Paper seals. Service stamps. Oblatki

Paper seals (“oblatki”) of the Russian Empire were adhesive official and private sealing labels used on correspondence, packets, archives, and commercial papers from the late 19th century until 1917.

Official government seals often served a role similar to postage stamps for service correspondence: they identified mail sent by state institutions under official postal privilege, usually without postage payment. They confirmed the official origin of letters, secured folded documents against tampering, and marked correspondence as governmental or administrative service mail.

Private businesses, banks, trading houses, and commercial organizations used similar paper seals to secure invoices, contracts, sample packets, and company correspondence. These private seals usually displayed company names, trademarks, or city designations rather than imperial or departmental emblems.

Today Russian paper seals are collected as part of philately, postal history, and are considerably scarcer than ordinary postage stamps. Early philately focused almost exclusively on officially catalogued postage issues, while service seals, official labels, and private sealing stamps were generally ignored by collectors and dealers. Since most paper seals were destroyed when envelopes or packets were opened, relatively few survived. Their limited preservation, lack of early cataloguing make Russian imperial paper seals an increasingly specialized and historically important field of collecting within philately and postal history.