Sending a Cosmic Greeting

Corr: Stamp collector Sergey Barkov has sent 40 space stamps to Kursk where his relatives and friends live. Some of the stamps are for his Alma Mater – the South-Western University.
SB Sergey Barkov, “send a cosmic greeting” event participant:

It took me more than a month to prepare for this event. I bought various postcards and stamps and spent about 2 hours to get them stamped here.

Corr: On Cosmonautics Day, residents and guests of Moscow sent out vintage postcards from the Moscow museum of Cosmonautics. Employees of Russian Post helped fill out the cards. Plenty of long forgotten postcodes and stamps were remembered to send a cosmic greeting to loved ones and friends.

SB Daria Chudnaya, “send a cosmic greeting” event participant: This batch that I’m holding is for cities across Russia, including Moscow, Saint Petersburg, even Ples and Kostroma, I’m sending them all over the place. I also want to send some to the UK, I still need to fill those out, and I want to send some to Vietnam because I have a lot of friends there.

Corr: The stamps are unique. They’re exact replicas of stamps from the “Murzilka on the satellite” collection. The originals were created in 1964 by Soviet designers Znamenskyi and Stepantsev. The prototypes are stored at the museum. A limited collection of their replicas was prepared especially for this event.

SB Natalia Kobyzova, “Russia Post” media director for Moscow: The postcards were released as part of a very limited collection and are not sold freely. You can only get them here. Therefore, in any case, the recipient of such a postcard also becomes the owner of a collectible.

Corr: The retro postcards also come with a special signature greeting from a conqueror of space, Aleksandr Laveykin. SB Aleksandr Laveykin, cosmonaut and Hero of the Soviet Union: Everything happening here at the museum today has a very deep meaning, because it’s the very place where we celebrate this day and sign the postcards that will be sent across the world, and that’s how it should always be done.

Corr: The collectible value of the postcards is also increased by special stamps. Only on this day they were marked with a special artistic stamp. The postcards were sent from this mobile postbox.

STUP Elena Lubimova, correspondent: The cards can be sent to anywhere in the world. The only requirement is filling out the exact address and placing a post stamp for mailing out abroad or across Russia. Afterwards comes the special stamp from Russian Post. Then the postcard is ready for mailing.

Corr: In 2019, Cosmonautics Day was celebrated for the 58th time. The free event at the museum of cosmonautics was organized by Russian Post. Around 1000 copies of postcards from the 1960s were printed. While more than 2000 rare originals are stored in the museum’s collection.

 Elena Lubimova, Andrey Kostrov, TV BRICS