Russian Christmas Cards

A lovely collection of Soviet Christmas cards from the dawn of the Space Age. They're very much like ours from the same age, except there are quite a few with realistic space hardware:

Santa with early spacecraft. That's poor Laika's tomb on the far end, and a Boctok on the near side. I haven't a clue what that one in the middle is, though. It looks pressurized. Does anyone know? The same troika appear in another card as well.

Edit: The mystery ship is apparently Voskhod, from when they were pretending that it was something more impressive than just a Vostok with extra seats jammed in.

One of the Lunas, returning its samples to Earth.

There's also a rather austere one of the Lunokhod, with an embossed picture of Stalin [edit: Lenin, actually. One of those commies]. I'm guessing these were Party cards, or else went to people involved in the Luna/Lunokhod projects.


There are a number of the 'Santa in a helicopter' and 'Santa in a rocket' designs as well, which seemed ubiquitous in the 60s. I got quite a few of those as a child.

And then there's this one, I just love the art :)

*****

The same site has a collection of Soviet Christmas cards with animals as well.

I love this one. The same artist (I'm pretty sure) has several others throughout the site.

*****

Mars might get @whacked by an asteroid. The headline originally said "1 in 5", which really bought my eye!