About Watch Russia
Museums have long been not just collectors and preservers of our heritage but also creators of the present, shapers of our identity. This is especially true not of big, well-known institutions but small local museums established on private initiative out of a deep love for their own native land or hometown. These are the authentic geniuses of their place.
We invite you to explore unusual private museums that reveal the spirit and character of their lands with the same affection as they were founded upon.
Where: Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky
The private Vulkanarium museum is a project of hereditary volcanologist Sergey Samoylenko and his wife, Alyona. Everything came together here out of love. A very great and sincere love. First, Alyona, who had come to Kamchatka on a business trip, fell for the charismatic guide who organized a tour of the surroundings for her team. Her feelings were so serious that the young woman decided to move from Yaroslavl and agreed to marry Sergey. Seeing how obsessed her husband was with volcanoes and immersed in the topic, Alyona conceived of a museum project. “My husband’s father, oceanologist and volcanologist Boris Samoylenko, studied the ocean, underwater volcanoes, and volcanic lakes, and worked at the Institute of Volcanology and Seismology of the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Sergey also worked at this institute for 20 years, in the active volcanism laboratory. He researched the eruptions of 15 volcanoes. In addition, Samoylenko was among the researchers who helped Sergey Korolev test the hypothesis that Kamchatka’s volcanic slags replicate the lunar landscape. For this, lunar tests were conducted on Kamchatka. My father-in-law received the equipment and conducted research with actual lunar rovers on Kamchatka,” Alyona recounts, speaking about the museum’s main inspiration.
There were no issues with the scientific foundation for building the exhibition. It was based on a copy of a handwritten letter from Sergey Korolev on the need to conduct research and collection of stones from volcanologist Vladimir Leonov, who discovered the famous Valley of Death at the foot of the Kamchatka volcano Kikhpinych. The museum now collaborates with pilot-cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev; the Vulkanarium features a section called Volcanoes of the Earth from Space, which displays photographs of volcanoes taken by the test cosmonaut from aboard the International Space Station.
The museum space is 100% interactive. The exhibition also features active volcanoes: molten lava flows from the crater of one, and the eruption of another is demonstrated by a steam generator, with rings of steam rising from its vent. Among the exhibits are fragments of volcanic rock, solidified lava, and stones. There are inhabitants of the fire-breathing hills, lichens. They are alive, are regularly watered, and, according to the museum staff, need to be talked to regularly. Everything except the lichens can be touched, a bowl containing volcanic sand is particularly popular. There is a virtual tour called Flight over Kamchatka: visitors are shown natural parks, lakes, the Valley of Geysers, and volcanoes from above. The narration covers the significance of volcanoes and what happens on planets that lack them. Volcanoes provide invaluable assistance to scientists: they bring up from the earth’s depths what humanity cannot yet explore on its own. The technology needed to descend to such depths does not exist. The museum also debunks myths from films, such as the idea that one can instantly drown in lava. “You can even stand on it. There is a documented case when volcanologists drifted on a stone raft down a lava river for over an hour,” says Alyona Samoylenko.
The museum has been open since 2017, during which time, it has become an example of true social enterprise, assisting in popularizing the region and developing tourism.
Where: Tomsk
For most of us, Slavic mythology is associated with barely comprehensible texts from a middle school literature textbook. In Tomsk, at the private First museum of Slavic mythology opened by social entrepreneur Gennady Pavlov, they have managed to shatter these stereotypes, making the museum one of the most popular cultural places in the city.
At the start of the tour, visitors undergo an unusual test: beside a big pike, together they write down their dreams on notes and drop them into a little box, hoping that “at my whim, at the pike’s command” their wish will be fulfilled, as in the Russian fairy tale. Further on, around the corner, a “joy of recognition” awaits many: a life-sized wooden fox crafted in the style of a Bogorodskaya toy “sits” at a laptop, tapping the keyboard with its paws. Every other visitor is moved: “That’s me at the office.” Simultaneously, on an interactive display, one can find out a series of facts from Slavic mythology. For example, that the expression sheveli porshnyami (move your pistons/hurry up) originated as far back as the 10th century. Porshni was the name for bast shoes made from strips of leather worn during the rainy off-season or trips to marshes. Porshni, by the way, are right there, in a nearby museum display case. Assessing how visitors react to these exhibits, the guides choose which route to take the tour group on to make sure they aren’t bored. For instance, children increasingly have to be told what kind of pike it was that met them at the entrance. For this age group, the project Accessible Fairy Tales is implemented.
The museum holds many exhibits gathered on folklore expeditions before the museum’s founder died in 2015. Gennady Pavlov’s work is now being continued by his three daughters, one of whom, Olga, deliberately studied art history. There is a permanent exhibition dedicated to the main Slavic deities: Gods and Heroes of Ancient Rus, consisting partly of lacquer miniatures and ceramics and devoted to the mythical birds Sirin, Alkonost and Gamayun. Even so, most of the exhibits are interactive. For example, children are invited to turn millstones, operate bellows in a forge, try on chain mail, while adults can enjoy a lecture on Eroticism in Folklore. A separate stand is dedicated to scary creatures in fairy tales: domovoys, leshys, Baba Yaga and other babaykas. Here again, adults joyfully recognize themselves in a depiction of a person in a feverish delirium. Our ancestors believed that, at such a moment, the patient is surrounded by a dozen or so tiny fever-sisters, who tear the person apart.
