Yekaterinburg Local History museum is on Malyshev street near the Iset river. There are a lot of other sights in the immediate vicinity of the museum: the City Pond, the Plotinka, the Bol-shoi Zlatoust (Big Chrysostom) church, the Fine Arts Museum, etc.
The local history museum was founded in 1870, about the same time as the Ural Society of the Lovers of Natural History. Presently, the main museum expositions are located in the house of the Ural entrepreneur Alfonse Fomich Poklevsky-Kosell. But some theme expositions are in several other buildings.
Shigir Idol is the most precious exhibit of the museum. It is the world`s oldest wooden sculpture. According to the results of radiocarbon analysis, this idol was made by ancient local tribes in Mesolite, also called the Middle Stone Age (about 11 thousand years ago). The idol was found by the workers of a gold mine at Shi-gir peat land (near the city of Kirovograd) at the end of 19 century.
The local history museum of Yekaterinburg differs from the similar museums in the other cities of Russia as its collections go far beyond the bounds of the region. You must visit the permanent exposition called «Twentieth-century history of Russia in gifts.» It is a very large and most interesting collection of gifts given at different times to the leaders of Russia and the Soviet Union: Nicholas II, Stalin, Kalinin, Brezhnev and Gorbachev, as well as the Communist Party and the Soviet people as a whole.
The museum has many presents to Stalin from the work collectives of various plants of the Soviet Union, as well as the plants of the other socialist states such as Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia and many other countries. Among the presents there are a lot of things with beautiful decoration: smoking pipes, samovars, chessmen sets, national costumes, pictures and cold weapons.
