The ultimate goal of Russia is to abandon the economy based on producing raw materials and move towards revival of processing industries. But during the two decades of economic collapse in the manufacturing economy, technology has changed worldwide. So, today high-quality collection samples of precious stones are not any more viewed as raw materials, but as products, and more often than not as high-tech products. And enhanced stones are also products, not rough gems. However, being considered as "products," prepared and enhanced gems should no longer be subject to limitations in their turnover since the turnover of products is not restricted.
Prepared collection sample is also a product
What is so high-tech about a collection of mineral samples? Let's investigate. You may say that a sample is of high quality and hence expensive only if it looks good and all its crystal faces are safe, i.e. the sample retains the "core" mineral undestroyed. Dissecting such a collection piece from its enclosing rock is called preparation. The difference in value of one and the same mineral collection sample prepared perfectly or ugly may reach thousands of times!
To understand this better, let's imagine that there is a certain painting of a great artist. Over many years the painting was once and again "refined" by far less talented artists, and then there came a restorer who undertook to recover it. If the restorer will manage to remove all the layers of "pseudo-artists” and bring to light the initial colors of the original author, the canvas will be very expensive. But if the restorer has "awkward" hands, if it’s a layman, etc., he or she will damage the painting to a great extent, having removed the overrunning layers together with the master’s original strokes. Obviously, this canvas will greatly lose in price compared with the first case. And it is also clear that the work of the restorer (incidentally, involving state-of-the-art technologies, including 3D X-ray scanning and selective paint etching) is a responsible high-tech job. What is interesting about it all is that even a negligent restorer is not able to devaluate a painting to the bitter end.
But an inexperienced preparator who does not use modern techniques may almost entirely devalue a potentially expensive mineral specimen meant for a collection. Preparators of minerals are engaged in work which is even more sophisticated and their responsibility is still higher. Very often a mineral of interest (and thus of value) in its natural state is "tightly embraced" by enclosing rock, usually opaque and sometimes much harder than the "right" mineral. Without partial removal of this enclosing rock the mineral may stay hidden if it does not crop out. Imagine a huge diamond hidden in a piece of clay. Do you think it will attract anyone’s attention even if put in some most conspicuous place where many people pass it by? No one will even think to raise it...
And this is the situation we have in the gem fields all the time. We should understand that the bowels of this planet have quite a lot of most precious things, including gems, gold, silver and platinum. The only question is how to find them and how to extract them from the earth. You may stand in front of a hill of nondescript rock consisting of large and small pieces and it will never occur to you that nature has hidden whole treasures in these cobbles.
Recovering such "treasures" from the rock presumably containing them in the course mining is called beneficiation. However, there is a nuance: beneficiation of what? The answer is beneficiation of raw material. In other words, beneficiation means industrial extraction of valued minerals (gold, diamonds, etc.) for subsequent processing by some of the known methods. Gold is then melted, while diamonds are cut. Gold is mainly extracted from ore since it does not occur in its pure form. There is no need to be accurate in ore beneficiation. Even a badly damaged rough diamond (in the process of its extraction from the enclosing rock) may eventually turn into a very expensive polished diamond.
In most cases, commercial mining of solid minerals is performed by way of blasting operations. For example, blasting is used when beryl is mined to produce beryllium ore. In this case, in the Soviet Union emeralds (a bright green variety of beryl) were mined by way of accompanying operations in the framework of beryl production. Bang, and 70% to 80% of emeralds are lost forever even as raw material for faceting. But this is true for raw material. Some fragments of emerald crystals remain intact and are used for cutting. It’s not a great disaster (though still a big loss), if some emerald crystals are divided by explosion between the adjacent pieces of rock, split in half...
However, emerald collection samples are another thing. A restorer may glue together a torn canvas painted by an artist preserving its full value, but even a well-glued crystal of emerald is worth only one-tenth of the value produced by the same gem if it is intact. But it’s not often when you can glue the crystal together - usually fragile emeralds are shattered into small fragments when beryl is mined, and at best they are suitable for cutting. And there is no sense even to mention the chipped crystal edges and tops which make such emeralds cheaper since almost all emeralds recovered by blasting have these defects... So, is there any reason to wonder that a whole undamaged crystal of emerald is worth much more than a similar shapeless “rough” fragment of emerald crystal of the same weight, color and clarity? The same goes true for mining gems of all kinds.
But explosions in industrial production are still half the trouble. Contrary to popular belief, not all gems are born in “crystal cellars” or in free space. For example, emerald crystals in the Urals are never growing free; they are always tightly packed in enclosing rock, often in solid mica. No one knows if there is something inside of pieces of rock formed after explosions in the mining process. And if modern equipment makes it possible to “see” beryl and even distinguish emeralds more or less clearly during ore beneficiation, there are still no means of quick and careful extraction of emerald crystals from enclosing rock in the course of industrial mining of raw minerals, while in the process of beneficiation such crystals are damaged even more.
