🖼 State Historical Museum

Красная пл., 1

A red-brick Russian-style building of the 1870s–80s with tent-roof towers, the largest history museum in Russia.

The building was constructed in 1875–1883 to a design by the architect Vladimir Sherwood and the engineer Anatoly Semyonov; the old Main Pharmacy building was demolished for it.
In 1755 the first Russian university, Moscow University, opened on this spot, in the former town hall building.
The museum opened to the public on 2 June 1883, when only a few rooms on the first floor were ready.
Viktor Vasnetsov, Valentin Serov, Ivan Aivazovsky and Ilya Repin worked on the decoration of the halls.
Exhibit No. 1 in the inventory book is a twisted bronze bracelet from the Caucasian village of Koban, donated by Count Uvarov in 1881.
The gilded lions and unicorns on the tower spires were removed in 1935 and returned only in December 2003.
The collections hold more than 5 million items, and the permanent exhibition on Red Square shows only about 0.5% of them.