More and more frequently, the museum steps out into the city to host interesting events. For example, the kolyadki festival Neighbours with a Bear has already become a citywide carnival-festival that families attend in original costumes. Available throughout the year is a Faces of Siberia audio walk around Tomsk, with artists collaborating with the museum team to place art objects in the most interesting locations across the city.
Where: The village of Vyatskoye, Yaroslavl Region
The village is located 30 kilometres from Yaroslavl and, on weekends, traffic jams form at the entrance to this once ordinary village among thousands in central Russia. So it is better to come to Vyatskoye on a weekday and stay for about three days. A shorter time simply won’t be enough for seeing everything.
Ten years ago, Vyatskoye became the first member of the The Most Beautiful Villages and Towns of Russia association, whose headquarters are now located here. Since 2019, the village has been on the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List. All this happened thanks to a native of the region, patron Oleg Zharov. The village was actively built up in the 18th and 19th centuries, featuring merchant and peasant houses, tea houses, taverns and almshouses. More than fifty houses are now recognized as architectural monuments, about 30 of them having been restored. A dozen museums operate in Vyatskoye; almost all are interactive and touch upon many spheres of life. These are the Museum of Russian Enterprise, the Museum of the Returned Shrine, The Gorokhovs’ House, The Russian Black Bath, the Museum of Kitchen Machinery, the Children’s World museum (with a large collection of various Ded Moroz figures belonging to actor Alexander Oleshko), the museum-print shop Pages of the History of Printing, the Polytechnic Museum or The Amazing World of Mechanisms and Machines, the museum House of Angels, the interactive museum The Rooms of the Merchants Urlov Brothers, the museum Sounds of Time and the Museum of Russian Pastimes.
One should begin with the first museum that opened in the village 15 years ago, the Museum of Russian Enterprise, with its flagship tour The History of a Village That Wanted to Become a City. The tour starts with a model of Vyatskoye. As the story progresses, the guide turns on tiny lights in the houses that have already been restored and then in those where restoration work has just begun. After this, one can plot an interesting personal route, all the other museums having been mentioned already.
One should begin with the first museum that opened in the village 15 years ago, the Museum of Russian Enterprise, with its flagship tour The History of a Village That Wanted to Become a City. The tour starts with a model of Vyatskoye. As the story progresses, the guide turns on tiny lights in the houses that have already been restored and then in those where restoration work has just begun. After this, one can plot an interesting personal route, all the other museums having been mentioned already.
In almost every museum, besides a ticket, one can also buy a… dozen first-grade crunchy salted cucumbers. This is the village’s gastronomic brand. Vyatsky cucumbers were supplied to the imperial court and were also exported to Sweden and Switzerland. By the beginning of the 20th century, the annual cucumber harvest reached up to 30 million units a summer. The harvesting and pickling season was called ogurechni (cucumber time). Supplies were stored in voluminous stone cellars called ogurechnye yamy (cucumber pits). The pickling recipes, harvesting details, the actual cucumber pit, as well as the black bath, can be seen on a tour of the house of Cucumber King Gorokhov. By the way, the chain of tiny baths along the Ukhtomka River, which has become a symbol of the village, is not only an open-air museum but also a functioning bath complex.
Where: Torzhok
The tiny town of Torzhok is often called the city of helicopters since the 344th Centre for Combat Application and Retraining of Flight Personnel is based here. It trains pilots of the highest category, granting them sniper pilot and sniper navigator qualifications. Many families in the town are in some way connected with rotary-wing machines. As a result, two helicopter museums appeared in Torzhok at once. The first is on the territory of the military unit and is a restricted-access facility, requiring lengthy negotiations to gain entry approval. The second, opened by local social entrepreneur Alexey Cherepnov, contains no military secrets and is targeted on the broadest range of visitors, including the very youngest.
Mi-2, Mi-24, Mi-6 and Mi-8 helicopters are parked on the museum grounds. As the founder himself, a graduate of the Syzran Higher Military Aviation School and a former military pilot, jokes, these exhibits, which have a real combat past, are destined for a worthy retirement at the museum, surrounded by loving and caring descendants. The Mi-6 model helicopter, produced in 1962, came to the museum on the initiative of the daughter of Mikhail Mil, creator of the legendary Mi family of helicopters. Nadezhda Mil highly appreciates the attention paid by those who care about the legacy left by the inventor. And she supports the museum’s initiatives in every way possible. All exhibits here have accessible cockpits. Accompanied by a guide, visitors are told about the technical design and capabilities of each model. Using the example of the Mi-8 helicopter with a fully preserved pilot’s cockpit equipped exclusively with analogue instruments, the gadget-dependent generation is shown how pilots flying such machines used rulers and wind calculators to navigate. Besides a rich combat biography, this exhibit also has a creative page in its history: this helicopter participated as a stunt double in the filming of the 2020 film Ogon (Fire).
The exhibition features not only real machines but also books and equipment used by pilots, both past and present. Visitors can see the stack of textbooks required for a pilot to obtain flight clearance and samples of uniforms used in different aviation eras. One can move immediately from theory to practice. The museum has an Mi-2 aviation simulator. Using neural networks, a replica of the landscape of one of the city’s districts was created for the museum. The “pilot” or “passenger” sitting in the simulator cabin gets a complete impression of a real flight over the city. In addition, a career guidance project for children, Helicopter Pilot School, has been launched at the museum, and master classes are held on Helicopter Construction.
