GREETINGS FROM......IMPERIAL RUSSIA
GREETINGS FROM.... VLADIVOSTOK
The postcard on the left was sent from Vladivostok to France in 1907.
The caption:"Wladiwostock. Swetlanska-Str. Ecke der Chinesischen Str. ", Vladivostok. Swetlanska Street, Corner of the Chinese Street. The Svyetlánskaya was the main street of the city at the time and ran from east to west not far from Golden Horn Bay. The city was founded on July 2, 1860 as a military post. The name means "Control the East".
This picture and all pictures below on this page, if not mentioned otherwise: scanned about 300 dpi. Then set right and cut out, resized 25 % of this image and saved as jpg.
As indicated on the address side, the card goes to the west via the "Voie Transsibérienne". Vladivostok is the eastern terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway and the most important Russian city in the East. The journey from Moscow to Vladivostok is also described in Baedeker 1914: route 77 From Moscow to Vladivostok via Tchelyabinsk (Trans-Siberian Railway).
It is a journey of 8134 Werst, 8677 kilometers (1 Werst is 1066.78 meters).
Nikolayevsk-on-Amur -80 kilometers from the estuary- became, after its foundation on August 13, 1850, the most important administrative center and largest port in the east of Russia. The naval port, the residence of the military governor and the headquarters of the Siberian military fleet were moved from Nikolaevsk to Vladivostok in 1871. The port of Vladivostok also appears on postcards.
The card opposite has been sent to Hamburg.
The ship on the left in the harbor is the new battleship Retvizan, which was built in America. This ship belonged briefly to the Baltic Fleet and was sent to the Far East in 1902. In 1904 the ship was hit in the Japanese attack on Port Arthur. The ship ran aground at the harbor entrance, was lifted and repaired. Other ships attempted to reach Vladivostok, but had to return to Port Arthur during the Battle of the Yellow Sea. The ship was scuttled by Japanese howitzers around the harbor, December 7, 1904. In January 1905, the ship was refloated by the Japanese, repaired and added to the Japanese Navy in 1908. The name then became Hizen.
It appears that next to the Retvisan is the Poltava, built on a Russian shipyard, and the Tsesarevich, built in France.
The Poltava entered service in 1899 and from 1901 Port Arthur was home. On December 5, 1904, the ship sank at the battle of Port Arthur, shot from a hill. The ship was eventually repaired and part of the Japanese Navy under the name Tango.
Built between 1899 and 1903 in France, the Tsesatevich is the basic design for the Russian-built Borodina-class battleships. The home port was Port Arthur (Manchuria). The ship fought in the Russo-Japanese War from 1904-1905 and after this war became part of the Baltic Fleet.
De kaart hierboven is verzonden naar Hamburg. In het dubbelring-stempel is duidelijk de plaats aangegeven: ВЛАДИВОСТОКЪ [VLADIVOSTOK].
The Vladivostok postmarks shown so far: the "regular" double ring stamp. There are many double ring stamps with different serial letters. An overview gives the work of Robinson.
The post office in Vladivostok, probably opened around 1865, starts out as just Pochtovaya Kontora (1874-November 1888), a larger type of post office directly under the control of the postal district headquarters.
After that, the office was given the rank of Post-Telegraph Office (from November 1888). Around December 1909 there is a postmark Vladivostok 1. Furthermore, there is of course a station post office (from 1895).
The oldest postmarks are single ring stamps with the date in three lines (four different ones).
Then - after 1890 - the "cross-date" stamps follow (8 different ones reported, but there may be more). These are the single-ring stamps with the top of the day, the bottom of the month (in Roman numerals), to the left of the whole of the century and to the right of the rest of the year. The double ring stamps were introduced in 1903. For Vladivostok, 27 different stamps have been reported.
In addition, a bilingual double ring postmark was in use in 1917. Only 1 postmark from 1909 of Vladivostok 1 is known. Three different stamps of the station post office are known.
Finally, there are the postmarks of the railway post lines from Vladivostok. The card here was carried on the Vladivostok-Charbin line. Charbin is the hub in Manchuria.
On this card: the railway postmark of the line ВЛАДИВОСТОКЪ 264 ХАРБИНЪ [VLADIVOSTOK 264 KHARBIN]. Line 263 is the opposite direction. At Chita the Trans-Manchurian line branches off to China and until 1913 this was the route to Vladivostok.
Naturally, there was also a railway line from Vladivostok to the northwest: railway line 153-154.
