Russian Ethnographic Museum

This guide to the Russian Ethnographic Museum in Saint Petersburg follows Prince Tenishev, an industrialist who sent researchers into Russian villages in 1899 to record ordinary peasant life rather than the doings of tsars and generals. You'll hear how his archive found a home in a museum commissioned by Nicholas the Second, and how architect Vasily Svinyin insisted on Russian materials alone, sending north to Karelia for the pink marble columns of its ceremonial hall. The building was finished in 1913, just as war and revolution arrived.