State Historical Museum
Red-brick neo-Russian museum tracing the nation's story from prehistory to the twentieth century.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the State Historical Museum on Red Square in Moscow opens with a mural of Russian rulers, from Princess Olga to Alexander the Third, plastered over inside the entrance hall in the 1920s. You'll hear about Vladimir Sherwood, the Anglo-Russian architect whose grandfather ran cotton machinery for a tsar, and how he won a public competition to build this red-brick fantasy of old Muscovy on the site of a Baroque medicine store. The guide follows the museum's opening in 1883 before Soviet rule buried its imperial decor beneath white paint and constructivist bleakness.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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