Revolutionary museums in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union before and after 1917
a Socialist History Society Public Meeting held on 29th October 2024

Speaker: Nikolay Sarkisyan

In Soviet Russia, the world’s first museum of revolution opened in Petrograd in 1919. This marked the beginning of a special type of museum – the historical-revolutionary museum – which was followed by other similar museums in the USSR, opening in the 1920s and 1930s and continuing until the end of the Soviet Union. These included museums of revolution, museums dedicated to Lenin and other party and revolutionary figures. However, the revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire had already been ‘pregnant’ with the idea of museumifying its history, and the first unsuccessful attempts to open such a museum date back to the 1900s and 1917, which transcended party disagreements. In this talk, I will discuss what the museum meant for Russian revolutionaries, why they were so scrupulous about history, and how museums changed in the 1930s.

Nikolay Sarkisyan is a postdoctoral researcher working on the history of revolutionary museums in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. He worked at the Museum of Political History of Russia (formerly the Museum of Revolution) and the Smolny Museum (formerly the Museum of Lenin) in St Petersburg from 2014 to 2017.