A zemstvo was a rural administrative district in nineteenth century imperial Russia. Many zemstvos issued their own postage stamps from 1865 until 1917. Collecting zemstvo postage stamps is a particularly interesting and busy area of Russian stamps collecting — new and unknown issues are still unearthed from time to time, and there is a huge variety to choose from.
The designs on zemstvo stamps tend to be fairly simple — quite often nothing more than an uncomplicated design and some text. A working knowledge of the Cyrillic alphabet is very helpful when shopping for zemstvo stamps. The Cyrillic word for zemstvo, incidentally, was previously written as зѣмство but is now written земство.
Zemstvo stamps have appealed to collectors for over a century, and a standard catalog of them is the Chuchin catalog, which lists over 150 different areas of Russia that issued these stamps. Working towards a complete set can be a fun lifetime goal for a stamp collector.
