This card shows ten views of the city as miniature postcards spilling from a postman’s satchel. From top to bottom are: the People’s House, the Warsaw Station, the statue of Peter the Great, the Malyi Theatre, the arch of the General Staff Building, the Mariinskii Theatre, the Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ, Bol’shaia Morskaia Street, the Winter Palace with the Alexander I column in front of it, and finally St Isaac’s Cathedral and Konnogvardeiskii Boulevard.

This is one of many cards in the Cooke collection which has been used. The postcard is addressed to a father in Ekaterinoslav (modern-day Dnipropetrovsk) by his son, Sergei, in St. Petersburg. Sergei writes, on the 2nd of August 1912, that he had been on parade the day before in front of the Tsar. He reports that the parade had gone well, and that he and his company went on to a meal at the People’s House (the first of the miniature postcards). In Nicolas II’s diaries, the entry for August the 1st refers to two inspections he made that day. Sergei’s parade will have been the second – an inspection of newly graduated officers from the gymnast/fencing school. ‘The results were gratifying and impressive,’ wrote the Tsar.