd. Also addressed here is Imperial mail that was not handled by the IMDS, due to the high mail volume.) C. The Government and Diplomatic Mail Delivery Section. (Under Kerensky’s Provisional Government in 1917, essentially an eight-plus-month period that was the aftermath to the IMDS; the functions were essentially the same, but it was no longer “the Emperor’s mail.” One type.) Bibliography:
Adler, Kurt, More Scarce Postmarks, in British Journal of Russian Philately #19, December 1955, pp. 580-581. Baillie, Ian L.G. & Eric G. Peel, St. Petersburg: The Imperial Post – its postmarks and other postal markings, 1765-1914, The British Society of Russian Philately, Chancery House Press, Beckenham, England, 2001. Dobin, Manfred, Postmarks of Russian Empire (pre-adhesive period), Standard Collection, St. Petersburg, 1993. Dobin, M.A. & L.G. Ratner, From the History of the Saint-Petersburg Post, 1703-1914, Standard-Collection, St. Petersburg, 2004, pp. 83, 116, 151. Imhof, Heinrich, Die Poststempelformen in St. Petersburg von 1766-1914, Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft RUSSLAND/UDSSR im BDPh e.V., Bad Berleburg, 1976. Lamoureux, Marcel, A Postmark of the Imperial Chancellery, in Rossica #96/97, 1979, pp. 117-118. Skipton, David M., The Emperor’s Mail, in Rossica #113/114, 1990, pp. 32-55. Tann, Leonard, More on the St. Petersburg State Chancellery Postmark, in Rossica #137, Fall 2001, pp. 15-16.
1
Manfred Dobin, who had access to a number of postal and related archives in Russia, lists two St. Petersburg postmarks that he attributes to the Postal Director’s Office, with usages from 1844 to 1847 and 1856 to 1858, respectively. However, he offers neither illustrations of examples on cover nor any citations from official sources to demonstrate that the postmarks in question were reserved exclusively for Imperial mail and never used on correspondence to or from much lesser lights. Worse yet, in one book – Postmarks of Russian Empire (sic) – the two postmarks that Dobin identifies as being from the “special office” are not the same as the two he identifies in another book that he co-authored (From the History of the Saint Petersburg Post), yet the usage ranges are almost exactly the same, differing by one year. Given the confusion and the lack of documentation, those two postmarks – whichever they are – are ignored in this exhibit.