Hello,
I would appreciate your help identifying these antique spoons.
The hallmarks appear to include:
One antique dealer believes they are probably not silver based on the photographs, while others suggested an in-person inspection.
Could you please tell me if these hallmarks look genuine and whether the spoons appear to be authentic Russian 84 silver?
I have attached close-up photographs of the hallmarks and the complete spoons.
Thank you very much for your time and expertise.
The only way to be absolutely sure about these is to have them tested, but they appear to be genuine Russian coin spoons from 1874.
The maker is Vasily Dmitriev (initials that look like BA to those, like me, who don’t know the Cyrillic alphabet), working in Moscow at this time. The assay mark is for Viktor Savinsky (BC), who was the Moscow assay master at the time. The 84 is the Russian purity mark for .875 silver. The final punch is St. George, the Moscow city mark until 1898.
ETA: However, the inset coins are another matter entirely. These show many signs of being modern tourist reproductions. Feeding them to AI comes back with a detailed description of everything that’s wrong with them:
Why These Spoons Are Reproductions
- Identical Cast Details: Genuine antique coin spoons were hand-fabricated by soldering an actual, circulated historical silver coin to a hand-forged handle. On your spoons, the “coins” are cast directly as a single piece with the bowl.
- Molded Inscriptions: The lettering and profiles lack the sharp, struck definition of real mint coins. The text is slightly soft, rounded, and raised in a way that is characteristic of modern centrifugal or jewelry casting.
- Mass-Produced Fake Types: This specific pairing of a Peter the Great portrait rouble (left) and an Empress Anna portrait rouble (right) on twisted handles—stamped with the exact same 1874 Moscow hallmarks you shared previously—is a well-documented mass-produced design manufactured extensively in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
- Artificially “Aged” Patina: The dark, uniform black tarnish precisely tracing the edges of the raised lettering and profiles is a chemical oxidation wash applied at the factory to mimic 150 years of dirt and wear.
Conclusion: I would assume they’re fake until they’re tested.
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They must have been produced in huge numbers - they seem to show up all over the place! Sold to tourists in Russia, they were probably cranked out somewhere in China. 
Italics for a reason. They appear to be genuine, but they’re not.
Thanks for the replies, guys. So it’s definitely not silver? What material do you think it could be? I tried testing it with a magnet to see if it was magnetic, but it wasn’t attracted at all. Based on that, roughly how much do you think it’s worth?
Thanks for the replies, guys. So it’s definitely not silver? What material do you think it could be? I tried testing it with a magnet to see if it was magnetic, but it wasn’t attracted at all. Based on that, roughly how much do you think it’s worth?
Almost certainly not silver, or even silver-plated. If, as we suspect, it’s a cheap alloy, for tourist trinkets, it’s worth almost nothing. Find someone (like a scrap metal dealer or a jeweler) who has an XRF machine to test it, just to be totally sure.
BTW, the “magnet test” is useless. Sure, silver isn’t magnetic, but neither is gold, brass, copper, pewter, nickel silver (along with all similar copper alloys), aluminum, and not even a lot of stainless steel. The only things that are magnetic are iron, raw steel, and pure nickel, and none of those is normally used to make flatware, plated or not.
