State and Private Mail: a Postal Episode of Soviet-German Relations During the Period of the Brest-Litovsk Peace of 1918
Authors: Yakub A.V. , Yakub N.V. 
Published: October 2024

Mail and postage stamps are a single entity, maintaining such a connection even in times of serious socio-political upheavals. After the events of 1917, the new leadership of the postal and telegraph department was almost immediately concerned to stop the process of further destruction of postal and telegraph communications in Russia, which had begun in the previous period. Attempts were made to maintain the functioning of international postal communications by this time, although in the conditions of the actual state of war of Soviet Russia, primarily with Germany, this was seriously hampered. Only after the signing of the Brest Peace and its ratification on March 15, 1918, the international postal service began to revive. Nevertheless, in the difficult conditions of the initial period of the civil war, foreign nationals who were on the territory of Soviet Russia had to find alternative ways to send correspondence abroad to the state postal service. One of these methods was the creation of private mail. In the conditions of complex international relations in the spring - summer of 1918, the functions of private mail could be assumed by special structures that were created at foreign missions in Soviet Russia. One of these structures was the “German-Baltic Committee” in Petrograd, created at the German Consulate, opened after the signing of the Brest Treaty. Сommittee initiated the issue of a special stamp, which was first described in his memoirs by the Russian emigrant G. Shenets, and one of the most prominent representatives of Russian philately, K. Schmidt, conducted a study of its functioning. The circle of people who used this private mail was very limited. Letters and small packages were accepted, for the dispatch of which a fee of one ruble was charged, a stamp of the corresponding denomination was pasted by the committee's employees on all mailings and stamped with special stamps in German. These stamps were not sold to the public. From the Baltic provinces, special couriers brought back correspondence, which was again issued in the committee itself with the same stamps at the same tariff. Probably, the activity of this “private mail” turned out to be short-lived. The need for it, in fact, disappeared after the signing on August 8, 1918 of the agreement between Russia and Germany on postal, telegraph and railway communication, according to which all postal and telegraph relations between the two countries were regulated by the Convention on the Universal Postal Union and bilateral treaties and agreements concluded in this area between the Russian Empire and Germany, the effect of which were resumed according to the peace concluded in Brest-Litovsk. In general, the short-term activity of the German-Baltic Committee in the field of postal services, apparently, was more of a forced, extraordinary measure, although it fits well enough into the international situation associated with the period of the Brest Peace in relations between the RSFSR and Germany. On the other hand, this episode of international postal activity indicates that the leadership of Soviet Russia systematically followed the path of strengthening control over those areas of activity that ensured the monopoly right of the state to receive income from international activities.