Early history
Records mention a system of messengers in the 10th century. Early letters were carried in the form of a roll, with a wax or lead seal; the earliest known of these seals dates from 1079, and mentions a governor Ratibor of Tmutarakan.
By the 16th century, the postal system included 1,600 locations, and mail took three days to travel from Moscow to Novgorod. In 1634, a peace treaty between Russia and Poland established a route to Warsaw, which became Russia's first regular international service.
Russian Empire
Peter the Great enacted reforms making the postal system more uniform in its operations, and in 1714 the first general post offices opened in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. “Regular post service” was established along the Moscow and Riga routes. In February 1714, the postal service started biweekly runs from St. Petersburg to Riga; in June of that year it started runs from St. Petersburg to Moscow. The field post office was founded in 1716, and the so-called ordinary post service in 1720, for fast conveyance of state ordinances and papers. Regular delivery of private parcels (the so-called heavy post) was organized in the 1730s and ’40s. In 1746, parcels and private correspondence were first delivered by courier, and starting in 1781 money, too, could be delivered to one's door. The earliest known Russian postmark dates from July 1765; it is a single line reading "ST. PETERSBOVRG" (in Latin letters), but the first official recommendation to use postmarks did not come until 1781.
Post coaches appeared in 1820. In 1833, the St. Petersburg City Post was created, and the city was divided into 17 districts with 42 correspondence offices located in trade stores. In 1834, reception offices appeared in the suburbs (in St. Petersburg there were as many as 108). Delivery of printed periodicals was organized in St. Petersburg in 1838. The Department of Coaches and T-carts was opened in 1840 at the Moika Embankment; light cabriolets carried surplus-post, coaches delivered light post, and T-carts dealt with “heavy" post. Green street mail boxes were installed in 1848, the same year stamped envelopes were issued; orange mailboxes for same day service appeared near railway stations in 1851, with the first prepaid postage stamps appearing in 1857.
The Imperial Russian Historical Society estimated that in 1854 the Russian postal system was formed by a network of 16,510 mail couriers and of 3,950 relay stations, positioned every around 85,000 versts (roughly 90,500 kilometres). This structure was capable of delivering packages and letters twice a week in most of the Russian cities, 6 days in 63 cities and two times a year in the Kamchatka.[6]
Local postal systems used stamps referred to as Zemstvo stamps, from the term for local government begun under Alexander II in 1864.[7]
Russian Post is a founding member of the Universal Postal Union created in 1874. In 1902 Chief Postal Service was made part of the Internal Affairs Ministry and in 1917 under the Provisional Government it became part of Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs.
Soviet Union
During World War II, known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War, Soviet postal service was a part of the People's Commissariat for Communications of the USSR. It delivered up to 70 million parcels per month to the Soviet Army front from the rear under extremely difficult and often very dangerous conditions. In the postwar years, mail service has undergone quantitative and qualitative changes. In 1946, the People's Commissariat for Communications was transformed into the USSR Ministry of Communications. Postal service has been carried out by the Post Office, which was part of the Ministry of Communications, along with other offices of telecommunications industries. By 1950, the postal industry, destroyed by the war, was restored to the pre-war level.
Russian Federation
During the Soviet era, postal and telecommunications enterprises were unified, initially existing within regional and republican communications departments, and later within state-owned communications and information technology enterprises; the USSR Ministry of Communications was at the top of the communications hierarchy. Following the collapse of the USSR, a decision was made to separate postal services into an independent industry: on November 16, 1992, the Federal Postal Administration was established under the Ministry of Communications of the Russian Federation.[8] which was supplemented with a governmental resolution no. 798 issued on August 14, 1993.[9] By order of the Ministry of Communications, effective January 1, 1993, territorial (regional, territorial, and republican) federal postal administrations and postal institutions in Moscow and St. Petersburg were established within the Federal Postal Administration.[10] This order also approved the list of activities for separating postal and telecommunications structures and the principles for separating postal and telecommunications.
In 1994, a professional holiday for postal workers was established – Russian Post Day.[11] Furthermore, in 1997, in order to restore the heraldic traditions of the Russian postal service and enhance its authority, a flag and emblem were established for the federal postal service organizations of the Russian Federation.
Since the Soviet Union dissolved, the Federal Postal Service consisted of a network of 90 disparate entities which were mainly listed as state institutions or federal state unitary enterprises. In legal terms, they were completely independent concerns. They were linked to the Federal Postal Network only by a trunk intrazonal and inter-district transmission and delivery system. Different parts of the same system, connected by a single mechanism in adjacent regions, were in outright competition with each other, trying to lure corporate clients away from other competitors even if it involved an operating loss. There were no uniform budgeting, planning or other processes. These companies operated using outdated postal facilities representing as many as 50 different IT solutions in terms of industry technology.
