National Museum of History

About

On Red Square No. 1, facing Saint Basil's Cathedral, stands this museum. Its founding was approved by Tsar Alexander II in 1872, driven by a proposal from the crown prince Alexander, later Tsar Alexander III. The present building was constructed between 1875 and 1883 to designs by architect Vladimir Sherwood and engineer Anatoly Semyonov, and it opened to the public in 1883. The collection comprises roughly 5 million artifacts and around 14 million pages of documentary material, spanning the breadth of Russian history. The museum operates not just as the main building on Red Square but as a complex that also includes Saint Basil's Cathedral, the Museum of the Patriotic War of 1812, the Romanov Boyar Chambers, the Central Museum of Russian Cossacks, and a branch in Tula.