In 1922, visitors to a Museum of Social Hygiene in post-revolutionary Moscow encountered an unusual display. Three mummified bodies were placed side by side: an Orthodox saint, the body of a counterfeiter whose remains had previously been passed off as holy relics, and a rat that had dried out inside a pipe.
Nothing in the arrangement marked one as more important than the others. Instead, the display invited comparison. The same processes of decay and desiccation were presented as operating across all three bodies, and the accompanying labels explained these processes from a biological point of view. What mattered here was therefore not the individual value assigned to any one object, but the new significance produced by placing them in relation to one another. Holiness, the display suggested, had nothing to do with the preservation of the body. Recontextualized within a secular, scientific narrative, the saint’s relics themselves became agents of a new, Bolshevik anti-religious ideology. The success of this display led other hygiene museums to organize similar displays, which remained popular even in the late 1920s, as demonstrated by a caricature published in the magazine Begemot (Figure 1).
G. Efros, caricature published in Begemot 22 (1928). It shows visitors treating the Leningrad Museum of Hygiene as a site of pilgrimage. The caption, which reads “I’m going to the Museum of Health. To venerate the holy relics,” ironizes the persistence of religious practices within a secular exhibition space.
Figure 1 Long description
A black-and-white satirical illustration shows four visitors inside a museum room. On the left, two elderly women in headscarves stand facing one another. On the right, two visitors kneel before a display case labeled “Мощи” (“relics”), each holding a candle. Behind them are museum displays containing jars with preserved specimens, including hands and feet, as well as images of bodily abnormalities. The caption in the upper right corner reads: “The Leningrad Museum of Health has seen an increased influx of visitors following the arrival of the ‘relics’ of Feodosii of Chernihiv.” The caption under the image presents a dialogue between the two elderly women: – Agafya Savvishna! My dear… Why have you come here, dear? – I’m going to the Museum of Health. To venerate the holy relics.
However, this exhibition was not just a blockbuster event in the course of anti-religious propaganda. It also marked a broader shift in museum theory and practice, one that can be traced in both Soviet and international contexts. Instead of being conceived as a repository for antiquities and treasures in a broad sense, the museum began to be understood as a platform for constructing and delivering a message that was current, dynamic, and, in the Soviet context, also ideologically loaded. As a result, museums of hygiene searched for new ways of communicating with their visitors, and thus composed their permanent displays as complex collages of specimens, models, texts, diagrams, photographs, and, later on, even audiovisual media.
While such approaches to display have been extensively studied in relation to avant-garde art exhibitions in general and experimental projects in Soviet art museums in particular, hygiene museums have received remarkably little attention.Footnote 1 Indeed, they seem to fall outside the familiar narrative of avant-garde exhibition-making: there were many of them, they were often improvised from limited resources, and their displays relied largely on reproducible and replaceable objects rather than unique items. Moreover, hygiene museums were often overshadowed by the more politically charged projects of museums of the Revolution and anti-religious museums.Footnote 2 At the same time, hygiene museums were part of this same early Soviet museum project: from the very outset, they were places where new forms of display were developed and put directly into practice.
This relative neglect of hygiene museums also points to a broader historiographical question about how the history of the modern museum has been told. One influential way of narrating this history has been through collections and objects: what museums collected, preserved, researched, or displayed, and why. Through more synthetic studies of museum collections and their ordering, scholars in the 1990s increasingly examined how objects participated in the construction of knowledge and how museums consequently transmitted particular values.Footnote 3 We might call this an object-centered approach to museum history, in which the individual object and the collection of which it forms part constitute the central units of historical analysis.
But what happens when the acquisition and ordering of collections do not fully explain what a museum does? Recent museum scholarship has increasingly approached museum display as a knowledge-making practice, asking how different elements of the museum work together to produce and reproduce meaning.Footnote 4 This perspective resonates strongly with contemporary museum practice and analysis, but it has been less often applied to historical examples. Ian McShane’s recent study of the interwar “museum movement” is a notable exception.Footnote 5 I refer to this as a mediation-centered approach to museum history. The distinction is therefore not between museums that use objects and those that do not, but between different focuses of historical analysis. Rather than taking the object or collection as its primary unit, this approach examines how objects, media, and spatial arrangements were brought into relation to produce and communicate knowledge. Seemingly mundane yet remarkably widespread, not organized around collections in the conventional sense, and conceived primarily as institutions of public education, hygiene museums offer a particularly vivid entry point into this alternative history of the modern museum.