Only the latest high-tech methods specifically designed for gentle extraction of collection material from the rock offer a chance to reach an amazing level of sample preservation. And such technologies have been developed by Russian inventors. Only such methods make it possible to produce collectible specimens of the Ural emeralds capable to compete in terms of beauty and value with collection samples of emeralds from Columbia and Zambia (which are recovered at the gem fields formed in different geological conditions making it much easier and cheaper to prepare these samples for collection purposes).
Is it then not true that well prepared collection samples of gems are high-tech products? To be more precise: are they not products? And is it not high technologies that are used to manufacture them? Is it possible that a "product" can be obtained only if a gem is joined with some precious metal as a jewelry piece? So, it looks like if you make a piece of jewelry to be worn on one’s neck or in one’s ear it is a product, while a finely prepared collection sample which took much more labor and money is still a rough stone!
What do we have here in the law - a simple omission, ignorance of its authors, or a conscious pursuit of someone's commercial interests to the detriment of common sense? Is it because of this there is a stubborn resistance to introducing the concept of “enhancement” to the Russian legislation on mining and turnover of precious stones? After all, it is absolutely obvious that after any process of enhancement a gem becomes a "product" which does not preclude it from being also a raw material for any further processing.
In fact, any labor invested in raw materials turns them already into products. To make a reasonable division between "raw materials" and "products" we may use quite a simple criterion: to turn a raw material into a product, it must be subjected to a certain level of processing and the resulting product must have a possibility to be finally consumed in the retail market, or the new product must obtain special properties, qualitatively distinguishing it from the initial raw material and giving it a new use.
Thus, any gemstone which passed the stage of preparation is by all means a product since the stone turns into a prepared collectible sample having its retail market.
Freedom to enhanced stones!
Similarly, if rough gemstones have been enhanced, they are no longer raw materials, but products, since their enhancement gives us an entirely new product: from non-precious beryl we obtain precious emeralds, from non-precious corundum we have precious rubies and sapphires and from non-precious chrysoberyl we get precious alexandrite. Of course, these stones will have quite a different market than that of raw material from which they were made. And a different value. But at the same time, under the Russian law, such stones continue to be considered as simple "raw material" and not "products". I wonder what kind of raw materials they are under this law: emeralds (obtained after enhancement) or beryl (which they were before enhancement)? And so the story goes on involving other precious stones.
No one would ever regard gasoline or kerosene to be "raw material" – it is a product of oil refining. So why is the emerald, obtained from beryl, is still just a "raw material"? Is this because it was much easier for the state to prohibit free circulation of raw materials than to prohibit free circulation of products?
Introducing a single concept of "enhanced stone" to the Russian industrial law may completely destroy the absurd system of prohibitions in the market of precious stones. The fact is that more than 99% of all emeralds, rubies and sapphires present in the Russian market are enhanced stones (beryl and corundum). Prior to their enhancement, they were not emeralds, rubies and sapphires, meeting the requirements of technical specifications for these stones in the Russian understanding. So they were simply non-precious beryl and corundum and their turnover was not subject to the provisions of the Federal Law "On Precious Metals and Gems." Actually all these stones turned into emeralds, rubies and sapphires in factories and laboratories. But according to the Russian law, you may call emeralds, rubies and sapphires only natural stones! But these stones, being natural, have different names...
The Russian market, and even more so the global market, have understood this a long time ago. The market has no need to explain to buyers that sapphires set in their rings are not natural. Ultimately, these stones are not wholly natural - because what buyers see is a cut gem, i.e. it is a creation of human hands, rather than a natural crystal. But the legal aspect, the Russian behind-the-looking-glass reality is another thing. If an enhanced corundum in a ring can be called a sapphire in market perception (and this will not be cheating buyers), then in terms of legislation, this stone cannot be considered a sapphire, since it is a natural corundum, which does not comply with the requirements to sapphires.
Virtually all colored gemstones from among actually available in the Russian and world markets must circulate freely (without any restrictions), and no one has the right to demand any certificates for such gems.
To be on the positive side of the story, judges in their rulings on criminal cases initiated under Article 191 of the Russian Criminal Code should have listened to the above arguments of defense. But this is only a pipedream. In practice, things are much worse: after all, the Federal Law "On Precious Metals and Gems" has no concept of "enhanced stone." And it means there are no such stones on the market ... How very convenient to lock people up! Only one thing is not clear: is it the main task of the state to cast its citizens into prison?
Vladimir Zboikov for Rough&Polished
