russtyle-03

Unless a documented deck from the 1930's, 40's or 50's will appear, we must assume that there's a large gap in time between the first edition and later ones. And this raises a final question: since when can we consider this pattern as a standard one.

In our opinion since the 1960's. The period of the first edition didn't last long enough and the edition itself was too luxurious for a widespread use to settle among the Russian population. When the pattern was rediscovered, the printing technique made a cheaper production possible and it became a widely available and used pattern.

But there were consequences in regard to the quality. To illustrate that we've lined up the Russian made Jacks from the offset period in what we believe to be the correct chronological order.

c1970	c1973 - c1980	c1980 - 2004

China 2000's (?)	The top row shows the Russian offset prints and you can see the decline of the quality of the image. The second image looks better than the first, but the rougher grid of the offset is visible, when enlarged or seen through a magnifying glass. No need to comment on the last Jack above. The (lack of) quality speaks for itself. But the quality of our Chinese Jack is even worse. It looks like a cheap photocopy and the Jack seems to have lost a piece of his hair, where a shine was intended. Speaking of hair, did you notice that the hair of the Russian Jacks has grown darker and darker over the years. We have always had a preference for chromolithographic printed cards. It's a delight to look at them through a magnifying glass and, up to a certain point, you can enlarge them as much as you want and the images get better and better. Like in any beauty contest, there can only be one winner. For us, he's on the right here. We hope you can agree to that.	1911-1917

After the Colour Printing Plant had stopped in 2004, the Russian Style pattern was produced in Russia by the GMGroup and RusJoker, both from St. Petersburg, in editions from 2005 and 2006. Of course the pattern has been produced outside of Russia too. Already mentioned is the Piatnik edition, but Fournier from Spain has also made a nice reproduction, in a regular size and a patience size, with English indices. These editions were not specifically targeted at the Russian market. However, Chinese manufacturers have produced this pattern for the Russian market and seem to have conquered that market. And looking at the quality of the example here above, we can understand the complaints by Russian collectors. We've seen that with the present printing techniques it's possible to make an almost perfect copy of a lithographic deck for a reasonable price, so we hope that some Russian publisher will pick up that idea too and produce a deck, in which we can all enjoy the original beauty of the designs again.

Of course each standard pattern has evoked oddities too. Here's a sheet with small push-out cards (28 x 40 mm).
It was published by GMP "Politext" from Moscow in 1992.

But, as we always say here, a standard pattern isn't a real standard pattern, if it hasn't provoked "anomalies" too. For this pattern we have found two of them in our Russian collection. As a bonus, we'll show these on the next pages.