Guthrum

30 Nov 2015
10:05:43am

My small album examining the history of Stalin's purges is complete - it's on eleven pages and consists of fifty stamps (with an additional four missing which I've been unable to source).

It has inevitably taken the form of a series of illustrated biographies - not a format I'm that keen on for a stamp collection; as I wrote previously, it can look too much like a potted Wikipedia entry illustrated by the very same images you get on the real Wikipedia.

However, there seems little alternative. For obvious reasons the Soviet Union preferred not to dwell on Stalin's crimes of the 1930s, and the stamps in this album appeared fitfully and without obvious fanfare over a period of thirty years following Khrushchev's de-Stalinisation policy at the 20th Party Congress. I have not found any rationale behind the choice of subjects: they range from what seem like entirely innocent (if unwise) writers who were rather too nationalistic for their own good, to villains of the most appalling stripe such as Pavel Dybenko (who gets two stamps). As a coda, my final page is devoted to the evidently blameless rocket scientist Sergey Korolyov, whose main claim to fame postdated his internment in the Kolyma Gulag and dreadful treatment at the hands of the NKVD, and who is represented by colourful and rather large 'space' stamps.

Decisions had to be made about page layout: balancing the number and position of the stamps with the accompanying biographies of their subjects. Again, I never like too much writing on a page, but this album has resisted my efforts at containment.

I like to produce a title page for each album (and often each section within a larger collection), so here is the present effort.



All my attempts to produce a legible album page scan at the required size have come to grief. The image below - rather obviously taken with a flash camera! - gives an idea of the layout used for most of the album. I promise you it's better than any of the scans I came up with!

 
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nigelc

30 Nov 2015
06:15:02pm

re: The Great Terror - concluded

Hi Guthrum,

This seems an interesting project. Congratulations on bringing it so far.

I wondered whether you had included Feodor Chuchin, the soviet philatelist who was a victim of the purges around 1941/1942.

I don't know of any stamps with his picture but there were at least two official USSR postal stationery items that commemorated him.

 
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re: The Great Terror - concluded

Guthrum

I do like your effort. Much better than a straight stamp collection and not as twee as a conventional thematic effort which often tries to do too much and ends up not doing anything particularly well - and has a good educational content. I do like to be educated - it lifts the hobby above mere accumulation.

It really deserves a wider audience. I am not keen on competitive exhibits as they are often vehicles to display either the owners wealth or tortuous nitpicking mind. It is a shame that exhibitions don't have non-competitive exhibits that illustrate some original "takes" on stamps like yours.

Malcolm

 
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Guthrum

06 Dec 2015
04:32:19pm

re: The Great Terror - concluded

Thank you, gentlemen, for your kind comments above! I shall try to upload this modest collection to the 'exhibits' part of the website, although as I have mentioned above I have difficulty in obtaining a decent scan. I don't know whether that is because I have too modest a scanner, or whether I am simply not using it to best effect.

Ideally, to lift these pages beyond the 'illustrated biography' level I would need to find answers to two further questions:

1. On what grounds were these men rehabilitated by Khrushchev?

2. Why was it decided to issue stamps featuring these particular men, and not others who were also rehabilitated?

To the first question the Wikipedia entries which form the basis of all my data never explain the answers, giving merely the fact and usually the year. I suspect I would need to access Russian archives (where available) or Russian-language biographies. To the second question the answer (if it is not random) may be buried within the minutes of the committee which selected the issues, but I doubt these have been made public.

I believe there are some displays at Stampex which allow a cabinet or two of non-competitive pages, but I'm not sure I'm sufficiently ambitious to submit what I have to whatever panel selects these. (Anyway there are still those four annoying blanks!) I'm happy enough that anyone on SOR has enjoyed the sample above, and look forward to my next project. This could be:

1. the run of 17 Soviet WW2 generals issued in monochrome recess from 1973-1988, the last one missing, dammit!, or

2. the twelve series of Russian war heroes, made annually from 1960 to 1971.

Watch this space!

 
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smauggie

14 Jan 2016
08:42:51am

re: The Great Terror - concluded

That's a lovely page and and a topic worthy of note.

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Guthrum

14 Jan 2016
12:40:31pm

re: The Great Terror - concluded

Indeed, this was the source of much of the material in my Dubasov articles (see the relevant pages elsewhere on this website). I don't know whether the proceedings of Khrushchev's rehabilitation committee (if such a body ever existed) were ever made public, but somehow I doubt it.

Beyond Wikipedia links, we're into the realms of Jstor and other subscription repositories of learned journals (and, I suspect, much untranslated material in Russian). I managed to copy a (very) few articles on stamp design from these sources while I was doing my MA in military history, but no longer have such access.

There may be academic publications on this subject, too, but I have not looked into that.

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re: The Great Terror - concluded

Recently joined the club and while browsing found this thread.
I should say you've got very interesting and unexpected look at the Soviet stamps. It really opened for me a new side of Soviet philately. I thought about portrait stamps as of rather boring. Now my life will never be the same
But I did not find your collection in exhibit area. Are you planning to do so?

Thank you and best regards,

Stanislav

 
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Guthrum

24 Nov 2017
11:14:43am

re: The Great Terror - concluded

A slightly longer time-frame than I was expecting, but perhaps nothing will change over the next 100 years...

The problem is establishing who was responsible for boosting Khrushchev's image in this way. Was there a diktat from the Kremlin specifying who would or would not appear on stamps (and if so, what official in what department was responsible), or were these entirely 'in-house' decisions from DIEZPO of which the Kremlin might or might not eventually approve, rather as the Queen presumably still has the power to veto British stamp designs? (This sort of question is difficult enough to answer in regard to any country, let alone the Soviet Union.)

Is Russia the only country whose stamps reflect political motivations? If we accept the proposition that postage stamps are/were part of the routine consciousness of a mass of population, then postal usage might give us a clue as to how well any propaganda effect is working. If, on the other hand, these productions were mainly seen by stamp collectors and seldom used postally, then perhaps the philatelists were the target all along - a sort of 'intelligentsia' (if we accept that stamp collectors in any country are more or less intelligent!) whose opinion was worth influencing.

Or we might believe that the entire business was a knee-jerk procedure lacking any cunning forethought or outcome analysis. A bit, you might think, like current British stamp production...

 
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