“Raznochinny Petersburg” Memorial Museum

St.Petersburg
7 Bolshoy Kazachy per., St. Petersburg
Phones: +7 (812) 407 52 20
Web site: https://spbmmrp.ru

On the first floor, a local lore exhibition titled “Around the Semenovsky Parade Ground”, which covers the historic district Sementsy, where the Semyonovsky Life Guard Regiment was accommodated, tracing its history back to Peter the Great. Next to it is an interesting exhibition called “The Blockade Room of the Agte Family”, which contains authentic items from the blockaded life of a Leningrad family of four who survived the Seige of Leningrad in an office apartment at the Technological Institute on Zagorodny Prospekt (not far from the Museum). On the third floor, there is a memorial room where V. I. Ulyanov lived. It hosts the exhibition “Choosing a Path”, which details how he became a revolutionary. The museum also showcases items and documents, paintings and civilian clothes that document the city’s structure, the royal security service, transport communications, and retail stores. Visitors can see equipment from craft workshops, the arrangement of military barracks, the safe house of the revolutionaries, and the doctor’s office. There are also rare book editions from the 19th century, lithographs, a coin collection, postcards with views of St. Petersburg, and gift books with autographs of party leaders from the 20th century.

House 7 on Bolshoy Kazachy pereulok was built in 1825 and is a typical St. Petersburg building from the Pushkin era. From February 12, 1894, to April 25, 1895, Lenin rented a small room in the three-room apartment of the Bode family located on the third floor of this building. During this time, he worked as an assistant to M. F. Wolkenstein, a juror. This was already the fifth apartment that Ulyanov had rented in St. Petersburg. The rental price was 10 rubles a month and included kerosene, firewood, cleaning and tea with bread twice per day. The room was simple and austere. After Lenin’s death in 1924, “Ilyich’ Corner” was opened in the house, where residents could to know the biography of the founder of the Soviet state. In 1938, a museum apartment for V. I. Ulyanov (Lenin) was opened in apartment No. 13. The interior of the apartment was recreated from the recollections of eyewitnesses. Later, the museum apartment became a branch of The Central V. I. Lenin Museum in Leningrad. In 1960, a memorial plaque appeared on the house. In 1991, the museum apartment was transformed into the Museum of the History of the Revolutionary Democratic Movement of the 1880s and 1890s. In 2006, when a local history exhibition was opened about the “raznochintsy”, the museum was named “Raznochinny Petersburg”. “Raznochintsy” in pre-revolutionary Russia was the name for people from unprivileged classes who received education and lived on the income from their studies, such as students, teachers, minor officials, and merchants.

V. I. Ulyanov left the apartment in Bolshoy Kazachy pereulok in the spring of 1895, when he was sick with pneumonia. Upon his recovery, he went to Geneva to improve his health and never returned to this apartment. In 1925, Bolshoy and Maly Kazachy pereulok were united under the name “pereulok Ilyicha” (Ilyich lane). House number 7 is also associated with another historical figure: in 1894, Vasily Muravyov, a merchant engaged in the fur trade, lived here. He is widely known as hieromonk Seraphim Vyritsky, who was canonized in 2000 by the Russian Orthodox Church among the Synaxis of New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia.