ABSTRACT
Even a seasoned traveller with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Russian geography might find it difficult to name a town or city in the country that is not home to a public establishment known as a ‘kraevedenie museum’. An industrial or regional city might lack certain elements of urban infrastructure, but somewhere on its streets, there is likely to be a building—perhaps a section of a building or something resembling a shack—adorned with a plaque that proudly announces the presence of a kraevedenie museum. There is no established equivalent in Western academia to kraevedenie, the Russian-language term for the area of knowledge that these museums are intended to represent, but it can be translated literally as ‘the knowledge of a certain area’. The guides would say that these objects all somehow reflected the identity of a place and a people, and where they had come from historically and geographically.
