BCH Museum Activities

Museum-archive

A historical note

"... Who wants to see the human genius in his noblest struggle against superstition and gloom, let him read the history of the Arctic travels, read about the people who were going with fluttering banners towards the unknown. Nowhere else, perhaps, the knowledge was acquired at the cost of greater deprivations, disasters and sufferings. But the human genius will always strive forward until there is not a single inch left in these parts, a human foot would not have trodden on, until all mysteries are solved over there, in the north, too".
These words of an outstanding Norwegian researcher Fritjof Nansen reflect the idea of the exposition of the Museum.

The Historical Museum-archive of the Russian European North studying and exploration of the BCH KSC RAS was founded in 1974 and was included in the list of museums of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The scientists from the Kola Branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, members of the geographical society took part in its foundation. The chairman of the Northern branch of the Geographical Society, PhD Boris Ivanovich Koshechkin, the author of several popular books on the history of the Kola North, was the ideological inspirer and the organizer of the Museum.

The peculiarity of the Museum in tightly connected with the main tasks of its activity - to reflect the processes of exploration, settling and development of the European North of Russia in terms of the history of scientific researches in various directions.

The Museum offers permanent expositions on the following subjects:

"History of archeological discoveries"
"Ethnographic studies"
"Kola Pomor land (coastal area of the Peninsula)"
"History of researches, carried out by the Russian Academy of Sciences in the Kola North in the XVIII-XIX centuries"
"High-latitude researches"
"Complex Northern scientific-commercial expedition 1920-1931"
"The Kola Science Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences history"