Russian society of shipping and trade and struggle over the monopoly of foreign trade in philatelic materials in Soviet Russia in the first half of the 1920s
Authors: Yakub A. V. 
Published: October 2024

Using the example of archival materials related to the postage stamps of the Russian Shipping and Trade Society, the problem of interdepartmental interaction and struggle between various state bodies in the field of establishing control over the right of monopoly disposal of philatelic stocks within the country and abroad is considered. Established in 1856 with the center in Odesa with strong political and financial support from the government, the Russian Society of Shipping and Trade (ROPiT) quickly turned into a powerful tool for restoring Russian influence in the Black Sea region after the end of the Crimean War. At the second stage of ROPiT's activity, from 1865 to 1878, when the balance of interests between the owners of the company was finally established, the members of the board and the leadership of the Odesa administration managed to create the best option for managing the shipping company not only in terms of profitability, but also in terms of the possible use of ROPiT's material resources in new likely international conflicts in the Black Sea basin. One of the elements of this balance of interests between the state and society was the organization, under the control of the central post office of Russia, of a special system of postal communications, including special postage stamps used for processing postal correspondence transported on ROPiT ships. The First World War, the revolutions of 1917, and the Civil War on the territory of the former Russian Empire had a serious impact both on the activities of the Society itself and on its right to manufacture postage stamps. A huge number of the latter were produced by different administrations in Odesa. After the liberation of Odesa by the Red Army and the final establishment of Soviet power in the city and province, probably some number of ROPiT stamps remained in the warehouses of the property of the Society that finally passed into the hands of the state. The total amount of the denominations of the preserved postage stamps of ROPiT, according to the assessment of the Department of Affairs of the NKPS, formulated in a note sent to the Central Executive Committee of the RSFSR on December 5, 1922, amounted to 3.5 trillion rubles in banknotes of 1922. It was around these stocks, apparently, that the struggle between the Central Committee of the Pomgol VTsIK and the NKPS in the person of its subsidiary Chernomortran, located in Odesa, unfolded. This confrontation turned out to be closely connected with one of the key principles of the organization of foreign trade in the Soviet state, the principle of monopoly of foreign trade. Different interpretations of this principle eventually led to the fact that the main institutions of the RSFSR - the VTsIK and the SNK - were involved in solving this problem with the philatelic reserves of the ROPiT. Thus, this particular episode of the interdepartmental struggle over the philatelic stocks of postal payment marks of the former ROPiT indicates that the problem of forming a foreign trade monopoly mechanism required the leadership of Soviet Russia not only to pay close attention to maintaining full state control over the likely sources of gold and foreign exchange income, but also to actively overcome the parochial interests of some individual leaders of the national economy, sometimes pursuing their own, selfish goals.