This is the first Soviet postcard received by me. Yes, Soviet, because it was issued in 1981, so with a year before Brezhnev's death. I have a lot of postcards from that period (uncirculated, purchased recently from the flea market in Ploiesti, some of them very beautiful, that I will provide for swap), but I not received any. Many thanks, Egor, for this premiere.
On the back is wrote "USSR Exhibition of Economic Achievements Industry Square". Named in nowadays All-Russia Exhibition Centre, it’s a permanent general-purpose trade show in Moscow which was established in 1935 as the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition (VSKhV), renamed in 1959 Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy.
So in 1935 an existing site (then known as Ostankino Park) was approved for the exhibition, and in the next year was approved the master plan by Vyacheslav Oltarzhevsky, but the first show began barely in 1939, after several delays. Meanwhile the architect was arrested, because the exhibition didn’t suit with "the ideological direction of the moment", and was "too modest and too temporary". After WWII delays continued, the complex being reopened only in 1954. Until 1989 the exhibition had 82 pavilions with the exhibition area of 700,000 m2. Each pavilion was dedicated to a particular field: the Engineering Pavilion (1954), the Space Pavilion (1966), the Atomic Energy Pavilion (1954), the People's Education Pavilion (1954), the Radioelectronics Pavilion (1958), the Soviet Culture Pavilion (1964). In image is, of course, the Space Pavilion.
The aircraft is a Yak-42 (NATO reporting name Clobber), CCCP-42304, a three-engined mid-range passenger jet, a new model at that time, a T-tail with both the vertical fin and the horizontal surfaces swept. It performed the first flight in 1975, was introduced in 1980, and was built between 1980 and 2003 in 178 copies. It was the first airliner produced in the Soviet Union to be powered by modern high-bypass turbofan engines. Two engines were mounted in pods on either side of the rear fuselage, with the third embedded inside the rear fuselage.
Above it's mounted a Soyuz (Union) rocket, a expendable launch systems developed by OKB-1, and manufactured by TsSKB-Progress in Samara, Russia. The Soyuz vehicles, used as the launcher for the manned Soyuz spacecraft as part of the Soyuz program, is the most used and reliable launch vehicle in the history of spaceflight. By the dawn of the 21st century, more than 1,600 Soyuz rockets of various kinds had been launched with an unparalled success rate of 97.5% for production models. It can lift up to 7,500 kg into low Earth orbit and has been used to launch a wide variety of scientific and military satellites.
Both aircraft and rocket are even now in the exhibition, but not in the same position, the rocket being placed vertically, next to the aircraft.
The stamp depict Ryazan Kremlin (25R) and is part of the series Russian Kremlins, about which I wrote here.
sender: Egor Ivanov / Egorivanov (postcrossing)
sent from Moskow (Russia), on 07.04.2012
photo: V. Davydova
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