Day 11: State Historical Museum

The Russian State Historical Museum, located next to the Kremlin and Red Square with a statue of Marshal Zhukov in front.

Our second museum for the day was the Russian State Historical Museum.  It was a decent museum with extensive artifacts covering the history of Russia from prehistoric times up until the Russian Revolution.  It focuses mostly on the cultural artifacts, tools, and lifestyle as opposed to a political history of the rise and fall of empires.

 

A painting of Genghis Khan’s conquest of Asia.  Of note, Genghis Khan is the only person who has mounted a successful winter campaign against Russia.  His offensive obliterated Kievian Rus and reduced the rest of Russia to a vassal state, though this eventually paved the way for the rise of Muscovite Russia and the overthrow of the Golden Horde in the 1400s.

Jasper learning some history…	Peter the Great on a boat.  Peter the Great founded the Russian navy and helped build some of those ships with his own hands.

On a somewhat comical note, a neighboring exhibition hall was featuring a huge exhibit on the Russian-German relationship over the past thousand years.  We didn’t have time to see it though we made a few tongue in cheek references to the special relationship the two countries shared from 1941-1945 (or 1914-1918 for that matter).  It hasn’t all been negative relations between the two countries, of course: there’s the campaigns of the coalitions against Napoleon, the Polish Partitions of the 19th Century where Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Russian Empire successively occupied the country, the German-Soviet clandestine military cooperation during 20s and 30s, the modern Polish Partition (one of the clauses in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), and so forth.

But enough of that – for me, I considered this to be an average museum.  If I was more interested in the cultural history and artifacts, it’d be a must see, but I was hoping it’d have more political history as well, or at least something involving the Soviet Union.  Now there is a less prominent “Contemporary History of Russia” museum that we did not see that specifically covers Russia’s development from the 19th Century to the present.  I’ll put it on my list of things to see next time I’m in Russia.

Interior stairway of the Russian Historical Museum.  In general, the architecture and decoration of the building is quite exquisite, both on the inside and outside.