Documents of the Presidential Library reveal the history of mail in Russia

October 9 marks World Post Day. Even today, when paper letters are often replaced by electronic ones, it is hard to imagine life without mail. In the past, the postal service was a necessary requirement for the existence of the state. Materials from the Presidential Library’s collections tell about the establishment and development of the post in Russia.

The postal business first formed in Rus back in the X century. Noble princes exchanged messages, while ordinary people provided horses for messengers. Such service was called a povoz.

In the XIII century, as the Mongol-Tatar yoke began, a system of postal yam (checkpoints), institutions for postal purposes, was formed. The Tatars were interested in being able to maintain business contacts with Russian princes who had fallen under their power. In these checkpoints, yam, messengers had a chance to rest and change horses. The word yam itself is Tatar, derived from the Tatar dzyam – road. Yam-chi in translation means a guide or itinerary. The yam duty has been carried out by all residents of the postal route, who had to provide carts at any time and serve as drivers, leaving behind their farms for several days at a time.

With the weakening of the Mongol rule and the strengthening of the Vladimir’s, followed by the Grand Duchy of Moscow, the interaction between parts of Russia increased, and there was a need to improve postal institutions. Ivan Kozlovsky writes in the book The First Post Offices and the First Postmasters in the Moscow State (1913): “The imperfections of the cumbersome institution of the yam, the structure of which was far from ideal, the need to increase, expand and facilitate the means of communication, the needs of industry and trade, which were also looking for improved ways of transmitting goods and all kinds of information, – all this prepared a revolution in the history of communication routes and means of communication in the Moscow state”.

By degree of Ivan III, permanent roads for postal communications and permanent postal stations have been established for the convenience of changing horses.

Since the XV century, the burden of the yam duty has been replaced by the opportunity to elect certain people who would carry out the yam service for everyone. They were called yam hunters or yamshchiki, while the places of their settlements were called yamskaya sloboda. All residents paid a special fee to the treasury, which has been partially used to pay for the work of yamshchiki.

Kozlovsky writes that, having begun back in the XV century, Russian diplomatic relations with Western Europe had developed by the XVII century to such an extent that the government needed to have a non-stop operating institution to receive foreign information.

Since the delivery of government correspondence with the help of yam institutions began to seem slow, yamshchiki were less and less entrusted with the delivery of such kind of correspondence. Money parcels and letters of special importance have been entrusted for delivery to loyal figures. For emergency orders, a kind of relay races were carried out by special messengers, other couriers – fast messengers – were also called for duty.

“The yam were not postal institutions in the modern sense of the word. They were only a known way of messengers’ transportation”, according to Nikolai Sokolov's book S.-Petersburg Post during the reign of Peter the Great. The actual structure of the post in Russia dates back to the second half of the XVII century, when, under the influence of a peace treaty concluded with Poland, the Russian government began to instruct foreigners who lived in Russia to “keep” mail from Moscow to Riga through Novgorod and Pskov, and from Moscow to Vilna through Smolensk. Then, the third post, which ran from Moscow to Arkhangelsk, also began working. Mail was transported on Yamsky horses. At all stations of these postal routes, there were prepared “swaps”, meaning fresh horses. In 1696, precise time stamps for the passage of mail were introduced. It must be noted that the mail was exclusively commercial. The postmaster collected money for letters, used them to pay yamshchiki and foreign postmasters, and “turned the rest to his advantage”.

Since the beginning of the XVIII century, Peter the Great was developing a vision of the post office as an exclusively state institution. “In the same year when St. Petersburg was founded, an order was issued to establish two yam between it and Novgorod”, Sokolov says in his research. In 1711, the first post offices were opened in Moscow, and soon in Riga. Then, post offices began to open in other cities as well.

This was followed by Peter's decree: “to establish an ordinary mail, two days a week” in St. Petersburg. Monday and Friday were designated “postal days”, and the Moscow – St. Petersburg postal line began to operate in 1716. The St. Petersburg-Moscow postal route was the first and most important way of communicating of the new royal residence with the uezds and regions of Russia.

By the middle of the XVIII century, postal yards in the form of hotels with inns began to operate at postal stations. The post stations (stany), which replaced the yam and were established at the expense of the treasury, were allowed to be maintained by private individuals with the right to use the run money, receive income from the sale of food and drinks and from the accommodation of travelers for the night. The stationmaster was obliged to have 25 horses at each stan, 10 wagons on wheels or sledges, as well as everything necessary for postmen and mail transportation (horse harness, suitcases, bags, postmen's uniforms). All those who used the services of the postal station, as well as all correspondence, were recorded in special books.

In addition to the transportation of correspondence, the feature of passenger transportation has been associated with postal services for a long time. For private individuals, riding on the yam and postal horses became available in Peter the Great’s era. From that same moment, those, passing through the post, began to be divided into those passing on state and private need. The latter were charged a higher fee. The landowner class often had their own horses and carriages and did not need to change horses. This was called “riding on long”, as opposed to riding “on relay”, that is, on the yam horses.

In the era of Catherine II, the stationmaster was officially called the post-commissar and had the rank of collegiate registrar, which corresponded to the 14th class in Peter's Table of Ranks and provided the nobility only.

By the end of the XVIII century, not only letters and parcels were allowed to be sent by mail, but money as well. Until the end of the 1840s, letters from citizens were accepted in post offices, and with the introduction of postage stamps in 1858, mailboxes began to be used.

The inner-city post office began operating in 1833 in the capital of the Russian Empire, St. Petersburg. Residents of the city could submit their correspondence to one of the reception points. Then, the letters were taken to the post office, were sorted, and the postmen delivered them to the addresses. Only men could be postal workers, since the job implied travelling many kilometers with a heavy bag on the shoulder.

Things around postal institutions were heated to say the least. Even the names of archival documents are evidential of this: The case “On the rejection of the petition of the Zemstvos for the free mailing of textbooks for primary schools”, “On the provision of additional funds for the issuance of remuneration for insurance and registered correspondence lost at the post office”, “The case on the allocation of 2 million 360 thousand rubles for the costs of transporting state mail in 1917”.

Sometimes there were incidents during shipping. A vivid example is an extra post that drowned in the Terek River with “correspondence sent from St. Petersburg, containing some papers sent from the Office of the Caucasian Committee dated May 15, 1849”. It is most likely that Leonty Vasilyevich Dubelt, Chief of Staff of the Gendarmes Corps under Nicholas I, wrote about this particular incident in his “Notes for information...” (1849): “G(eneral)-m(ayor) Cherkesov reports that from the drowned in the Terek River, near Kazbek, the Moscow extra post has been found with S(aint)-P(eter)sburg and Moscow suitcases and all monetary correspondence, therefore only 16 simple postal packages were lost”.

Russia was one of the first countries to deliver parcels and letters by train. The first carriage with correspondence went from St. Petersburg to Tsarskoye Selo in 1837. And in 1874, the Russian Empire signed the Universal Postal Convention and became a member of the Universal Postal Union. From that moment on, a single international space for the exchange of letters and parcels began to form.