Hi, Can i get some help with any information on this marked 84 silver spoon?
The spoon looks to be Russian and the 84 is a purity mark, read as 84 zolotnik. There were 96 zolotniks in a Russian pound so 84 means a silver standard of 84/96, i.e. 875 out of 1000
I am no expert on Russian silver but I feel sure that there really ought to be other marks present to make it a genuine piece. In addition I find the mark fairly crude and strongly suspect that it is a fake. There is a useful outline of kokoshnik marks which you might like to consult on the following site:
Thanks for your reply and welcome.
Thanks for your help.
Vintage Soviet Russia 84 Silver Gold Guild Sugar Spoon 5.5" | eBay
Vintage Soviet Russia 84 Silver Gold Guild Tea Spoons (5) | eBay
Thanks for the links.
Art Deco spoons with blurry Czarist silver grade stamps on them and nothing else. No makers name no loving inscription from a godfather “Hey kid ,welcome to the world and best of luck.”
Phil’s right, But the faker’s not some forger trying to pull a fast one it’s the state itself.
Bart’s made excellent use of google lens to pull up some more of the same offered on Ebay as Soviet.
So these are early Soviet jam spoons, probably made in Moscow, but there are three other choices,
Jam not sugar as they have flat bottoms and limited sides. Jam piles sugar spills
I call them “Red Queen Spoons”. It’s a private pun based on the Reds or Soviets and the promises which were never kept and the answer the Red Queen gave to Alice as they raced across the chess board.
Alice, feeling rather tired and hungary asked if she might have some refreshments;
The Red Queen offered bread.
Alice wondered if she might have some jam on it.
To which the Red Queen gave that immortal answer, “Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today”.
It was as if Lewis Carroll aka Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who published in 1865, had scripted the Soviet agricultural and jam production campaign half a century before it was enacted.
As a child born in a time of shortages of jam and other sugars, post war, it’s a phrase that resounded true.
CRWW
The immortal answer was from The White Queen, I believe.
Thank you so much for your help, much appreciated. So to sell, would it be misleading to state 84 soviet silver? With '“Red Queen Spoons” in brackets ![]()
The usual Soviet standard was .870 not .840 but if you simply said it was marked. .84 you’d be accurate as to information on it if not its silver content . And Paul has correctly pointed out I am mixing up my queens. The white queen was relatively benevolent in the story compared to the red. queen who, discovering all the roses in the garden were white, ordered mass execution of those responsible despite the ongoing effort to paint them red.
Alice, for whom this story was composed was Alice Liddell the daughter of the Dean of the Oxford college where the writer was a professor, I think of mathematics.
She married a distant relative had three sons and lost two of them in WWI.
The Hargreaves summered on the Isle of Wight, the Tennyson end where the Needles are.Their haunts of Freshwater, Alum Bay, Totland Bay were my summer haunts a century later. The photos of her, always rather sad looking were taken by a very famous photographer who also lived in Freshwater. For us, as children, the freedom of the downs and the challenges of the Solent were perfect. I learned to sail in tiny keel-less dingies in waters that defeated the Spanish Armada and made a fair amount of pocket money retrieving golf balls which had gone over the cliffs into rough too precipitous for the plus-two’s crowd.
Parents then, emerging as they were from a war where danger was the norm, seemed to have a far greater tolerance for offspring hazards. I rather doubt if my grandchildren would have got away with sailing round the Needles in some of the weather we encountered. We only capsized once. I was sailing in tandem with my cousin who waved me off with the cheery note “the lifeboat will rescue you”. It might have but they never saw the small dingy amist the rather large waves. Luckily I had.a tender scrambled into that and the two craft one right-way up and the other upside down drifted toward Hurst Castle on the mainland. I was most anxious not to lose either because I didn’t have the sixpence for the ferry to get back to the Island. Luckily I got a tow back to shore, got the dingy and the boat upright and jury-rigged myself back to Yarmouth. My cousin, who later headed a large multi-national brewing concern, greeted me somewhat laconically with a “What kept you?”
CRW
Thank you so much. ![]()



