I recently stumbled upon 2 Christmas postal cards from the time of the Soviet Union.
One used, from 1977. The other unused, from 1983.
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The 1977 item:
I can manage somewhere between tentatively and ably in a few languages (with a healthy dose of Google translate), but I'm totally useless when it comes to languages in Cyrillic.
Does anyone have any idea what's going on here?
Did Santa trade his red cap for a hardhat?
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"You gotta put down the duckie if you wanna play the saxophone. (Hoots the Owl -- Sesame Street)"
re: question(s) about 2 Soviet-era Christmas postal cards
Christmas was not officially celebrated in the Soviet Union for obvious reasons. It was prohibited shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution but the tradition of winter celebration was so strong that the government revived it in 1930s finding the New Year's Day to be a suitable replacement. The traditional Christmas symbols such as the tree and Santa (verbatim: "Grandpa Frost" in Russian) were kept and the New Year's became one of the most beloved holidays in the Soviet Union.
The first card is an example of the New Year's dose of Soviet Propaganda. The hardhat on Grandpa Frost's head reads the Cyrillic acronym BAM, which stands for the Baikal-Amur Mainline railway - one of the major construction projects of the USSR's last decades kicked off in 1975 and still ongoing in a sense (although the line became operational about 20 years after the construction began). You can read about the project elsewhere on the Web. 1977 was relatively early in the life of the project when they still thought they would have been done by 1983. The words on the front of the envelope are some of the names of the major stations along the line.
The curious part about this card is that although it is a stamped stationery card, it has no postmarks, so it was mailed inside an envelope. One could have gotten a card that was 3 times as cheap (w/o pre-paid postage) to send inside an envelope. The answer may be actually in the message itself where an aunt sends her relatives not only New Year's wishes but also congratulates them with Christmas!!! Very few still did that in the late 1970s USSR. Apparently, such wishes were safer to relay inside an envelope.
The other card is a fairly typical children's New Year's greeting type with all kinds of cute furry animals (in this case together with a little bread ball from a Russian tale) having a good time.
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