(Russian: Евгений Михайлович Архангельский) Yevgeniy Mikhaylovich Arkhangelskiy Eugen Arhangelski started russian stamp collecting society overseas, РОССИКА - ROSSICA - A Short History of the Rossica Society (1929 - 1968).pdf The founder, Yevgeniy Mikhaylovich Arkhangel’skiy (Eugene Arkhangelsky). Rossika’s founder entered this world in Radzivilov, Volhynia Province, on 27 October 1881. His family moved to Plotsk in 1883, and there he began to collect stamps at the tender age of 7. By the time Arkhangelsky went off to Warsaw University, he was already a serious collector with some rarities in his albums, but illness forced him to withdraw from his studies. At 21 (1902) he joined the Army and became an officer, serving as a correspondent from 1910 to 1919 for two military journals. (This version is according to the article Greg Salisbury wrote in the English edition of the journal in 1954.14 However, A.I. Maslov’s obituary for Arkhangelsky states that he had commanded a battalion as a colonel, suffered a serious wound, and received numerous decorations. It must have been very painful for him to watch the Society he had founded be dismembered from 1939 to 1942. Journal publication was forced out of Europe. Yugoslavia itself became a battlefield for Nazis and partisans of every stripe, and in 1944 Arkhangelsky found himself in a concentration camp. His stamp collections, philatelic library, and all his possessions had been tossed into a bonfire by the Reds when Tito’s partisans came crashing into the area. The First Russian Cadet Corps students had been evacuated to Germany on 10 September 1944, but Arkhangelsky and most of the school’s officers remained behind. Serb partisans shot some of them as German sympathizers or at the behest of the NKVD as White officers.23 Somehow he avoided execution, but his days as a driving force in Rossika were over. He was released from the camp in 1946, destitute and in poor health, but he survived another decade, thanks in great part to the efforts of Emile Marcovitch - Venezuela. By 1953 Arkhangelsky was feeling his age (73) and his wounds from WWI. Bedridden much of the time, he was also suffering from heart disease and edema. He died in Yugoslavia on 13 February 1956, and was buried with his second wife in Bela Crkva. Rossika members continued to provide financial support to his widow.
