The collection of the Historical Museum will be presented in a virtual format

The State Historical Museum, which has stored the funds of the former Museum of V.I.Lenin since 1993, opens its most valuable collections, as well as archival materials, to history buffs and researchers.

The funds of the VI Lenin Museum store collections of art Leniniana, photographs, posters, documents, memorial items - about 100,000 items in total. The most valuable of them will be presented on-line.

“We are often asked whether the funds of the Lenin Museum have survived, what happened to the items after the museum was closed in 1993, whether they were sold or destroyed. The entire collection of the Lenin Museum is completely preserved and became part of the Historical Museum, where it is kept to this day. We periodically organize thematic exhibitions, but so far we cannot present the Soviet period in a permanent exhibition. This means that valuable historical materials and works of Soviet artists are still kept in the closed funds of the museum, without the possibility of acquaintance with them to a wide audience. The resource that we plan to develop will allow everyone to get acquainted with this collection. In addition, a number of interesting materials were provided by our colleagues from the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI). A number of archival documents,previously unpublished ones can be seen on the new Internet resource, ”notes the director of the Historical Museum. Among them are documents telling about Lenin’s involvement in solving controversial financial issues of the Bolshevik Party, telegrams, notes, executive resolutions of the head of the Labor and Defense Council during the Civil War, personal correspondence of V.I. Lenin, etc.

The earliest of the found Lenin documents - a letter by "totems" of twelve-year-old Volodya Ulyanov to his friend Bor Formakovsky, is also presented on the project’s website.

Currently, about 500 items have been published on the project’s website, but the virtual collection will be regularly updated with new materials. It will also collect topical comments by leading Russian historians on key events in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century; thematic videos and films. So, an article about the biography of the leader of the world proletariat was written by Andrei Sorokin, the scientific director of the RGASPI, and the guides of the Historical Museum tell fascinatingly about the secrets of Lenin’s cap and the famous Rolls-Royce, which is on display at the Historical Museum.

The project is being implemented with the support of the Fatherland History Foundation.

Site address: https://lenin.shm.ru