Russian Scouts in Emigration — ОРЮР

A green fundraising label of the Russian Scout movement in exile, inscribed RUSSIAN SCOUTS IN EMIGRATION in English and ОРЮР in Cyrillic, with the value 10 and a Scout fleur-de-lis rising over a sunburst.

Russian Scouting was founded in 1909 at Tsarskoye Selo by Oleg Pantyukhov. After the revolution it was suppressed at home — the Pioneers took its place in 1922 — and survived only among the White emigration, which carried it into more than twenty countries: France, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, the Baltic states, Poland, Belgium, Argentina, Chile, Australia, Britain and the United States. Pantyukhov himself lived first in France and then in the United States, and died at Nice. The exile organisation changed its name repeatedly: ОРСзг in 1920, ВНОРС in 1924, НОРС-Р from about 1934, НОРР and ОР in 1942.

The four letters on this label date it. ОРЮР — Организация Российских Юных Разведчиков, the Organisation of Russian Young Pathfinders — was adopted as the movement's name at a leaders' congress in Munich in November 1945, and came into use through 1946 in the displaced-persons camps of occupied Germany. No label can carry those initials before that date.

The year given here is therefore the earliest possible one, not a documented issue date. The label was offered as «Russia c1930, Scouts in Emigration, 10c France», which cannot be right on the evidence of the initials; the denomination in centimes points to the French branch of the organisation, and the likely window is the later 1940s or the 1950s, when the émigré units in France were at their most active. Sources consulted — including the SOSSI listing of Russian Scout exile issues, which records New York issues from 1952 — do not carry this label, and no firmer date has been established.