buying a Russia-made button accordion?

[tcabot]

The prices on squeezeboxes in Ukraine have pretty much halved because of the war, including some of the older, very high end stuff.
However, you do pay 20% VAT and ~5% import duties + admin fees to the carrier. It's most certainly not tax-free. If you are buying from online marketplaces, the taxes and admin might already be included in the price, so you don't see them, but they are there.

Ukrainian post works beautifully, getting your parcel from sender to the export office in a matter of a couple of days, even if you are ordering from a town in the war zone, 18 miles from the front line. The level of postal service is truly incredible.
It then gets handled by UK customs, potentially opened, inspected & not closed properly by UKBA and kicked violently in the back of a Parcelforce truck by a disgruntled postie, where it may sit for up to 2 weeks in the cold & the damp before it gets delivered to you. The delivery service might be "next working day", but they send you your £10 admin charge invoice with second class post (pray to God that it doesn't get lost, because it's not tracked!) and refuse to dispatch goods from the warehouse before you paid for it.
If you're lucky, the damage done to the accordion can be fixed in a few hours, but you might get the whole box smashed to bits, because UKBA loosely closed the box with a strip of gaffer tape instead of ensuring that the accordion is held securely inside the box with ample packaging material - just the way it was before they opened it.

Rant over, but the usual warnings about buying anything valuable unseen still apply, and, unfortunately, there are a lot of dishonest sellers who can sell you a lemon, especially when they know that it will cost you too much to send it back.

 

[oldbayan]

I'm in the UK and have just bought a garmoshka from Ukraine. There are lots of Russian instruments being sold out of Ukraine, with 0% tariff to the UK - I don't know about the US. The seller I bought from, Teodorix2000, records video of him playing the instruments he sells, so I was able to hear it before buying. Very happy with my purchase. It was $500 including shipping.

I bought a few boxes from Ukraine in the last few years, most were old Soviet-era instruments made in Ukraine, there used to be a large factory in Horlivka back then. You get what you pay for, and the quality and construction are variable. The bellows and action are good, but the reeds are not very responsive. Stay away from brands like "Etude" which are the entry-level instruments. My best is a "Lyra" 3-row Bayan with 100 basses. I also bought a garmoshka in C which was good for the price (about CAD $120), brand name Vestna (spring in English). I also had a big 3-row 3-voice Saturn that was in poor shape, I fixed it all and later donated it to a Ukrainian help center when the war started, they were looking for musical instruments for the refugees.

Another brand we see often is Tulskaya, they come from Tula, Russia, and still make instruments to this day. A few years ago I bought a custom-made garmoshka from there, before the war. It cost me USD 1200 and it is very good and nicely made. It is now impossible to import anything from Russia. You can buy Russian-style accordions from Dino Baffetti but they are not cheap.

 

[Hellohelenhere]

I bought a few boxes from Ukraine in the last few years, most were old Soviet-era instruments made in Ukraine, there used to be a large factory in Horlivka back then. You get what you pay for, and the quality and construction are variable. The bellows and action are good, but the reeds are not very responsive. Stay away from brands like "Etude" which are the entry-level instruments. My best is a "Lyra" 3-row Bayan with 100 basses. I also bought a garmoshka in C which was good for the price (about CAD $120), brand name Vestna (spring in English). I also had a big 3-row 3-voice Saturn that was in poor shape, I fixed it all and later donated it to a Ukrainian help center when the war started, they were looking for musical instruments for the refugees.

Another brand we see often is Tulskaya, they come from Tula, Russia, and still make instruments to this day. A few years ago I bought a custom-made garmoshka from there, before the war. It cost me USD 1200 and it is very good and nicely made. It is now impossible to import anything from Russia. You can buy Russian-style accordions from Dino Baffetti but they are not cheap.

Do you know the brand name/s of the instruments made in Horlivka?

 

[tcabot]

Bayans. "Tembr" and "Malysh" (the baby one) I think. Avoid both.

Post WW2 factory stuff:
Piano Accordions: Avoid anything made in USSR.
Bayans: Chord-bass "Kirov" or converter "Rubin" are probably the only ones worth buying, if you get them really really cheap and you're prepared to spend cash on getting them serviced. Usually not worth the effort unless you're happy to do the work yourself.
Hromkas & venkas:
As far as mass-produced Soviet factory jobs go, you have 3 "big hitters": Tula, Kirov, Shuya.
Tula was making decent stuff in the 50s, and some of it came with naturally-sized (aka helikon-style) basses. Unfortunately, the stuff from the 50s either needs a complete overhaul, or is no longer repairable. The powerful, responsive bass is part of their signature sound. Ones made after 1970s can be very squealy in the treble, the register mechanisms leak lots of air and the bass helikons are replaced with smaller, weighted ones (still oversized scale though).
Wooden-bodied ones (Black & Red-wine colours) from the 50s-60 are the best call.

Shuya made hromkas, and the sound of the older ones is closer to a Hohner - quite soft, ringy and gentle. No oversized basses here. Insane variance in quality, some literally fall apart.
"Chayka" (the original one) is by far the best call here. With the exception of one, very special early 50s wooden model that had top quality Dix reeds installed (apparently, a whole warehouse of these has been appropriated at the end of WW2).

Kirov is somewhere in the middle. Nice, oversized basses and very interesting, nice sounding treble. Would have been the best of them all, but the RH and LH manuals are almost unusable and need to be completely rebuilt to transform them into a musical instrument. These are easily identifiable by snowflakes inlaid into the celluloid.

Unless you're planning on overhauling the Kirov keyboard with new,lighter springs, I'd say go with the Chaika-1 or woody Tula. Avoid the rest.

Apart form these 3, there was the "Belarus" made in Belarus (duh) - decent quality by Soviet standards, but they made hromkas in the bodies of 7/8 or 3/4 bayans, so they are huge!

Quality from all factories varies from surprisingly good, to non-existent. As you move from the 50-60s onwards, you start seeing cost cutting like plastic reedblocks, metal pallets held with rubber bands instead of traditional wooden ones. Plastic bass manual covers that clack like castagnettes when you play. Treble mechs are a rip-off of the budget Hohner design, but poorly made, with lower quality metal but can be hot-rodded to get very good performance out of them.
Bass machines can be appalling quality. Tula made the only acceptable ones. Shuya varies from OK to unusable. All can be hot-rodded with ptfe bushings to work really well though.
Everything else is best avoided.

Pre-WW2 - there were lots of smaller factories all over the place and they were producing very good quality stuff with good hand-made reeds, but tuning it to about A=428hz. Very awkward!

Don't confuse mass-produced Soviet factory jobbies with luthier-made high end squeezeboxes made to order. The latter can easily rival the best boxes in the world, but there's few of them and they are priced accordingly.