Acts of Random Philately: Uzbek ennui

There’s no accounting for taste. I happen to like definitive stamps that are well-designed and issued in a range of attractive colors. The Dutch definitives of my childhood (the beautifully simple “en profil” Juliana stamps) probably had something to do with that, and I still have a soft spot for the recess printed high values of that set. But some definitive sets are difficult to like.

In 1883-1884 Great Britain issued the dullest definitive set in its history. The designs weren’t that great to begin with but the coup de grace was the decision to use just two colors: dull purple for the lower values and dull green for the higher values. What a boring set! I suspect this idiotic decision involved enormous sideburns, syphilis and laudanum.

Which brings me to Uzbekistan. Obviously. The Central Asian republics have spent the past 25 years developing their national identities. Uzbekistan did so under the harsh reign of Islam Karimov, in office since 1990 and one of two remaining “Soviet survivors” among the post-Soviet heads of state. Initially, Uzbekistan overprinted some old Soviet definitives, while four stamps showing the flag and coat of arms were uninspired but functional. When a small definitive stamp showing the coat of arms was issued in 1994 it was hard to predict that it would be the first value in the dullest set of post-Soviet definitives, with bunches of values issued until 2006.

There are a few things to like about this set. In the first place, the way the country name was spelled changed, with values prior to 1998 inscribed UZBEKISTON (Cyrillic)/UZBEKISTAN (Latin) while starting in 1998 it was a Latin O’ZBEKISTON. The currency unit was given as either SUM (Cyrillic), SO’M (Latin, a single value issued in 1999) or nothing at all. Of course high inflation meant that new, higher values were needed regularly. Five values in the set were in a larger format than the others, just to add further weirdness.

But the colors! Except for the first 1994 stamp in the set, all values are in shades of red, blue or green. And usually they’re the same shade. For example, the last batch of values was issued in 2006: 9 stamps. Two stamps are the same shade of light green, three stamps are in an identical light blue and four stamps are the exact same shade of light red. There must have been a lot of cursing and squinting going on in the Uzbekistan post offices as postal officials tried to distinguish between different stamps. Sometimes all the values in a batch were the same color, like 4 values issued in 2004 being the same shade of light green.