Jeff
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Location: Herndon, Virginia
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Montreal to Switzerland via Petrograd?
Contributed by Matthew Kahane.
You will remember that there used to be a regular feature in The Post-Rider of mail from the Russian lands to Canada. As that feature no longer
exists, I thought I would send this little note to you, in case you wished to share it with fellow-Rossica members – even if the item went from Canada
through Russia.
I enclose scans of both sides of a postcard I found a few weeks ago in my regular scouring of the boxes of postcards at the weekly flea-market in
Geneva. The postmark on the Canadian 2¢ stamp appears to read MONTREAL …..DA 11 DE 13 15 (STATION…), and the postcard, with its New Year greetings
in the picture and in the text, was addressed to Vuadens in the Canton of Fribourg in Switzerland.
The curious thing is that the card has also received a Russian postmark ПЕТРОГРАДЪ 3 24
2 16 3 1 ЭКСП in black and a violet two-line boxed h/s: Д. Ц.
ПЕТРОГРАДЪ. There is no indication on the card that it was to travel westwards through
Russia, and I would have thought that mail from Montreal to Switzerland would normally have gone across the Atlantic. Presumably the card arrived in
Petrograd by accident, mis-sorted, and we can assume that it did arrive in Vuadens (a smallish town), even though there is no arrival postmark, as I
found it in Geneva, among hundreds and hundreds of other cards, used and unused, mainly French and Swiss, being sold at $1 each.
Would any fellow-member have any other ideas about this item?
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Jeff
Super Administrator
Posts: 265
Registered: 10/18/2002
Location: Herndon, Virginia
Member Is Offline
Mood: It's developing...
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Front side of postcard
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Rasputin
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One possibility - a French Canadian postal clerk misreads "Suisse" for "Russe."
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