Museums and stuff

I went a few weeks ago to the Dostoevsky Apartment-Museum. It's the last apartment he lived in, a corner apartment, rather large and bourgeois, with a view of a church steeple from his study (a feature he demanded of every apartment he lived in).

But the friends I went with were less than impressed with the assortment of historical artifacts on display. The tour guide made much of a black woolen top hat which had been preserved under a glass dome.

Today I went to the State Museum of the Political History of Russia, and like most Russian political museums it featured a lot of pictures of men in uniform and incriminating documents. Also:

• A set of binoculars used by Khrushchev in his trip to America
• A hat given by Fidel Castro to Yuri Gagarin
• A plaid shirt belonging to Nobel prize winning scientist and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov
• A "plaster cast ham" that had been used by revolutionaries to conceal a revolver