Old postcards Cosmonautics Day (12 April)

Cosmonautics Day, the Soviet space holiday on 12 April, marks the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s flight: on 12 April 1961 he orbited the Earth aboard Vostok 1 in 108 minutes. The USSR made the date a holiday by a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet on 9 April 1962, shortly after Gherman Titov, the second Soviet cosmonaut, had proposed it to the Communist Party’s Central Committee. In 1968 the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale declared 12 April World Aviation and Cosmonautics Day, and in 2011 the UN General Assembly proclaimed it the International Day of Human Space Flight.

The Soviet postcards in this section span almost two decades. The earliest are two greeting cards titled S Dnyom kosmonavtiki (“Happy Cosmonautics Day”); one of them is dated 1962, the year the holiday was established. The latest is “Triumph of Soviet Cosmonautics”, printed in 1978.

Between them sits a 1977 portrait series that makes up most of the section: each card shows one cosmonaut, captioned with his or her full name. Among them are the Vostok pilots of 1961–1962, Gherman Titov, Andriyan Nikolayev and Pavel Popovich; Titov’s card ties the series to the origin of the holiday itself.

Read side by side, the early greetings and the later portraits show two ways of marking the same date: wishing someone a happy holiday, and putting faces to it.