On January 17, a postcard with a commemorative stamp dedicated to the 175th Birth Anniversary of Stepan Makarov, a naval commander, a scientist, a Vice Admiral was put into postal circulation in the Geographical Projects of Russia series

Stepan Makarov (1849-1904) was a Russian naval figure, a hero of the Russo-Japanese War, an oceanographer, a polar explorer, a shipbuilder, a vice-admiral (1896). He was an inventor of mine-carriers, a developer of the insubmersibility theory, and a proponent of using icebreakers. He was a developer of the Cyrillic-based semaphore alphabet (1895).

In 1865, Stepan Makarov graduated from the naval school in Nikolaevsk-on-Amur. In 1866-1867, he sailed on the Askold corvette to Japan and Africa. Since 1867, Makarov served with the Baltic Fleet on the Dmitry Donskoy corvette and in May of 1869, received the first officer rank of midshipman. When appointed in 1869 to the Rusalka armor plated battleship, he began a research on the problems of the ship unsinkability; to this end, he proposed to divide the ship into watertight compartments, install main pipelines with powerful pumps and branches, and to use a special collision mat for sealing holes. Later on, he repeatedly addressed the problem of ship unsinkability and published several papers on this issue, and at the 1873 Vienna World’s Fair, he demonstrated his invention - a collision mat for sealing holes in the ship hull.

In 1886, he took command of the Vityaz corvette, on which in 1886-1889 he undertook a round-the-world navigation and conducted a number of scientific researches. From 1894 to 1896, he made the second round-the-world voyage. In 1896, he was promoted to vice-admiral and became the commander of the Baltic Fleet squadron. He put forward the idea of designing a powerful icebreaker to explore the Arctic. From 1897 to 1898, Stepan Makarov personally supervised the construction of the first powerful icebreaker Ermak of his design at the Newcastle shipyards.

Stepan Makarov made a significant contribution to solving the problems of construction and application of the fleet, improvement of the combat qualities of ships, hydrography, shipbuilding, training and education of military sailors; he developed the tactics of the armored battleship fleet, etc.

The main illustration shows a portrait of Stepan Makarov; in the background, there are corvette Vityaz, a map of the Pacific Ocean with the indication of the ship's path, and the logo of the Russian Geographical Society; the commemorative stamp features images symbolically reflecting geographical projects.

In addition to the issue of the postcard with a commemorative stamp, JSC Marka produced special cancels for Moscow and St. Petersburg.


Design Artists: S. Kapranov and Kh. Betredinova.
Quantity: 5 thousand postcards.

« back