Postage stamps and postal history of Russia

Peter the Great enacted reforms making the postal system more uniform in its operations, and in 1714 the first general post offices opened in Saint Petersburg and Moscow.

Postal stationery made its first appearance in 1845, in the form of envelopes that paid the 5-kopeck fee for local mail in St. Petersburg and Moscow.

During the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet postal service was a part of the People's Commissariat for Communications of the USSR.

It delivered up to 70 million parcels per month to the Soviet Army front from the rear under extremely difficult and often very dangerous conditions.

A huge network of mailboxes was established not only in cities but also in rural areas, stations, railway sidings and at freeway junctions.

Further development of the postal service followed the path of mechanization and automation of mail processing, improving the organization of its transportation and delivery.

Russian postal enterprises were operating and there was commercial independence, but with it the strong competition posed by former partners, the telecommunication companies.

Thus, despite the separation of industries, a unique postal network, established in prior periods and covering almost all localities in the country, has been preserved.

These companies operated using outdated and worn-out postal facilities representing about 50 different IT solutions in terms of industry technology.

In accordance with the concept of restructuring the federal postal service, adopted by the Government Decree on 28 June 2002, the postal industry in the Russian Federation carried out the reorganization, aimed at creating a single, highly efficient and competitive company able to make a significant contribution to the solution of urgent problems on the accelerated development of the economy and resulted in the establishment of a single unified operator- Federal Unitary Enterprise Russian Post.

In the middle of March, the clients of on-line retailers launched a massive spam attack on the Moscow office of the Roskomnadzor watchdog.

In this period the company received up to 1,000 messages from individuals with complaints about delayed deliveries of purchases made at Internet shops.

[6] The company's new management, in October 2013, stated an ambitious goal of doubling revenues to make the company ready for an initial public offering in 2018 by allowing it to provide banking services, reducing the number of unprofitable branches and focusing on providing deliveries from online retailers.

For example, after opening Exchange center in Yekaterinburg, parcel from China to residents of the Sverdlovsk Oblast is delivered in five days, including all customs clearance.

The company held a ceremony at Yakutsk Airport to launch its second new airmail plane under a program to expand links to remote areas, its first being a flight in the Khabarovsk Krai territory on Russia's east coast.

Russian Post deputy director-general Alexei Skatin said that "The mail must be delivered on time despite the difficult geography of the region.

[10] The postage stamp idea had already swept much of the world when, in September 1856, the Russian authorities decided to follow suit.

These were used to make up complicated rates for international mail, which had previously required cash payments at the post office.

In September 1865, the Shlisselburg district became the first of the zemstvo offices to issue stamps; the system was officially organized by a decree of 27 August 1870.

In 1909 a new series came out, using a mix of old and new designs, all printed on unwatermarked wove paper, and with lozenges on the face to discourage postage stamp reuse.

But in 1915 and 1916, as the government disintegrated under the pressures of World War I, several of the designs were printed on card stock and used as paper money.

The period of the Russian Revolution is complicated philatelically; post offices across the country were thrown on their own devices, and a number of the factions and breakaway republics issued new kinds of stamps, although in some cases they seem to have been as much for publicity purposes, few genuine uses having been recorded.

Entities issuing their own stamps include: In 1917 the Provisional Government reprinted the old Tsarist designs but sold them imperforate.

The first stamps of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic appeared in 1918, as two values depicting a sword cutting a chain.

The thematics of Soviet stamps mirrored to a large extent the history, politics, economics, and culture of this world's first socialist state.