What Was the Russian Empire’s Postal System?
In January 1714, at the very moment he was waging war on Sweden, Peter the Great issued a decree establishing a regular postal service between Moscow and the army in Pomerania. The decree set the template for the imperial postal system: state-run, financially self-supporting, and tightly bound to the needs of the army and the central administration. By the time the empire fell in 1917, the Russian Post was one of the largest employers in the country, running tens of thousands of post offices from the Baltic to Vladivostok and employing a workforce that included the first women telegraph operators in Europe (see Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, 5th ed., 1993).
The Muscovite inheritance
The Russian postal system grew out of the yamy, the relay stations of Muscovite Russia. The yamy were first mentioned in a peace treaty with the Golden Horde in 1389, and the system was regulated by the Muscovite Law Code of 1649. Each station kept a quota of horses, and a courier travelling in the tsar’s name could demand fresh mounts at every stop. The drivers, the yamshchiki, were hereditary state servitors, often lower-class peasants tied to their post. The Russian winter was the system’s great advantage: a sleigh could cover the 1,200 kilometres from Moscow to Kazan in four days. The system’s great disadvantage was that the courier service was reserved for officials; ordinary private correspondence was a marginal affair carried by travelling merchants, religious missions, and pilgrim caravans.
The Petrine reform
Peter’s 1714 decree set up a postal service open to private users at a fixed tariff. The first post office opened in Moscow in the same year, and a network of regular routes was extended during the next two decades — St Petersburg, Riga, Smolensk, Kiev, the main Black Sea ports. By the time of Peter’s death, the Russian Post was handling about a quarter of a million letters a year. The first Russian postmark, the oval date stamp, was introduced in 1782. The first stamped envelope — rather than the more common practice of franking the letter sheet — was issued in 1845.
The system in the nineteenth century
The postal service expanded rapidly in the 1830s and 1840s with the introduction of steamships on the Black Sea and the Caspian and the construction of the first Russian railways, beginning with the Tsarskoye Selo line of 1837 and the Moscow–St Petersburg main line of 1851. Rural post offices multiplied after the Emancipation of 1861 as a part of the new zemstvo system, and by 1914 the empire had nearly 20,000 post offices, of which the great majority were in European Russia. Rural mail delivery, however, remained patchy: in many provinces the peasant still had to walk to the district town to collect his post.
The Trans-Siberian Railway, completed in 1901, brought the Far East into the imperial postal system for the first time on a regular basis. A letter posted in Moscow reached Vladivostok in roughly a month; before the railway, the same letter took three to four months by yamshchik courier or by the postal trakta road (Starr, Communications Revolution, 1970).
The postal system and the state
The post office was an instrument of intelligence as much as of communication. The Department of Internal Affairs ran the perlustration — the opening, copying, and re-sealing of suspicious private correspondence. The Third Section of His Majesty’s Own Chancellery and then the Department of Police maintained joint responsibility with the Post for political surveillance. The chernye kabinety (“black cabinets”) were technical departments, not separate agencies, but they were widely feared: the nineteenth-century correspondence of Herzen, Ogarev, and the émigré revolutionaries is full of references to suspected perlustration (see Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, 5th ed., 1993).
Telegraph, telephone, and field post
The Russian Telegraph Service was set up in 1851, with the first line from St Petersburg to Moscow; by 1866 it had merged with the Post Office. The international Morse service was extended to Berlin, Vienna, Paris, London, and the Far East in the 1860s and 1870s. Telephone exchanges appeared in the capital in 1882 and slowly spread to provincial cities over the next two decades. The Field Post Office (polevaya pochta) handled mail for the army in the field; it was tested on a small scale in 1863-1864 during the January Uprising, expanded greatly in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, and reached its full bureaucratic maturity in 1914-1917, when the Central Field Post Office employed tens of thousands of soldiers and civilian auxiliaries in handling soldier correspondence.
Stamps and postal art
The first Russian postage stamps — a 10-kopeck and a 20-kopeck, both featuring the imperial eagle on a coloured ground — were issued on 1 January 1858. The Empire’s stamps were technically conservative for most of the period, but the later issues became a battleground of late-imperial national politics: stamps overprinted for the Russian post offices in the Levant, for the Chinese Eastern Railway zone, and for the post at the 1914-1918 Central Powers occupation of Russian Poland are now standard items in European philately.