On June 28, 2002, the Government of the Russian Federation approved the Concept for the Restructuring of Federal Postal Service Organizations.[16] The Concept proposed merging all existing federal postal service organizations and creating a federal state unitary enterprise called Russian Post, based on economic management rights, with subsequent corporatization while maintaining state control.
The Russian Post was established by a decree of the Government of Russia on September 5, 2002.[17] Its charter was approved on February 11, 2003.[18]
Post-reform period
In 2004 Elsag Datamat won the tender to build Russian Post's first automated sorting centre.[22] In 2008, Andrey Kazmin, former CEO of Sberbank was appointed to the CEO of the company.[23]
In January 2009 it was announced that Kazmin was to leave his position as CEO of the Russian Post due to a financial crisis from ambitious but poorly implemented reforms.[24] From 2009 until his ousting in the 2013 reforms the General Director was Aleksandr Kiselyov. The current CEO of Russian Post is Mikhail Volkov.[25]
Growing inefficiency in the 2010s
The early 2010s saw a rise in complaints. The number of parcels from foreign online retailers had been rising steadily for several years and was certain to rise further.[26] According to Russian Post's own estimates, orders from Internet retailers are delivered to Russia mostly in ordinary or registered parcels; in 2009 there were 2.3 million, by 2012 the number had soared to 17 million. On March 6, 2012, five trucks from Germany were in queue to be unloaded at Vnukovo International Airport. At the International Post Office, 12,300 parcels, 5,300 EMS packages, and 36,000 minor incoming parcels had piled up. Another 2,000 parcels were waiting for customs clearance at Sheremetyevo International Airport.[27]
In 2012 a group of people dissatisfied with the state of affairs established the website "anti-Russianpost.ru"; its goal was to allow users to highlight instances of disappointing or unsatisfactory service from Russian Post. In the middle of March the clients of on-line retailers launched a massive spam attack on the Moscow office of the Roskomnadzor watchdog. In this period the company received up to 1,000 messages from individuals with complaints about delayed deliveries of purchases made at Internet shops.
In March 2013 Russian Post reported the unfavourable state of affairs. In a special message Russian Post's deputy general director, Nina Fetisova, told the Federal Communications Agency Rossvyaz and the Federal Customs Service that the processing of international mail was in a critical situation at the customs posts Vnukovo and Sheremetyevo International Airport and also at the Central International Post Office in Moscow. The director of the federal postal services of the Vologda Oblast said: "The reason for delays is not our own ineffectiveness, but the pressure of social factors. We have too many official functions: the delivery of pensions, of written correspondence, and subscriptions to newspapers and magazines".
In order to improve the services, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev signed a government decree to take the Russian Post out of the sphere of competence of the Federal Communications Agency Rossvyaz, and subordinate it directly to the Ministry of Communications and Mass Media.[27][28] Also, On April of that year, the General Director of the Post, Alexander Kiselyov was ousted from the office.[29]
The company's new management, in October 2013, declared an ambitious goal of doubling revenues to make the company ready for an initial public offering in 2018 by allowing it to provide banking services, reducing the number of unprofitable branches and focusing on providing deliveries from on-line retailers.
2014–2023 development program
In late October 2013 Prime Minister Medvedev generally approved the Post's development program in a meeting with Minister of Communications Nikolai Nikiforov. Among its goals are to turn the Russian Post from a model of "subsidized postal operator" to "self-sustaining postal business", modernization of its logistics infrastructure and making its work more efficient. Companies will create eight main hubs with automated sorting and direct exchange with each other. The service area of each hub will be about a 700-km radius. The number of branches in the cities will grow, while the placement of new areas will be determined by regulation. In rural areas, there will be new formats of work: "letter carrier plus internal transport," according to the reform. This is expected to reduce the number of unprofitable offices from 14 thousand to about 8.5 thousand, most of which are in rural areas.[33] Also discussed in the draft is non-discriminatory access to the infrastructure of the postal service.[34] In December 2013, the government published its draft Federal Law on Postal Communications, which is expected to be approved in Spring of 2014. In that year Russian Post was to begin deploying a unified ERP system — a set of integrated applications that allows creation of a single environment to automate planning, accounting, control and analysis of all core business operations across the enterprise. In September 2013 Deputy Minister of Communications Mikhail Evrayev said that one of the major problems of the Russian Post was the lack of a unified information system working both at the central office and at all branches.[35]
