Russian Museum of Ethnography

The Russian Museum of Ethnography 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.