1. Museum on the wheels
The story of hygiene exhibitions begins before the October Revolution. A couple of them had already appeared in late imperial Russia, and Russian delegates even took part in the International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden in 1911.
But it was only after 1917, amid the rapid spread of epidemics such as typhus, cholera, and the Spanish flu on the fronts of the First World War and the Civil War, that a broader network of museums of hygiene emerged. The public health crisis was so deep, and the territory of the country so vast, that stationary exhibitions were insufficient.
They were supplemented by agit-trains—specially equipped wagons used for propaganda and education—that circulated across the country, reaching smaller cities and villages. Although the main task of agit-trains was spreading revolutionary ideology, special sanitary wagons educated locals on disease prevention using posters, lectures, film showings, and even theatre performances (Figure 2). As the Hungarian writer Arthur Holitscher, who travelled across Soviet Russia in 1920, recalled, one of the agit-trains contained a small anatomical museum, which showcased pathological changes in different organs as well as a “history of a brush” presented in posters.Footnote 6
Oktyabrskaya Revolyutsiya (October Revolution) agit-train, 1920. Visitors queue to enter a wagon used for public health education on disease prevention. © Private collection.
Figure 2 Long description
A historical black-and-white photograph shows a group of children and adults gathered beside an open railway carriage. The exterior of the carriage is covered with large-scale paintings depicting people washing floors and clothes and carrying out other hygienic activities, along with Russian-language slogans, including one beginning “А чтобы победить грязь…” (“And in order to defeat dirt…”) along the upper wall.
The link between politics and organizing everyday life was strong. Exhibitions did not just inform about diseases and teach the basic hygiene rules, but connected wholesome living in the near future with establishing socialist order. A telling example was the Krasniy Vostok (Red Vostok) agit-train, which ran along the Moscow –– Bishkek route and was in particular aimed at a female audience. Questions of women’s emancipation were intertwined with discussions of sanitary issues, healthy motherhood, and childcare.
2. Language of things
It was in this atmosphere that the first Museum of Social Hygiene opened in Moscow in 1919 under the People’s Commissariat of Health. The museum was organized into thematic sections that linked disease prevention to daily life. These included displays on domestic hygiene and child care, food and nutrition, protection against so-called “social diseases” such as tuberculosis and syphilis, safety at the workplace, and even the preservation of water, air, and soil.Footnote 7
Part of the exhibits gave an idea of human anatomy and explained the fundamental laws of biology. By presenting anatomy and natural processes from conception to death through a strictly scientific lens, the museum provided the necessary “evidence” for its more provocative displays. In this setting, the three mummies were the logical conclusion of a display designed to prove that the human body was a biological machine, governed by nature rather than the divine.
Mass education and communication with visitors were clear priorities for the Museum of Social Hygiene from its opening. The museum’s public program was ahead of its day. Guided tours for organized groups took place three times a week. Additionally, open explanations of the exhibits were offered daily at 4 p.m., except Mondays, with no prior booking required. Workers could thus attend these sessions right after their shifts, which typically ended around 2 or 3 p.m.
However, the exhibition was designed to be comprehensive and self-explanatory, even without a guide. The Museum of Social Hygiene combined three-dimensional objects with texts, posters, photographs, and diagrams to engage visitors on multiple perceptual levels. This is what I understand here by mediation: the exhibition’s ability to build bridges between what was displayed and the meanings that visitors were expected to derive from it.
