If this is Thursday it must be postcards, 347

 

Peter and Paul Cathedral, St. Petersburg, Russia

Here are two more unused postcards sent in the early 1970s to Bob from St. Petersburg, Russia.  Both cards show the Peter and Paul Fortress founded by Peter the Great and built from 1706 to 1740 using designs by Domenico Trezzini.  From the air one can see the star formation of the fortress.  

Peter and Paul Fortress as seen from the river, St. Petersburg, Russia

The Fortress is located near the north bank of the Neva River on Hare Island and over looks sandy beaches although the beach is not in the picture on this card.   It was originally built to protect St. Petersburg from Swedish counterattacks but it never was used for that purpose.  The six bastions were first hastily constructed of earth and timber and then later rebuilt in stone.

The Peter and Paul Cathedral, shown on the first card above, features a 402 foot or 122.5 meter tall bell-tower and is topped with a gilded angel.  This cathedral is the burial place for all Russian Tsars from Peter I to Alexander II except Peter II and Ivan VI.  Nicholas II and his family were re-interred in the side chapel of St. Catherine, in 1998 the 80th anniversary of the deaths. 

In the 1920s it was used as the city garrison and as a prison for mostly political prisoners by the Bolshevik government.   Rebuilt in 1870 and known as the “Russian Bastille” the Trubetskoy Bastion was the main prison block.   Several well-known people, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Maxim Gorky, Leon Trotsky, and others, were held in this prison.  One of the prisoners, the anarchist, Prince Peter Kropotkin, escaped from the fortress in 1876.  Although it was believed that conditions in the prison were terrible and rumors abounded about frequent torture, malnutrition, overcrowding and other horrors in reality it was far less brutal than the public perception.  No more than 100 prisoners were held at any given time and most had access to what might be considered luxuries like writing materials, literature, and tobacco.

In 1917, during the Russian Revolution, mutinous soldiers attacked the Fortress and the prisoners were set free.  At that time hundreds of Tsarist officials were incarcerated in the Fortress.  By 1924 most of the site was converted to a museum and is today the State Museum of Saint Petersburg History.   The Gas Dynamics Laboratory was added to the site in 1931.  Much damage occurred during World War II bombardments when the city was under siege by the Germans.  Today it has been restored and is a major tourist attraction.

The postcards arrived in separate envelope with a letter.  That envelope had an interesting stamp.  The stamp below is one in a set of six stamps issued in 1977 featuring Arktika-class nuclear-powered icebreakers.  Built between 1975 and 2007 four Arktika-class nuclear-powered icebreakers are still in service today.  Icebreakers have multiple uses from breaking ice and making way for cargo ships to scientific expeditions to tourist cruises.  

Arktika-class, nuclear icebreaker stamp, 1977

For additional information, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_and_Paul_Fortress
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_icebreaker