Sometimes it seems that museums are necessarily associated with huge buildings, expensive paintings, and ancient artifacts behind thick glass. But there are museums that speak to us in a completely different, very personal language. They tell stories not of kings and generals, but of ordinary people, of you and me.
The Museum of First Necessities is just such a place. Its main exhibits are not masterpieces of art, but simple things that became priceless in difficult times. An empty tin can turned into an ashtray, a scrap of newspaper, a homemade toy, or a cherished piece of soap. Each of these little things preserves the memory of survival, resourcefulness, and the fragile humanity that people tried to preserve despite the circumstances.
This museum makes us look at the familiar world in a new way. It reminds us that the true value of things is often revealed not in abundance, but in moments when they are almost absent. A walk through its halls is a quiet conversation with the past, which helps us better understand the power of the everyday and see the reflection of our shared history in the most seemingly insignificant objects.
About the museum of first necessity
In a sense, the Cryptography Museum is a museum of first necessity. When people hear the word “cryptography,” they immediately think of the KGB, the FSB, and surveillance. And indeed (we even have an installation showing how cryptography developed within the national security services), that was the case at first. Before the advent of the internet, people did not feel the need to monitor the security of their data. Their data was protected by the state. But with the advent of the internet, this need arose. Now cryptography is developing in a civilian direction—it is, in essence, the protection of your interests. And it is very important to know this.
The main thing was to show how science is connected to you personally. It is not an abstraction, as many people think: “Science is something boring that does not concern me, but concerns some nerds.” Our museum is about the basic literacy of modern people. After all, new literacy is the ability to exist in a digital environment.
About the fact that there is no universal museum experience
Before university, I lived in a small village. So now I find it very funny when people say to me, “Well, when you went to the Pushkin Museum as a child.” I didn't go to the Pushkin Museum as a child. Before university, the most I had seen was the Amber Museum or local history museums.
How I went from law school to museum work
My parents are lawyers by profession. And although I knew how it all worked, I still had a romantic image of lawyers in my head. I always dreamed of becoming one myself. But after university, I quickly realized how wrong I was, and it became clear that I would have to rethink my plans for life.
At some point, I joined the Contemporary Dance community in Kaliningrad. It was the heyday of the Fabrika Contemporary Art Center and the TSEKH festival, and I was involved in various wonderful artistic activities in Kaliningrad for quite a long time. I went to work as a project manager at the Kaliningrad Union of Photo Artists. I realized that I lacked certain skills for the job. And as a diligent straight-A student who graduated from school with a gold medal and from university with a red diploma, I naturally decided that I needed to go back to school. I found out about Shaninka, bought tickets with all my money, and came, not expecting to be accepted at all. A month later, they told me that I had been accepted, and even with a scholarship.
At the time, I wasn't planning on working with museums; I was thinking more along the lines of urban studies. Vyacheslav Glazychev, the star of Russian urban studies, was still alive then. I wrote my thesis on the organization of art residencies in the Kaliningrad region because I sincerely intended to return there. I still haven't given up on that idea. At the end of my studies, I received an offer from the Polytechnic Museum, which was then preparing for modernization and holding a competition for concepts.
I came to Polytech, and this ambition — to make it the number one science museum in the world — captivated me.
To be honest, I can't name many references for our museum. We took guides related to accessible environments from British and American museums. We looked at the Museum of Communication in Bern and the Spy Museum in Berlin. We looked at the Microbe Museum in Amsterdam and the Cryptography Museum in the US, but that's not quite our story either — it's a museum of a single organization, the US National Security Agency. In general, we created our own narrative: there were examples, but there was no role model.
The Museum of First Necessities is not an exhibition of old things, but a living reminder of how people lived in difficult times, when every little thing mattered. Here you can see what food, packaging, household appliances, and documents from the everyday life of Soviet people looked like — so simple, familiar, but now almost forgotten. The museum helps us understand that “first necessities” are not only bread and sugar, but also a sense of stability, order, and shared destiny. It speaks to us about the past not in a dry and formal way, but in a familiar, almost homely way.
Things that every museum should have
I immediately outlined an educational strategy. For me, a museum is a path of transformation, and any exhibition is part of the educational process. A museum should be designed in such a way that visitors experience a “before” and “after” state. There should be some kind of intellectual and emotional discovery.
How the idea for Cascade, a school for teenagers in museums, came about
At some point during my time at Polytech, I started doing methodological work. There was a program for teenagers—not very large, but very impressive. We started working with Sasha Heifets, and it turned out to be very difficult to recruit children—especially children who weren't part of the humanities and culture crowd. We started discussing this. It was in late 2017—early 2018—when a major American study was published on the impact of teen programs in museums on participants. It showed how dramatically their social trajectories change. In short, people simply proved what we already knew. We sat down to think with the great methodologist Dasha Savelyeva, who is a theorist and practitioner of educational design and a specialist in motivation. We started looking at different learning algorithms. And then project-based learning was introduced into the federal state standard for education.
We tried to understand what the disconnect was — why teenagers don't go to museums. In adolescence, it is very important to internalize knowledge and package it into something. And we thought, let's do a project based on cultural institutions. During the school year, teenagers will participate in a project-based learning program at these institutions, and it will count toward their school credits. The issue of scaling was very acute — we wanted it to be possible to repeat this in every district center, not just in a good Moscow museum.
It was important for us to create a space where teenagers could think independently and, most importantly, have the opportunity to realize their ideas. I really believe that at Cascade, you learn to be an adult in advance — to understand what interests you, to formulate your ideas, and to see them through to the end. In the case of Cascade, this takes the form of a final exhibition, which is curated by both contemporary artists and our tutors. At the same time, we understand that the process is still more important than the result.
Recently, I met a Cascade graduate in the media section of our museum and almost cried.
A museum of basic necessities is not just a collection of old objects. It is a reminder of what is most important. That our lives are built around simple but essential things: warmth, food, safety, and communication.
Walking through these halls makes you look at your home in a new way. After all, all these modest exhibits were once the center of someone's universe. They saved people from the cold, helped them prepare food, and preserved memories.
Museums like this teach us to appreciate not only rare masterpieces, but also everyday objects. They show how our ideas about comfort have changed, but the need for simple human convenience has remained the same.
Leaving here, you feel the weight of an ordinary mug or a warm blanket differently. And you realize that real wealth often lies not in luxury, but in these very “basic necessities” that make our lives comfortable and safe.
