Provisional, Inflationary And Liberated Ukraine

I was going through the covers at the local stamp shop on my weekly pilgrimage, and I came up on this cover. It was love at first sight.

I knew nothing about it when I bought it. Here is what I have been able to find out:

It is from the Ukraine, in 1993. The Ukraine had been liberated as a part of the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.

The stamps are denominated in karbovanets, which was the name of the Ukranian currency at the time. By the time 1993 came around this currency was in full hyperinflation.

Inflation for the year 1993 was over 10,000%. Thus it would make sense to print off stamps on the spot and hope the printer finished printing before the currency was revalued in the mean time.

What I do not know is exactly how much each stamp is worth (100 or 100,000 karbovanets?). Here is a closer look.


I do not know the significance of the box in the lower left hand corner with its dark bars and dotted, slashed squares.

Also, if anyone knows what it says on the back of the cover I would love to know too.



Happy collecting!

On the back, at the bottom are the ways numbers are to be entered in the boxes on the front. I assume it was for some sort of machine reader. I have a cover from Russia with the same boxes filled in.

The box with bars on the left is were you have to write postal index (code), and the numbers on the back are the examples of how you have to wright those numbers. Since it was going to US the spot is empty.

On the back, above numbers, it said "Attention. Example of writing the digits of the index". At the top it said "some meaningless numbers", "The sale price" and something like the name of the printing factory.
I would assume that the prices are 5, 30, 40, and 100, karbovanets. There is nothing that indicates thousands. The only writings there are Ukrainian Post and KRB which I assume stands for karbovanets.

Looks like good, postally used cover with early-90 era local provisional stamps, but local provisional is from Mykolaiv, not Odesa, whee it was postmarked. But the problmes wiht the stamps: the bottom horizontal line is too far under the KRP value. There is no 30 KRB value from Mykolaiv. The 5 FRG appears to be a legit stamp. (Source: Lobko catalog, Kyiv (Ukrainian) and English (Ukrainian Philatelic Resources, 2000).