Disturbing, even uncanny exhibits such as mummified bodies, wet specimens in jars, or wax models of infected organs were used to grab the visitors’ attention. This was particularly important for audiences with low levels of literacy. As the museum theorist S. Shershever later put it, museums of hygiene spoke to the masses in a concrete “language of things.”Footnote 8 The same concept appears in the writings of other contemporary museum theorists. Reflecting on museums of Revolution, N. Druzhinin, for example, describes the emotional impact of rare three-dimensional objects in this way: “In this materiality lies their most compelling strength, the source of their interest, and their greatest affect.”Footnote 9
Yet the “language of things” still had to be deciphered. While the objects were meant to trigger a physical, emotional reaction in a lay public, and thus to make them more alert, auxiliary materials such as large-scale slogans, labels and posters were right there to provide the scientific or political explanation for the objects. The exhibition thus addressed different faculties at once: it appealed to affect through objects, to the senses through images, and to reason through explanatory texts. The meaning therefore did not reside in any single object, but emerged from the relation between them and the different forms of explanation that surrounded them. In this way, objects became physical evidence within a larger argument about health and progress, turning the museum as a whole into a kind of three-dimensional textbook for the new Soviet citizen.
Importantly, most of these objects and materials on display were not unique, but reproducible. Many of them were manufactured in-house in the museum’s own workshops. They produced teaching aids not only for its own displays but also for regional hygiene museums: from the very beginning, the Museum of Social Hygiene in Moscow was conceived as a central institution for the dissemination of knowledge about hygiene. It was meant to advise on the organization of similar museums in other districts of Moscow and cities throughout the USSR. At that time, linking the museum with the production and distribution of educational materials was quite a novel idea: this practice was first introduced by the Hygiene Museum in Dresden in 1912. However, what is crucial here is that the easy reproducibility of the material, and the ability to spread it across vast territory, made the uniqueness of the individual museum object even less important. Increasingly, the significance of the individual object lay less in what it was than in what it could do within the display.
3. From objects to processes
This shift allowed some hygiene museums to rethink the structure of the display itself. Many of them were indeed notoriously dull, as contemporary newspaper critics made clear. Their displays often consisted of what one correspondent from Yaroslavl called “boring images and illiterate charts.”Footnote 10 Yet much depended on local museum directors, and in a handful of cases these constraints gave rise to remarkably experimental approaches to display.
One of the most ambitious examples appeared more than 500 miles from Moscow, in the industrial city of Dnepropetrovsk (now Dnipro, Ukraine). There, in 1930, the director of the Museum of Sanitary Enlightenment, S. Shershever, designed a permanent exhibition that followed human life, commenting on sanitary issues at every stage. Visitors moved through the exhibition as through a scripted life cycle from conception to cremation. This arrangement captures a shift championed by Soviet museologists during the Cultural Revolution (1928–1931): a move away from the display of objects to the display of processes.Footnote 11
The exhibition operated on two interconnected levels: in every room, psychophysiological and public-health information was superimposed onto political background. In this respect, it continued the logic of agit-trains, which made individual health inseparable from collective construction of socialism. But here, unlike in the more heterogeneous and improvised displays of the agit-trains, where the connections between the exhibits were generally explained by the staff, this relationship was made explicit through the spatial and visual structure of the exhibition. For instance, displays offering advice on contraception, pregnancy, and childbirth were framed with statements about Soviet childcare policy and diagrams visualizing birth and abortion rates.
All the displays were electrified. Their design shared a visual vocabulary with avant-garde exhibitions like El Lissitzky’s Soviet pavilion at the International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden of the same year, 1930. This aesthetic employed collage, montage, dramatic shifts in scale, and abstract geometric backgrounds to dissolve the boundaries between text and object. Rather than isolating artifacts in vitrines, the authors of the Dnepropetrovsk Museum of Sanitary Enlightenment embedded them within larger informational compositions. Together, these techniques further transformed the collection of objects into a coherent, carefully scripted story.
The museum also included biological and anti-religious laboratories in which visitors actively participated in experiments. Visitors could even observe the hidden mechanisms that made miracle-working icons appear to “cry.” As Shershever stressed, “every visitor performs one experiment or another.”Footnote 12 Long before the rise of multimedia museums, in Dnepropetrovsk the visitor’s experience became more important than the singular museum object on display.
