I think if you’re going to try and make it as an antiques dealer – even if it’s a small side-business or hobby that you do between other things, it’s good to hunt down, collect and keep the occasional trinket for yourself. A silent reminder to enjoy the things that you can come across while out hunting for stuff.

One example of this was something I picked up recently, a beautiful solid silver Russian pedestal beaker…

I’m not sure who the maker is, but this gorgeous piece of silver was manufactured in Moscow in the early 1850s, with a zolotnik mark of ’84’ on the rim (more about that, later). It’s comprised of two parts: The body, and the base, which are curved and circular in form, and soldered together at the neck. After buying it, I had a quick peek online to see what these things generally go for…and I think I got a pretty decent bargain, considering! Hahaha…Aaaaanyway…

The Russian Beaker

Let us begin at the beginning. This is a Russian silver – BEAKER. A beaker is different from a MUG in that beakers do not have handles. It’s called a pedestal beaker because it’s mounted on a pedestal, base, or foot. Not on a STEM, like a goblet, which is similar, but longer and thinner in shape.

How Was It Made?

Like most silverware, this piece was likely made using a series of hammers in a shaping process known as ‘raising’. Basically, you start out with a flat disc of silver (a ‘sheet’ as it’s called); you trace a circle on it, make a dent in the middle, to mark the center, and from the center, you work out and up, beating the sheet with a hammer in a series of concentric rings.

As you beat the silver, the metal stretches and forms, rising up as it’s manipulated by all the hammer-dents (hence ‘raising’ the silver). This builds up the sides of the cup. As the process continues, the silver would be heated (annealed) to soften it and remove brittleness. Failure to anneal the silver would mean that the constant beating would compact and harden the metal, making it brittle.

Eventually, the basic shape of the cup would be complete. A similar process would’ve been used to create the base. Once the two pieces had been made, they would’ve been planished and then burnished (smoothed out and polished), possibly on a lathe, to get uniformity of shape.

Once that was completed, the two parts would’ve been decorated – separately – before being soldered together.

The decoration on this piece is all hand-engraving. It is extremely intricate, but not exactly the best of quality – there are a variety of inconsistencies here and there around the body of the beaker. There are places where the decorations are uneven, or lines cross or cut into other decorations by accident.

Because of these inconsistencies, I suspect that this beaker was likely a practice-piece, made by an apprentice (student) silversmith, or a journeyman silversmith, who had graduated his apprenticeship but was still new to the craft, and who was attempting to show off what he had learned.

Whoever made it (the maker’s mark is unknown), the smith obviously felt that it was of sufficient quality to put on sale, because the beaker, warts-and-all, was sent off to be assayed!

Russian Hallmarks

By the 1800s, like with most other countries around Europe, Russia had established a solid system of hallmarking – the testing and certification of silverwares prior to their entrance onto the commercial market – a necessary middleman step to weed out any fraudsters and con-artists from cheating unsuspecting customers.

As with almost every other European country, the hallmarks followed a specific system: There was the place of assay, the date of assay, the purity of the silver, and the maker’s mark. This beaker includes a fifth mark, which is the mark of the Assay-Master – the name (or in this case, the initials) of the big-cheese who ran the office to which the beaker had been sent for assay.

In this case, the marks are:

[A.K.] [185-] [84] [Image of St. George and the Dragon] [Maker’s Mark in Cyrillic letters]

The A.K. stands for Andrey Anatovich Kovalsky, who was master of assay at the Moscow Assay Office until he left the post in 1856. The next mark is the ‘185-‘. This is the year of assay. I left the last number off because it’s not clear. But it still dates the beaker to a very narrow window – 1850 to 1856.

The next mark is ’84’. You would think that ’84’ is the purity – as in – 84%.

Well…yes…and no.

84 is actually the zolotniki.

“…the what?” I hear you ask.

The ‘zolotnik’ (plural ‘zolotniki’) was a Russian measurement of weight, which came from a 12th century gold coin – the zolotnik. Although the coin went out of circulation centuries ago, its name was repurposed in the 1700s for the national hallmarking of silver. There were four grades of zolotnik, starting at 96, then 90, 84, and 62 zolotniks (62 was later replaced by 72, which was replaced less than a century later, by 84, which remained the national lower-limit up to the time of the Revolution in 1917).

96 zolotniki = 100% pure silver.

90 zolotniki = 93.7% silver.

84 zolotniki = 87.5% silver.

So the mark of ’84’ on the beaker represents 87.5% silver purity.

The next mark is that of St. George slaying the dragon – a famous story from European folklore. This is the coat of arms for the City of Moscow, signifying where the piece was hallmarked.

The final mark, as with British silverware of the same era, is the maker’s mark, which was usually the maker’s initials. In this case, it’s his initials in Cyrillic (Russian) lettering. Unfortunately I don’t read Cyrillic script, and information on Russian maker’s marks can be very hard to find. We may never know who made this piece.

Closing Remarks

So is a beaker like this a rare piece? Yes and no. As a possible apprentice piece – probably. Russian silver is fairly rare, but not THAT rare. You can find it and you can definitely collect it. Although I imagine that pre-revolution pieces tend to fetch a premium.

Is it a piece of first-order manufacture? I don’t think so. I have seen other pieces online which looked even more lovely than this (and I think that’s pretty hard to beat!), but that said – the prices on those were hundreds, even thousands, of dollars more than what I paid, so I’m happy to have it! I think it’s beautiful, different and certainly unique!