‘ … If not a Revolutionary Museum, then at Least an Oppositional One … ’: the Russian Revolutionary Movement’s Initiatives to Create a Revolutionary Museum in 1901–1917

Revolutionary Russia. 2025. Vol. 38. No. 1. P. 1–23.

Nikolay Sarkisyan

This article examines the emergence and evolution of revolutionary museology in Imperial Russia between 1901 and 1917, addressing a previously understudied aspect of revolutionary culture. By analysing four successive attempts to establish revolutionary museums – the Russian Museum in Geneva (1901–1902), Maxim Gorky’s initiative on Capri (1912–1913), Vladimir Burtsev’s various projects, and the Petrograd House Museum (1917) – it explores how revolutionaries appropriated and adapted European museum models to articulate their collective history. The paper argues that these museum-building efforts reflected a broader musealisation of revolutionary culture, in which material artefacts increasingly shaped revolutionary memory. While embodying the revolutionaries’ subjective sense of unity, these initiatives simultaneously revealed underlying tensions between revolutionary ideals and national narratives. Although none of these initiatives fully materialized, they preceded later Soviet historical-revolutionary museums, demonstrating how museums became key sites for negotiating and constructing revolutionary identity.

Keywords: Russian Revolution, revolutionary movement, museums of revolution, radical memory