Early Post-WW2 Letter to an Officer and his wife, 20 January 1946.
The letter is enclosed in the small plain-paper envelope in which it was mailed. The right side of the envelope is missing, but it is easy to project the full size of it as approx. 5" x 3 ½". Luckily, the address part is on the left side. The letter is addressed to Viktor Kabuzan, Military Unit # 37572 in Stalinabad (Dushanbe, the capital of Tadzhikistan). The letter was handwritten on a sheet of graph paper of surprisingly good quality for paper that could be found in 1946 Kiev.
In very good to excellent condition. The addresses are clear and legible, the Kiev cancellation stamp
The letter is enclosed in the small plain-paper envelope in which it was mailed. The right side of the envelope is missing, but it is easy to project the full size of it as approx. 5" x 3 ½". Luckily, the address part is on the left side. The letter is addressed to Viktor Kabuzan, Military Unit # 37572 in Stalinabad (Dushanbe, the capital of Tadzhikistan). The letter was handwritten on a sheet of graph paper of surprisingly good quality for paper that could be found in 1946 Kiev.
In very good to excellent condition. The addresses are clear and legible, the Kiev cancellation stamp is mostly missing but the Stalinabad stamp is in place. Unfortunately, only the name of the city is clear. The date is illegible, but the first two digits are "52", i.e., 5 February. Two weeks delivery time for a letter from Ukraine to Tadzhikistan in winter of 1946 sounds quite impressive!
Reading the letter, it becomes clear that it was written by parents of a woman married to an officer (or, less likely but possibly, a civilian specialist) serving or working in Military Unit 37572 in the capital of Tadzhik SSR Stalinabad, as Dushanbe was renamed then. Four pages of parents' heartache over prolonged time gaps between letters and postcards, interspersed with tidbits of family news. Hard to imagine at the tail end of the first quarter of the 21st century the informational vacuum people used to live in, with the vast majority of the Soviet population confined to slow mail as the only means of long-distance communication.
A fascinating piece of history, as personal as it gets, and as such, an understated gem for a collection of WW2-era Soviet memorabilia.
Please note that the pen in our photo is for size reference.
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