Soviet-era New Year's cards are my jam. Christmas was never a big deal in Russia even before 1917, and New Year's, being secular, basically became secular Soviet Christmas. One year, my BFF (who grew up in Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union) was in town and we celebrated in the traditional style, sadly minus the tree. One day I will get a New Year's tree with a red star, and thus I can fulfill all my secular-Jew-growing-up-in-North-America holiday urges.
I've noticed space-age/space-race imagery in pictures of other Soviet holiday cards too, and I dig that. This is interesting, how the secular holiday got the Christmas trappings. Us atheists have our task of cobbling together what angle(s) we want to take on the "season" too, I reckon.
I remember about Novim Godom cards from the Russian Class I got a D in in my freshman year in college.
The spacecraft at the top left is Vostok, the 1-person craft that carried Yuri Gagarin and later Valentina Tereshkova, the first man and woman in orbit. The middle one is a sort of inaccurate Soyuz, the 3-person spacecraft that was first used in 1967, and is currently the spacecraft that carries crews to the International Space Station. The one to the lower right, in the foreground, is a grossly oversized Sputnik 3, the "Orbital Geophysical Station" loaded with instruments whose results didn't make a splash in the world, because the first US satellite scooped it on the van Allen belts.
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I've noticed space-age/space-race imagery in pictures of other Soviet holiday cards too, and I dig that. This is interesting, how the secular holiday got the Christmas trappings. Us atheists have our task of cobbling together what angle(s) we want to take on the "season" too, I reckon.
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The spacecraft at the top left is Vostok, the 1-person craft that carried Yuri Gagarin and later Valentina Tereshkova, the first man and woman in orbit. The middle one is a sort of inaccurate Soyuz, the 3-person spacecraft that was first used in 1967, and is currently the spacecraft that carries crews to the International Space Station. The one to the lower right, in the foreground, is a grossly oversized Sputnik 3, the "Orbital Geophysical Station" loaded with instruments whose results didn't make a splash in the world, because the first US satellite scooped it on the van Allen belts.
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Soyuz has sure been at it a while. It's almost as old as we are!
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