Russian Stamps with Spitsbergen Overprint

The immediate post-USSR era is a giant mess for us stamp collectors!  Here are two articles which could help a reader to understand the overall situation.  First, a good summary in Linn's Stamp News.  There's a quote in there which is a handy way of summarizing the whole deal: "The challenge of collecting, classifying and winnowing the wheat from the chaff of overprinted Soviet stamps is either the opportunity of a lifetime or an impenetrable philatelic quagmire, depending on your point of view."

Next, a post from the FMF Stamp Project blog - it's not entirely correct, certainly stamps from Alderney and Åland are actually used for mailing letters and are well beyond the status of being cinderellas.  Nonetheless, there are a lot of examples there so it's nice to look at the pictures, at least.

There are some overprinted small-sized late-era USSR stamps which were genuinely used and are found in the Scott catalogue (for example, many of the early Uzbekistan stamps) so you can't automatically assume that everything is junk.  However, I don't know of any of the 4-stamps-per-overprint type of thing which were ever legitimate.

Ryan