It takes roughly ten hours to travel from Moscow, Russia, to Kyiv, Ukraine, by train. But a letter sent via Air Mail from Moscow will most likely reach Kyiv in ten days.
LJ user valkorn – whose nostalgic postcard tour of Moscow was featured here in November 2006 – offers a graffic comparison (RUS) between Russia's highly inefficient postal service and its overseas counterpart, the United States Postal Service:
The logos of these two organizations provide a clear reflection of the way they work:
[image slightly altered to fit the GV format]It becomes obvious right away why it takes three days for a package from the States to reach Russia, and then a month to reach the addressee in Moscow.
And here are some of the comments:
valkorn: I've heard a cute hypothesis: that the Russian Postal Service actually exists for distribution of bills and election campaign leaflets, and the rest of the traffic is comparatively small and receives the leftover attention.
darkcjc: I've not only heard but know firsthand about the practice of pushing back all orders and a complete switching to printing campaign materials on the eve of the election by virtually every printer… Perhaps, the post is used for this, too. Well, and also to deliver draft notices to draftees [povestki].
pinwizz: Beginning last fall, draftees get their draft notices for the following years right at the draft center. It's more reliable and faster than USPS. I recommend it to everyone.
ghost_deep: Do you think it's worth trying to [send letters] through the military? ^_^
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spinka: One of my LJ friends received her full Sex and the City edition from the American Amazon.com after half a year of waiting. During this period, they managed to send her a replacement set =)
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alyonka: Subconscious pushes itself outside during the creation of a logo, and the creators are expressing not what they would like to express, but the truth :) Symbols…
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kitaycev: If I'm not mistaken, it takes no less than 2-3 days to receive a letter sent within Moscow.
2007-03-06 04:48 am none (UTC)[…]
__mixa__: Once I got a package from London to Khabarovsk in four days. It's sad that that was an exception, not a rule, and that usually packages shake their way to us on trains for two to three months :(
3 comments
When I was in Irkutsk my parents sent me a parcel for Christmas.
It arrived at the post office in Irkutsk just fine. Unfortunately, either they didn’t let me know about it, or they sent the notification to the wrong address, because when I didn’t collect it in a month, they sent it back to England.
So, my parents sent it back to Irkutsk again.
It arrived at the post office in Irkutsk just fine. Unfortunately, either they didn’t let me know about it, or they sent the notification to the wrong address, because when I didn’t collect it in a month, they sent it back to England.
At which point, I decided to collect my parcel – slightly battered but in otherwise good condition – direct from my parents on my return home to England that summer.
Why does mail between Belarus and the US always go through, but now it seems that mail between the US and Russia does NOT always go through?
Have “mail thieves” found capitalism in Russia to be profitable too?