Detecting Forgeries

Lobko's Catalog is one of the best references for differentiating forgeries and fantasies from the legitimate item.

If an overprinted Soviet stamp or provisional stamp design is not featured in Lobko's catalog, then there's a very strong possibility that the stamp is bogus.

According to Lobko's catalog, the main indicator of legitimacy is the paper making up the provisional.

The paper on which overprints were made was manufactured in the former Soviet Union and Ukraine. The technolgy used to manufacture this paper insured that, when examined over a light, pulp filaments all ran in one direction. Paper rolls were cut in such a fashion that filament direction coincided with the longest part of the page. Widespread sampling has shown that all provisional issues shown in this catalog were made on paper with vertical filaments.

Envelope manufacturing technology differed: it printed text, illustrations, and imprinted stamps at an angle to the filaments in the paper. Thus, all overprints/surchages that were made on envelopes display filaments running at an angle of approximately 45-55 degrees. Therefore, provisional stamps with angled filaments were not prepared on a sheet, but instead cut from an envelope that had the same provisional marking. All such stamps are forgeries.