In the year 88, in the ordinary Soviet school village near Sverdlovsk, a teacher offered third-class students to write each other a letter and send it by real mail. The children divided into pairs, received envelopes with stamps, wrote several lines, sealed them in envelopes, wrote an address and index and put them in a mailbox. My friend waited anxiously for the letter, which reached the address only on the third day. When he grew up, he learned why the letter to the neighbor’s house took so long. His village, like Sverdlovsk itself, was a closed regime city and all the letters from the village were first sent to the Sverdlovsk special mailing station, and already from there were sent to the addresses.

This spring, a friend being a teacher with junior students already in Yekaterinburg, decided to repeat the experiment. He bought for his money 20 envelopes with stamps, gave them to the children, explained how to correctly write the address and index, checked all the envelopes and personally watched for the schoolchildren to drop them into the mailbox.

The first letter came in a week and a half. Then over the course of a month came the rest of the letters, except two. The last one came a week ago, in September. The latter is not yet, although the recipient still hopes and checks his mailbox every morning. The pedagogical effect was completely destroyed. Congratulations to the Russian Post!