4. The talking museum
If many hygiene museums in the 1930s still resembled “overcrowded classrooms,” the Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) Museum of Hygiene attempted to construct something even closer to a multimedia environment. Tired of “boring” charts and models, its director A. Alekseev himself engineered exhibits that visitors could activate during the visit.
Alekseev’s most ambitious invention was the “self-anatomizing human figure,” created through what he called “dissolving projection.”Footnote 13 A statue, looking like a classical athlete, functioned as a projection screen onto which successive anatomical layers were cast. Before the viewers’ eyes, the body gradually transformed: skin appeared, muscles emerged beneath the surface, internal organs illuminated the torso, and finally the skeleton became visible. Images dissolved seamlessly into one another so that the body anatomy, instead of being presented as static separate images, started unfolding in time.
The installation was clearly inspired by the famous Glass Man developed by Franz Tschackert for the Dresden Hygiene Museum in 1930, which became a world sensation. Displayed in a darkened room, the Glass Man illuminated internal organs one after another while a recorded voice explained their functions. Unlike earlier anatomical displays that isolated individual organs, it presented the body as an integrated functional system within a complete human figure. Although less technologically advanced than the Glass Man, the installation in the Leningrad Museum of Hygiene may have appeared no less modern to visitors. Its dissolving projections resembled cinematic montage, transforming anatomy into an unfolding visual spectacle.
Alekseev also experimented with sound. In some parts of the exhibition, visitors could press a button and hear audio recordings ranging from explanations of displays to so-called sound-documents. For the latter, Alekseev planned to wire the museum directly into the ambulance service’s telephone lines, allowing visitors to overhear live emergency dispatches. In that way, Soviet medicine’s working reality entered the museum’s walls. Moreover, expertise no longer came from a guide standing beside the object, but became part of the visitor’s own process of exploring the exhibition. This requirement for visitors to activate the exhibits themselves was based on the idea that self-directed discovery was more effective than passive observation.
It’s still unknown whether Alekseev realized all the ideas he enthusiastically expressed in the pages of the journal Sovetskij muzej (Soviet Museum). The fate of the Museum of Sanitary Enlightenment in Dnepropetrovsk remains uncertain too: its traces disappear in the very year Shershever published his first—and last—article about it in the same journal. Yet these cases, although they do not form a single continuous genealogy, reveal how some of the most radical and experimental exhibition ideas emerged within the simultaneously mass and obscure network of Soviet hygiene museums.
5. Legacy of hygiene museums
Born in field hospitals on the fronts of the Civil War and in the smoke of agit-trains, hygiene museums were never quite ordinary museums. From the very beginning, they had no single treasured artifact around which the exhibition could be organized. Their task was to tell a story—about the healthy body serving the collective—in a language accessible to audiences often unfamiliar with museum culture and frequently illiterate. This forced museum workers to fundamentally rethink how displays can communicate knowledge to mass publics.
First, as Lazar Rosenthal aptly observed, “quotations and statistics acquire almost the same rights of citizenship as the authentic exhibit itself” there.Footnote 14 Soon, new media and technologies—electricity, film, sound—entered the museums as well. As a result, what became valuable was no longer the individual object, but the exhibition itself as a coherent statement, or rather a media-rich environment organizing the visitor’s attention, emotions, and experience. In this sense, Soviet hygiene museums anticipated many key features of contemporary museum practice, including interactive and multi-layered display, visitor participation, and the use of exhibitions as instruments of public education.
At the same time, these museums played an important role in dismantling religious worldviews, promoting collectivization, and instrumentalizing the human body in the service of Soviet modernization. Yet their significance extends beyond the ideological messages they conveyed. It is precisely within these highly ideological displays that one can trace an alternative genealogy of the modern museum—one built not around the display of unique objects, but around forms of mediation through which museums construct and communicate knowledge.
Author contributions
Conceptualization: S.M.; Data curation: S.M.; Formal analysis: S.M.; Investigation: S.M.; Methodology: S.M.; Writing - original draft: S.M.; Writing - review & editing: S.M.
Conflict of interests
The author declares no competing interests.
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