Russian Museum of Ethnography

The Russian Museum of Ethnography (Российский этнографический музей) is a museum in St. Petersburg that houses a collection of about 500,000 items relating to the ethnography, or cultural anthropology, of peoples of the former Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.

The founding date of the Russian Ethnographic Museum is considered to be 1895, when a separate ethnographic department was formed at the Russian Museum on the initiative and under the leadership of Samuil Dudin. On April 13, Emperor Nicholas II, in fulfillment of the will and in memory of his father Emperor Alexander III, signed the Supreme Decree No. 11532 “On the establishment of a special institution called the “Russian Museum of Emperor Alexander III” and on the presentation for this purpose of the Mikhailovsky Palace acquired by the treasury with all the outbuildings, services and garden belonging to it.

The museum's first exhibits were the gifts received by the Russian Tsars from peoples of Imperial Russia. These were supplemented by regular expeditions to various parts of the Russian Empire which began in 1901. Further exhibits were purchased by Nicholas II of Russia and other members of his family (as state financing was not enough to purchase new exhibits). A collection of Buddhist religious objects was acquired for the museum by Prince Esper Ukhtomsky. Prince Tenishev, a wealthy industrialist, donated to the museum the archives of his private ethnographic bureau that had been documenting the life of Russian peasants since the 19th century.

The collection was not officially opened to the general public until 1923 and was not detached from the Russian Museum until 1934. When the Museum of the Peoples of the USSR in Moscow (successor to the Dashkov Museum) was shut down in 1948, its collections were transferred to the Ethnographic Museum in Leningrad. This museum should not be confused with the much older Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, popularly known as the Kunstkamera. Provided by Wikipedia