On December 15, Moscow’s Postal Museum and the Moscow Post Office hosted a special cancellation ceremony for the “5,000,000 .RU Domain Names” postcard. Seven thousand copies of the postcard have been published to celebrate .RU domain name registrations reaching the 5,000,000 threshold.
The ceremony was held by the officials of the Moscow Post Office, who said that the postcards are cancelled using a special pictorial stamp dedicated to the event. Cancellations of this kind are usually valid for a limited time only. For example, the special cancellation celebrating the 5,000,000 .RU domain name registrations will be valid for three days, from December 15 to 17, 2015. After that, the stamp will be deposited at the Popov Central Museum of Communications in St. Petersburg.
A postcard with a special cancellation applied to it instantly becomes a rare collectible. Two stamps were applied to postcards cancelled during the ceremony, one featuring the inscription “.RU Domain: 5,000,000 Domain Names” and the other representing a memorabilia stamp of the Postal Museum. In addition, a limited number of cards carry signatures of the ceremony participants: Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Director Andrey Vorobyev and representatives of the Coordination Center founders: Alexei Soldatov, Lomonosov Moscow State University Prorector, Arkady Kremer, Chairman of the Executive Committee at the Association of Documentary Telecommunication, and Dmitry Chernov, Acting Director of the Department of High Technology Development at the Ministry of Communications and Mass Media.
“I strongly believe that these anniversary cards will be valuable both for the Postal Museum and the Museum of the Internet, which I think will open soon. The 5,000,000 threshold is highly symbolic, which is now embodied in this postcard with a special cancellation. I think that it won’t take long before we reach the 1,000,000 mark in the .РФ domain. We will celebrate it in a similar fashion in order to show the continuity between the traditional and new means of communication,” Coordination Center for TLD RU/РФ Director Andrey Vorobyev said.
