State Historical Museum
Russia's national history museum, in a red-brick Russian Revival palace at the head of Red Square.
The museum was established on 9 February 1872 by decree of Emperor Alexander II, following a national exhibition that had gathered material on Russian history. A competition produced the design by the architect Vladimir Sherwood and the engineer Anatoly Semyonov, and the building went up on Red Square between 1875 and 1883. Its red brick, tented turrets and carved detail were drawn from sixteenth and seventeenth-century Russian sources so that the museum would sit beside the Kremlin walls and St Basil's.
The collection grew quickly through gifts from private collectors such as Pyotr Shchukin, Alexei Bakhrushin and the Uvarov family, and now numbers several million items. Displays follow Russian history from prehistory to the early twentieth century through archaeology, coins, manuscripts, arms and applied art, among them the Borovsky birch-bark documents, the Izbornik of Svyatoslav and a sixth-century Byzantine treasure. The interiors are themselves decorative, with vaults painted to match the period of the objects shown in each hall.
Highlights
- Sherwood's 1875-83 Russian Revival building facing the Kremlin
- Painted halls designed to match the periods on display
- Archaeology, numismatics, manuscripts, arms and applied art
- Branches include St Basil's Cathedral and the Romanov Chambers
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