Ukraine in the Soviet Union (early flags)

Last modified: 2014-03-30 by zoltán horváth
Keywords: hammer and sickle: mirrored | y.c.c.p. | u.s.s.r. | yccp | ussr | u.s.r.r. | y.c.p.p. | u.r.s.r. | y.p.c.p. | hammer and sickle: no star (yellow) | star: 5 points (yellow) | hammer and sickle: solid star |
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• Flag of 1919
• Flag of 1923
• Flag of 1927
• Flag of 1930’s
• Flag of 1937
• Flag of 1940’s
• Flag of SSR Carpathian Ukraine (1945-1946)

• Ukraine in the Soviet Union (1949-1991)
• Construction details of Soviet flags
• Soviet Union
• Ukraine

Flag of 1919

Red with in the upper hoist yellow cyrillic initials ("USSR") in sans-serif.
Mark Sensen, 23 Apr 1996

This is from [iva71], which shows serif and sans-serif fonts for different flags but I don’t know if that means that was the type of font prescribed or really used.
Mark Sensen, 12 Feb 2003

Flag of 1923

The ukrainian flag of 1923 was red with yellow initials (no hammer & sickle). The inscription was "U.S.S.R." (looks like "y.c.c.p.").
Victor Lomantsov, 21 Dec 2001

Flag of 1927

In the ukrainian flag of 1927 the inscription was "U.S.R.R." (looks like "y.c.p.p.").
Victor Lomantsov, 21 Dec 2001

Flag of 1930’s

Red with in the upper hoist yellow cyrillic initials (USSR) in sanserif. Yellow border around the canton.
Mark Sensen, 13 May 1996

Flag of 1937

Red with in the upper hoist yellow cyrillic initials (URSR) in serif. Little yellow hammer and sickle above.
Mark Sensen, 25 May 1996

Hammer and sickle were added to the ukrainian flag in 1937. In this year the new abbreviation of the country name was adopted — "U.R.S.R." (looks like "y.p.c.p.").
Victor Lomantsov, 21 Dec 2001

Flag of 1940’s

Red with in the upper hoist yellow cyrillic initials (URSR) in sanserif. Yellow hammer and sickle below.
Mark Sensen, 02 Jun 1996

This flag was replaced by a new one in 21 November 1949.
Mark Sensen, 25 May 1997

Flag of SSR Carpathian Ukraine (1945-1946)

This is a flag suposed to be the one of the SSR Carpathian Ukraine (1945-1946). Was published in [tfb] and reproduced also in other bulletins.
Jaume Ollé, 28 Dec 2001

It’s a red flag with golden inscription and a golden mirrored hammer and sickle in the upper hoist, topped by a largish solid star. Sokolov [sol83] shows this emblem in black on white line draw, which I redrawn as solid golden yellow with red lining (on red background). Only observing the real flag is possible to confirm or correct this.
António Martins, 26 Sep 2002

According to Sokolov’s Flags and Arms of Ukraine [sol83], the inscription reads:

ХАЙ ЖИВЕ ВОЗЗ’ЄДНАННЯ
ЗАКАРПАТСЬКОЇ УКРАЇНИ
З РАДЯНСЬКОЮ УКРАЇНОЮ

The inscription, in Ukrainian, refers to the goal of joining this wartime entity into the Soviet Union, which evenually happened in 1946.01.22, Transcarpathian Ukraine becoming a region of Soviet Ukraine (Zakarpatskaâ oblasth). This territory had been changing hands between the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia. Now it is a region of independent Ukraine.
António Martins, 26 Sep 2002

My image follows [sol83] in all details, except for the exact typeface (I used a more usual serif type, not the slightly decorative serif type of [sol83]), which may not be too important, as Sokolov’s choice may be also not 100% faithful to the original flag (and if there were more than one original flag, it’s almost certain that there were typeface differences between them).

Three typographic details of the original were kept and are of note:

1. The "u"s are latin like "Y"s and not the usual cyrillic glyph "y". Though there is indeed such a distinct cyrillic letter ("ү", U+04AE, used in Azeri, Kazakh, Tatar, Turkmen, Bashkir, Kyrghyz, Yakut, Uyghur, Tuvinian, Mongolian, Karakalpak, Kalmyk and Dungan — but not in Ukrainian), I’m sure these are supposed to be “normal” cyrillic "u"s.
2. The “ê oborotnoe oborotnoe” (so called Ukrainian "ye") is rendered as a mirrored (cyrillic) "z", not in the usual way (as a mirrored ê oborotnoe, i.e., as a stroked "C"). I’m not sure of the significance of this, but, failing to find any relevant letter with that shape, I bet it is a variant glyph for “ê oborotnoe oborotnoe” (U+0404).
3. The apostrophe is Ukrainian alternate for the cyrillic hard sign, but it is rendered also in an original way: the “blob” is at the bottom and the stem curls clockwise from the top right side of the blob. No reference glyph looks like this and I’d bet it is supposed to be a "6"-shaped “quote mark”, a variant glyph for the hard sign.

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