JV Stalin Museum – Mamayev Kurgan – Stalingrad

Posted on 09/07/2025 by Michael

Stalin Museum – Mamayev Kurgan

JV Stalin Museum – Mamayev Kurgan – Stalingrad

This is a very strange museum – not to what it is dedicated – but for its location and very existence. Mamyev Kurgan is probably the most revered war memorial in the whole of the Soviet Union/Russia – and that would include those Republics which broke away amidst the chaos of the early 1990s. And yet just a few hundred metres behind the mammoth statue is a private hotel and restaurant which just happens to have a small, three room museum to JV Stalin in the basement. How that has been allowed in such a location is a mystery to me.

It’s a very amateurish collection, doesn’t have a great deal of structure and not all the exhibits are displayed in the best way possible. It would probably be fair to say no one with curator skills has been involved in the project.

It is, therefore, nothing like the Stalin Museum in Gori in Georgia. That museum has been established on a scale the museum in Stalingrad could only dream about. However, there are a few items that I hadn’t seen before and although not everything is on display I was given the impression that in the collection there are a lot of original documents and newspaper clippings that might be hard to find other than in the national archives in Moscow.

It is hoped this post gives an idea of what’s on display. The lighting conditions are not of the best and that has had an impact on the images but you should be able to get an idea of what’s on show. A slight diversion along the paths at the back of The Motherland Calls! for anyone who visits the monument would repay the effort.

Location;

Imani Mershala Rokossovsky 102

GPS;

48.74132 N

44.53259 E

How to get there;

The museum (and the hotel of which it is a part) is behind the monument of The Motherland Call! on Mamayev Kurgan, as the path goes down the hill.

VI Lenin Exhibition at the State History Museum – Moscow

Posted on 10/05/2025 by Michael

To the Citizens of Russia

VI Lenin Exhibition at the State History Museum, Moscow

At the moment there’s a special exhibition attached to State History Museum, one which documents some of the life and work of VI Lenin. Although there’s only a fraction on display here of what used to be on show in the now closed Central Lenin Museum (which used to be housed in what is now the War of 1812 Museum) this exhibition is still worth the visit. Unfortunately, you have to pay the high admission price to enter the State Historical Museum – which, after the pre-historic exhibits is basically a glorification of Tsarism – to get to this exhibition, which is located on the third floor.

To get a better idea of what the Russian State did hold about Comrade Lenin have a look at the book, The Central Lenin Museum, produced in 1986.

What to look out for – amongst other things:

a porthole and sailor’s tally from the Cruiser Aurora;
the cap that (the clean shaven) Lenin wore when he was on an island in Finland before his return to Petrograd to lead the October Revolution;
the original poster of ‘Comrade Lenin cleanses the world of evil spirits’;
Lenin’s Rolls Royce – on the ground floor right where tickets are checked and possible to miss;
the painting of the Central Committee meeting which made the decision to go for everything and to make a Proletarian Revolution and not just a bourgeois change of guard – with a disinterested Trotsky skulking on the extreme right hand side;
the painting of the assassination attempt on Lenin’s life on 30th August 1918;
the gun that was used in the assassination attempt;
the light bulb whose filament is a profile of Lenin’s head;
Lenin’s death mask;
early Lenin badges;
early Soviet coinage and bank notes;
the first symbol of the Soviet Union – a hammer and a plough – before the adoption of the Hammer and Sickle;
the felt hat used by the first Red Army soldiers.

Duration of the Exhibition;

The Exhibition will be in the Historical Museum until 18 August 2025. It is located on the 3rd Floor, separate from the general displays and entrance is by way of the same ticket that gets you into the general museum.

Location;

Revolution Square

GPS;

55.75546 N

37.61771 E

How to get there;

Right in the historic centre of Moscow, at the opposite end of Red Square to the St Basil’s Cathedral, right behind the equestrian statue of Marshal Zhukov.

Cost;

2000 roubles

Casa Scînteii – House of The Spark/Casa Presei Libere – Bucharest

Posted on 06/10/2024 by Michael

Casa Scînteii – House of The Spark

Casa Scînteii – House of The Spark/Casa Presei Libere – Bucharest

The House of the Free Press (Romanian: Casa Presei Libere), known during the Socialist period as Casa Scînteii, ‘House of The Spark’, is a building in northern Bucharest, Romania, the tallest in the city between 1956 and 2007.

Construction began in 1952 and was completed in 1956. The building was named Combinatul Poligrafic Casa Scînteii ‘I.V.Stalin’ and later Casa Scînteii (Scînteia was the name of the Romanian Communist Party’s official newspaper). It was designed by the architect Horia Maicu, in the Socialist Realist style made popular in Moscow in the early 1950s, resembling the main building of the Moscow State University, and was intended to house all of Bucharest’s printing presses, the newsrooms and their staff.

It has a foundation with an area of 280 by 260 metres (920 ft × 850 ft), the total constructed surface is 32,000 m2 (344,445 sq ft) and it has a volume of 735,000 m3 (26,000,000 cu ft). Its height is 91.6 m (301 ft) without the television antenna, which measures an additional 12.4 m (41 ft), bringing the total height to 104 m (341 ft).

Between 1952 and 1966, Casa Scînteii was featured on the reverse of the 100 lei banknote.

100 lei banknote, 1952, reverse

On 21 April 1960, a statue of Vladimir Lenin, made by Romanian sculptor Boris Caragea, was placed in front of the building. However, this statue was removed on 3 March 1990, following the Romanian counter-revolution of 1989.

Casa Scînteii – FOTOFORTEPAN MHSZ

On 30 May 2016, the Monument to Capitalism, ‘Wings’, was inaugurated in the same place.

Renamed Casa Presei Libere (‘House of the Free Press’), the building has basically the same role nowadays, with many of today’s newspapers having their headquarters in it.

As of 2023, the House of the Free Press is the only building in Bucharest that has kept the hammer and sickle communist symbol, together with the Star, which appears on repeated reliefs on its façade.

Text above from (a revised) Wikipedia posting.