Russian State Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic

On Marata Street in St Petersburg, housed in a former church building, is the Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic — the world's largest collection devoted to polar exploration, holding the official status of a Russian state institution. The exhibition covers the development of the Northern Sea Route, the nature of the circumpolar regions, and the history of research into the southern continent. Since 1998 the museum has been under the authority of Roshydromet, the federal service responsible for meteorology and environmental monitoring in Russia.

The institution grew out of the scholarly work of the Northern Scientific and Commercial Expedition, founded in 1920 and reorganised in 1925 into the Institute for the Study of the North. On 22 November 1930 a museum department was opened at the institute, but it initially had no building of its own — the collection was kept in the basements of the Fountain House. In 1933 the Leningrad City Soviet handed the institute the building of the Edinoverie Church of St Nicholas, which had been closed two years earlier, to use as a museum. The architect Alexander Sivkov oversaw the reconstruction of the premises, completed by 1936, after which preparation of the permanent exhibition began.

The former church building was erected between 1820 and 1838 to a design by the architect Avraam Melnikov and closed to worship in 1931. The domed hall on the second floor, beneath its lit drum, retains the majestic proportions of the church and today houses the section devoted to Antarctica. The other halls hold collections on the nature of the Arctic and the history of the development of the Northern Sea Route — the permanent exhibition altogether displays around 20,000 items.

With the outbreak of war, the museum was mothballed by September 1941, and its most valuable exhibits were evacuated to Krasnoyarsk along with the institute. After the collection returned in 1944, the building underwent three years of major repairs; a group of Leningrad painters led by Lev Bogomolets worked on the artistic decoration of the halls. The permanent exhibition opened on 12 March 1950. In the 1950s, as Soviet Antarctic research expanded, the collection was enriched with material on the southern continent, and in July 1958 the museum acquired its present name. It gained the status of a Russian state institution on 2 February 1998.

Today the museum's holdings exceed 70,000 items, including around 34,000 photographs, an archaeological collection of 17th-century Pomor everyday life from Taymyr, and items from the “North Pole-1” drifting station. Among its most recognisable exhibits are the helm of the icebreaker Yermak and the Sh-2 amphibious aircraft, which took part in the rescue of the crew of the steamship Chelyuskin in 1933 and became the very first item in the collection. The exhibition is further enriched by dioramas of the tundra and seabird colonies, a 1936 relief map of the Arctic, and reconstructions of polar expedition equipment from different eras.

The museum remains Russia's only specialised collection devoted to polar themes. It combines the functions of a natural-history and a historical museum, continuing to add material from present-day expeditions while preserving the memory of the people who opened up the harshest regions of the planet.