posted 12-04-2024 02:04 PM
Yes, I've seen similar. Yours is an actual Christmas card with paper insert, whilst I collect (for philatelic reasons) only the more common postcard versions. I have quite a few of both Christmas — featuring Ded Moroz or Saint Nicholas either towing or being towed by a rocket with or without child cosmonaut, or a Soviet child riding a rocket — and New Year best wishes cards, which usually feature Sputniks 1, 2 and 3 flying in formation.
My earliest is a black and white card from Moldavia celebrating Christmas 1958.
And yes, I believe the signatures are genuine. They are left to right, Gagarin (Vostok 1), Titov (Vostok 2), Popovitch (Vostok 4), and Nikolaeyev (Vostok 3).
The Xmas card appears to have been sent to Leonid Alexandrovich Voskresensky, one of Sergei Korolev's rocket engineering colleagues. He died in 1965, unknown in the west, still covered by the Soviet paranoid secrecy. So how you have acquired it would be my major query?
Given the timeline of Soviet spaceflight, post Vostok 3 and 4 in August 1962, and pre-Vostok 5 and 6 and Voskresensky's retirement from active duties due to ill health in 1963, it can be firmly dated to Christmas 1962. The artistic style of the card is completely right for that era too.
If genuine, and I have no reason to doubt it, it is a wonderful thing, which unfortunately would not find a place in my collection due to its un-philatelic nature, but is still something I can envy. (If only it had a stamp and postmark on it...😀)
posted 08-06-2021 08:34 AM
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