Forgeries Of Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, 1921?

Does anyone know how to detect forgeries of this series (SC 177-186, Mi 151-3 and 156-161)? Tyler, Focus On Forgeries, gives good indicators for the "Symbols of Agriculture" design, but nothing for any of the other three designs (two examples here). Haven't been able to find any help in other sources or online.

Ged Sieflow in Rossica, 131, October 1998, pages 78-85 describes The Forgeries of the RSFSR's Second Standard Issue.

https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00020235/00072/81j

https://www.rossica.org/

Thanks, rogdcam. Those are great resources. I'll spend time there today. Will post what I learn.

I never knew these issues had been forged. This raises a general question in my mind. I understand why stamps such as the French navigation and commerce series for the colonies were forged to make these issues more widely available to collectors. There is also obvious incentive to create forgeries of scarce stamps.

But why would someone bother to create forgeries of common stamps like these Russian issues?

As the author notes in the linked article the forgeries are rather rare birds because they were produced to cheat the post office and genuine stamps far outnumber forgeries.

Thanks again, rogdcam. That Rossica article answered all my questions.




Rogdcam is right about this series, but in general a great many low value, common stamps were forged for the philatelic market, especially for what's known as the packet trade: forgeries filling out quantities sold in bulk, often to novice collectors

Yeah, just look at the French Colonies issues from the first half of the 20th century. There were almost as many forgeries printed for the packet trade as there were genuine printed for the collector market. :)

A more detail respond to Forgeries and why ?
The first forgeries were made to cheat the postal system . You first find those stamps to cheat the postal system in the Italian States . Many of these are rare and worth more than the original government stamps .

The second type of forgeries were for wealth collectors at the turn of the century . These were highly crafted forgeries and were done as art work mostly very few copies were made and even today are prized by collectors.

NOW TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTION ----- As stamp collecting became popular , Stamp firms started to make printed stamp albums . Printing these albums collectors enjoyed having pictures of which stamps belong to which country ,sort of a road map of which stamps belong on which page . Since album makers had no idea which stamps were common and which were rare and issued in low numbers . So they went to a few collectors and design their pages . Well what happen some of the stamps were not easy to get ,again how would they know what is floating around as common stamps .
As collecting stamps was increasing ,collectors wanted stamps to fill their pages and wanted the stamps that filled the pictures in their album was the trend and popular .
Dealers understood this "fill the album space stamp collecting " With some of those pictures they were really difficult stamps to get ,So dealers started to get people who would print those stamps that fit the albums . That is when you seen the explosion of forgeries . You see this with German States , Iran and many others were forgeries are real plentyful .

It goes back to the early album makers had no way to know which stamps were easy to get and which stamps were outside the album buyers price range .