Today in Ukraine, amid an attempt to break the very existence of the state as well as the national identity of the country where I built my life, stamp collecting is having an unlikely moment. From Kyiv to Odesa, Lviv to Chernowitz, the whole country has gone oddly crazy for postage stamps.
What makes the whole phenomenon unlikely is that Ukraine is locked in a death struggle for its own future against the Soviet Union’s successor state, struggling to Westernize and to survive as its Russian neighbor tries to strangle its very independent identity — and stamp collecting was the quintessential Soviet pastime. The layout and aesthetics of a 1950s neoclassical Stalinist-style post office will be equally familiar to residents of Kyiv, Minsk, Moscow, and Tashkent. As are, more or less, the rituals and hazards of the process of standing in line waiting for a first day stamp while being loudly yelled at by a stern heavyset woman in her mid-50s.
Stamp collecting was intentionally created as a highly standardized Soviet pastime, shared by Buryats, Uzbeks, Ukrainians, and Georgians. Also known as philately, a word that derives, aptly enough for a Soviet obsession, from the Greek words for love and taxes, it was the product of centralized government policy intended to shape the popular imagination in the workers’ paradise. In between the conclusion of the Soviet Revolution and the start of World War II, the Soviets popularized philatelism in order to indoctrinate the masses with Soviet symbols and aspirations. Whether they were commemorating newly departed Bolshevik leaders, signaling government support for new economic policies, rolling out new communist slogans, or marking the start of a new industrialization initiative — stamps were first and foremost ideological objects. The Soviets would routinely release stamps celebrating fraternal relations with other communist regimes, such as the collection of Soviet-Sino friendship space program stamps that I inherited, along with many depicting Laika, the first dog to have orbited Earth. (After this scientific and public relations success, did Laika land back on Earth? Did the Soviet government lie about her having survived a week when she had in fact expired less than two hours into her journey? These were questions that could, once, have gotten you arrested.)
Born in the mid ‘80s in Uzbekistan to Russian speakers, I still vividly recall learning about various Soviet revolutionary milestones, as well as the various indigenous costumes of the Soviet people from my parents’ stamp collection. I still buy up old Soviet stamp collections when I see them at flea markets. Yet the post-Soviet world has habits as well as scars.
What is it about the stamp collecting that grabbed people under Soviet rule so much that the most anti-Russian post-Soviets still have nostalgia for the practice? The beauty of stamps is that, despite being mass-produced utilitarian documents created by a bureaucracy, they are at the same time fragile and ephemeral art objects.
It was precisely the absence of a proper art market and the capacity for Soviet citizens to own their own property that made collecting real art impossible. Yet any Soviet citizen possessed with an aesthetic sensibility could collect stamps, including those reproducing paintings from Soviet and international collections. This represented an affordable stand-in for the ability to collect something rare and beautiful and be able to trade it with friends and fellow hobbyists.
Most Soviet citizens could not travel abroad, but they could collect foreign stamps. Soviet philatelists could engage in the thrill of having a pen pal somewhere else in the world, one whose messages would magically arrive from the forbidden outside world with an ornate slice of that exotic culture attached to the top of the envelope.
In April, the Ukrainian Postal Service first aroused international excitement with the release of a stamp commemorating the triumphant sinking of the Black Sea flagship of the Russian navy, the Moskva. The stamp honored the Ukrainian border guards who, while defending the besieged Ukrainian base at Snake Island, responded to Russian demands that they surrender with a curt response that the Russian warship might commit an unspeakable act upon itself.
The Ukrainian stamp, which depicted a border guard proudly giving the Moskva battleship the finger, was tremendously popular. The process of the creation of a national myth saw large swathes of the Ukrainian population happy and patriotic enough to spend hours standing in lines waiting for the limited-edition stamps. The first edition already trades on the internet for the equivalent of hundreds of dollars.
Wartime Ukrainians have also had the opportunity to vote on the illustration of their next big stamp, and 340,000 out of 834,000 online Ukrainian voters agreed in the Ukrpostha survey on the winning painting by artist Anastasia Bondarets as the second and latest in the series since the invasion: a watercolor image of a tractor dragging away a tank, its turret bent and crooked. This is a reference to the many abandoned Russian tanks that have been expropriated from the field of battle by enterprising Ukrainian farmers. “This tractor, which is carrying broken enemy equipment to be repaired and put into service by our military, is an allegory of how every Ukrainian does everything in his power, to the best of his ability, to bring our victory closer,” she said.
By showing up early enough and queuing for long enough, one can procure a first edition marked as posted on the first day of issue and have a souvenir of a hellish and heroic moment in Ukrainian national history. And I did.
Along with the rest of the Ukrainian public, I eagerly await the next in a series of cool stamps from the wartime nightmare that, if nothing else positive can be said of it, will evermore serve as a searing shared national experience. The next commemorative stamp is to feature Patron, a Ukrainian explosives engineer’s Jack Russell terrier, who has emerged as an adored symbol of national resistance after having sniffed out hundreds of land mines. Patron is in many suggestive ways the heir to Laika.
Ukrainian stamp mania is just one more sign that the country, post-Soviet and deeply traumatized though it may be, is desperate to get back to its normal cultural preoccupations. Even as the war and the need to repel the Russian invasion dominate everyone’s thoughts and actions, Ukraine’s cultural and artistic institutions are attempting a return to normality under what are almost impossible circumstances.
I recently attended a performance of Aida, Verdi’s story of lovers whose romantic love and their love of country come into conflict at a time of war, put on in Odesa’s iconic Baroque opera house. Though there would surely have been takers for over 1,000 seats, only 350 were actually filled. That is the maximum capacity of the bomb shelter beneath the auditorium. As we took our seats, an announcement informed us that should an air raid require us to shelter down there for under an hour, the performance would continue. If Russian bombers lingered overhead for any longer, our tickets would be refunded or rescheduled. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s high arts institutions are still mostly shuttered, but those shutters are cracking ajar. Museums have hidden away most of their objets d’art in secure locations so that if any (more) of them get struck by Russian missiles or shells, it is just the replaceable building and not the irreplaceable heritage of a people that would be destroyed. Still, some are starting to reopen, such as most national institutions in Kyiv and Lviv. And a few galleries are already reopening in cities in the west and south, many of them unsurprisingly focusing on artworks dealing with wartime themes.
For most ordinary Ukrainians, daily life remains dominated by the unbeautiful reality of destruction, privation, and displacement amid a war that is aimed at extinguishing our national identity. But much like flowers growing through concrete, artistic and cultural needs must and will thrive, even during war. The throngs of wartime Ukrainians enthusing over our nationalist stamps, a strange combination of Soviet history and the will for a victorious future in a free Ukraine, go to show that the human soul craves beauty and intrigue and self-expression more than mere survival.
Vladislav Davidzon is a Russian American writer and translator and the former editor of the Odesa Review. He is a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council. He was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and lives in Paris.
