Imperial Russian Playing Cards

Meeting of Frontiers is ‘a bilingual, multimedia English-Russian digital library that tells the story of the American exploration and settlement of the West, the parallel exploration and settlement of Siberia and the Russian Far East, and the meeting of the Russian-American frontier in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest.’ Amongst the many interesting things exhibited therein is an eye-catching deck of Imperial Russian playing cards…

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The deck was issued by Sobranie, and was designed (if I’ve construed this correctly) by one K.M. Gribanov. They currently belong to the National Library of Russia’s cartography division in St. Petersburg. Click on the images to view enlarged versions of the same.

The backs of the cards are illustrated too, with maps of the relevant locales. Here are the reverses of the four cards above….

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