Russian Christmas Cards

[rain_gryphon]

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!

Comments

[spaceroo.livejournal.com]

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.

I was wondering if it might of been a concept design for Soyuz. It sort of looks like what you might get if you eliminated (or hadn't yet thought of) the separate "Orbital Module" and just stuck a hatch with a docking probe on a somewhat larger re-entry capsule. I suppose it would be like the Russians to let the world think that Voskhod was an "advanced" design like that rather then the hackish thing it was.

That bunny with the microphone seems really proud of his vaguely phallic collection of ornaments. He's got the Capitalistic Dogs by the Christmas Balls now...

[xolo.livejournal.com]

The thing that looks like a docking module is actually the reserve retro-rocket cluster. Voskhod had a spare forward-pointing one that could be lined up easily by a horizon reticle in the event that the mains didn't fire or couldn't be oriented correctly. I've told you before (I think) the story of the intercepted Soviet radio traffic, with the cosmonaut saying "Look out the peephole!".

The Russians didn't plan to hard-dock to transfer their cosmonaut into the moon lander anyway. He was going to do a spacewalk. They invented a rather cool inflatable airlock cylinder for that, that allows the cosmonaut to climb in and out of the ship under pressure, so that he doesn't have to fight his inflated suit like the Americans did.

I didn't actually notice that about the Bunny's ornaments.

[spaceroo.livejournal.com]

The thing that looks like a docking module is actually the reserve retro-rocket cluster....

It's actually sort of difficult to find really good photographs of the Voskhod spacecraft (Perhaps the Russians are still vaguely embarrassed by the whole thing.), but the one thing you can say is it doesn't look much like that thing on the card. I still sort of wonder if the explanation here is the artist was working from some Soyuz concept art which the propaganda folks were "accidentally" leaking as being representative of the Voskhod. It's very much either a one-piece Soyuz or a stretched Zond. (Which of course was a "shortie" Soyuz.) ;^)

The Russians didn't plan to hard-dock to transfer their cosmonaut into the moon lander anyway. He was going to do a spacewalk. They invented a rather cool inflatable airlock cylinder for that, that allows the cosmonaut to climb in and out of the ship under pressure, so that he doesn't have to fight his inflated suit like the Americans did.

Hopefully that airlock would of worked better on the moon missions then it did on the Voskhod spacewalk. Leonov almost killed himself after having to deflate his suit to get back into the lock and then being unable to turn around to shut the door. ;^)

I didn't actually notice that about the Bunny's ornaments.

I'm surprised the Christmas tree in the background isn't doubled over in pain.

[pyesetz]

Actually, these aren't "Christmas" cards, since Christmas was banned by the Soviets.  They are "New Year's" cards. Each says "С новым годом", which means [We wish you good tidings] with the new year (bracketed part assumed in context).

[xolo.livejournal.com]

They may well have tried to ban it. Judging by the evidence of these cards, all they managed to do was to move it back about a week.