FOCUS ON PHILATELY: Western Ukraine's first stamps: the Lviv Issue of 1918 (08/05/01)

FOCUS ON PHILATELY

by Ingert Kuzych

Western Ukraine's first stamps: the Lviv Issue of 1918

Background to the stamp issue

By the fall of 1918, it was becoming all too apparent that the Central Powers of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire were going to lose World War I. Various people in the latter multi-national state began undertaking negotiations and making plans for independence. Included were the Poles, Czechs and Slovaks.

Other less-populous ethnic groups, however, were being ignored or marginalized, forcing some of them to take matters into their own hands. Among these were Italians, Croats, Slovenes and Ruthenians. It is upon the latter group of people that this article will focus.

Although the Austrians called them "Ruthenians," these people were Ukrainians. Their region of Galicia had been absorbed into the Austrian Empire a century and a half earlier, in 1772, during the First Partition of Poland. They now looked to take advantage of the opportunity presented to them and separate East Galicia, mostly Ukrainian, from West Galicia, primarily Polish. Unfortunately, the Poles saw things differently. As far as they were concerned, all of Galicia was Polish.

During the early morning hours of Friday, November 1, 1918, Ukrainians in the Galician capital city of Lemberg, as well as throughout East Galicia, carried out an audacious coup d'etat, seizing all of the important governmental and municipal institutions. The action was carried out at the behest of the Ukrainian National Council, to forestall a transfer of power by Austrian authorities to the Poles as had secretly been agreed to for that day. On November 9 the name of the new state was proclaimed as the Western Ukrainian National Republic (ZUNR); the city was renamed Lviv, its historic designation.

Following the coup, a policy of Ukrainianization was implemented in governmental and administrative institutions, which also included all post offices. Although postal services remained the same as they had been under the Austrian regime, they were now run by a ZUNR Ministry of Posts. The first post office to open in the city was on Volova Street. No Ukrainianization was needed at this locale, as by fortunate coincidence all postal workers there were Ukrainian. During Austrian times this post office used the cancel LEMBERG 8 - LWOW 8.

Initially, available Austrian stamps were used for mailings. They were canceled by an oblong rubber device without a dateline and with a one-word Ukrainian inscription, "LVIV," using violet ink. The dimensions of the rubber impression were 32.5 mm in length, 3 mm in height and 5 mm between individual letters of the inscription.

Production of the Lviv Issue

In order to prepare distinct Western Ukrainian stamps, Deputy State Secretary of the Post Volodymyr Holovatsky authorized the overprinting of Austrian stamps. The ministry ordered a single-impression metal handstamp made at the Appel firm in Lviv. The image consisted of the words "Zakhidno Ukrainska Narodna Republyka" (Western Ukrainian National Republic) and a rearing lion inside an eight-sided frame. The outer shape was used to conform to the octagonal frame design then found on most Austrian stamps (Figure 1).

Stamps selected for overprinting were the 3-, 5- and 10-heller values of the 1916 Austrian definitive issues featuring the imperial crown and the 20-heller Kaiser Carl I issue of 1917; the original values were retained (Figure 2). Overprinting occurred mostly with black ink, but violet and violet-black overprints are also known. Red and green overprints do exist, but these are considered to be trials.

The quantities produced for the four stamps were as follows: 3-heller - 2,200 copies; 5-heller - 3,400 copies; 10-heller - 6,700 copies; and 20-heller - 8,000 copies. In addition to the normal slate green 20-heller type, a small quantity of a light-green variety was also overprinted. The total number of stamps amounts to 20,300 on 812 panes, each of 25 stamps; the total value was 250,600 heller, or 2,506 kronen.

On Wednesday, November 20, 1918, the stamps were released for postal circulation. By this time, however, Polish elements within the city had set up a resistance network, and Lviv was the scene of intense street fighting in certain locales. The dangerous conditions hindered the post office from fully carrying out its mail delivery duties throughout the city. On November 20 the position of the ZUNR government became untenable, and it withdrew to Ternopil during the night of November 21-22. The Lviv Issue postage stamps, therefore, were only in circulation in Lviv for two days. Ukrainian postal workers were evacuated to the town of Khodoriv; they took with them the entire unused supply of overprinted stamps. No examples of usage in Lviv have been recorded, but covers bearing these stamps are known from Khodoriv, Kolomyia and Stanislaviv. Because of their scarcity, these postally used items can fetch about $1,000 apiece. Figure 3 shows the earliest known usage of the Lviv Issue, on a letter dated December 8, 1918, and mailed from Stanislaviv to Tlumach.

Collecting the Lviv Issue

Although not inexpensive at about $30 each, the Lviv Issue stamps fall among some of the less pricey Western Ukrainian issues (some rare-overprint values go for thousands of dollars apiece).

It is a challenge to find these stamps in multiples, but pairs and blocks of four can be obtained. Stamps with inverted overprints are also known; pairs of such stamps go for about $200 (Figure 4). Several tete-beche pairs (two attached stamps with the overprint on one stamp correct, but the overprint on the other inverted) of the 3-heller value are known and may fetch $250-$300 per pair (Figure 5), but only one complete set of all four values tete-beche has been assembled.

A few years ago, I was fortunate to obtain an entire intact sheet of 25 stamps of the first Lviv Issue value (3-heller, Western Ukraine No. 1). This item has never previously been described, and I believe it is the only sheet of Lviv Issue stamps in existence (Figure 6). Val Zabijaka, who has conducted auctions of exclusively Ukrainian materials for almost three decades, claims it is the only such item he has ever seen.

Examining the pane it is possible to observe that the overprinter was fairly conscientious in his/her job. The overprint design falls on the colored portion of the stamp most of the time. The only poorly-centered overstrikes are in positions 1, 13 and 25; only in position 5 is the image slanting more pronounced. (Figure 7 is a digital photo with stamp colors muted to show overprint details).

Forgeries

At least one forgery of the Lviv Issue is known. The example shown in Figure 8 is suspect for several reasons: the left frame is unbroken (an authentic overprint has two breaks in the left frame); and genuine overprints have a square stop after "UKR" in the top line, as well as a distorted cross line in the Cyrillic "N" of "ZAKHIDNO."

Epilogue

Virtually throughout its entire nine-month existence, Western Ukraine was in a state of war with Poland. The ZUNR government moved from Ternopil to the more secure city of Stanislaviv at the end of December 1918. It was here that most Western Ukrainian stamps were produced, the final total of which amounted to 132 different stamps (including two sets printed in Vienna but never issued).

On January 22, 1919, the ZUNR Government and the Government of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR), which had declared its independence from Russia exactly one year earlier, agreed to merge the two states.

However, the union was never fully implemented, and by July 1919 Poland occupied all of Western Ukraine. It continued to administer the region until March 12, 1923, when the Conference of Ambassadors allowed Poland to retain East Galicia with the proviso that its Ukrainian inhabitants be granted autonomy. The terms of the agreement were never kept by the Poles. In the meantime, the UNR fought on until 1920, when it was finally defeated by the Bolsheviks.

During World War II, western Ukrainian territories were made part of the German occupied Generalgouvernement until "liberated" by Soviet armies in July 1944 and joined to the rest of the Ukrainian SSR. All of Ukraine finally won its independence on August 24, 1991, as the USSR crumbled.

I wish to acknowledge the assistance received from Peter Bylen, Peter Cybaniak and most especially from Val Zabijaka in the preparation of this article. I also want to thank Mary Dattilo for her help with digitizing Figure 7.

Ingert Kuzych may be contacted at P.O. Box 3, Springfield VA 22150 or at his e-mail address: ingert@starpower.net

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