Mining Museum

Saint-Petersburg Mining Museum

Established in 1773 under a decree of Catherine II.

The world’s third-largest natural-scientific exposition.

Among the museum’s collection are more than 230,000 exhibits, including rare minerals, gemstones and metals, the most extensive meteorite collection, historical and working models of mining equipment, paleontological finds, archive records.

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The exhibition of Ural stone-cutters in the Mining Museum was enriched with new exhibits

On Tuesday, 7 November, the Empress Catherine II Saint Petersburg Mining University announced that the temporary exhibition "The Wealth of the Mineral Resources in the Art of Stone Carvers" has been enriched with new exhibits.

The Mining Museum learned how to move the Earth’s crust

It took hundreds of millions of years for geological processes to form a single supercontinent, Pangea, in the Late Paleozoic. About 220 million years ago, it split in two. Today, the six continents on Earth are very slowly but surely moving toward each other.

Urban Sketchers Exhibition Opens at Mining Museum

An exhibition of the Urban Sketchers international community of artists began its work at the Mining Museum in St. Petersburg. The exhibition presents paintings in the technique of rapid drawing, depicting the interiors and exhibits of one of the largest natural science museums in the world.

St. Petersburg Mining Museum to Take Part in Russia-Wide Atlas Nefti Project

Pictures of historical exhibits from the Mining Museum will be included in the catalogue commemorating the 300th anniversary of the petroleum industry in Russia.

Mining University’s Students Recreate Antique Vases Using 3D Technology

St. Petersburg Mining Museum's researchers have recreated the look of rare 19th-century fluorite vases.

Classic-Type Museum to Die Out. Museums of a New Kind Making Billions of Dollars

It has been decades since museums, along with books and theatre, were foretold to cease to exist. COVID-19 has indeed contributed to the debate regarding the "things of the past".

Всем здравствуйте! Может кто знает что-нибудь о биографии Черткова Анатолия Филатовича? Он был маркшейдером, учавствовал в строительстве тоннеля секретного под Амуром в 1937 году. Очень нужна информация ,спасибо!

’Jurassic Park’ in St. Petersburg

To get an idea of how Earth looked like in the distant past, one just has to look attentively at today's living creatures. Some ancient animals still resemble their progenitors. Some organisms are no longer found. The others have survived without losing their original form.

Student geological expedition opened the season

The scientific team, created in February 2021 on the basis of the Department of Geology and Exploration of Mineral Deposits and the Mining Museum, returned from its first field trip to the Putilovsky open pit.

Mining University celebrates Victory Day

On the eve of Victory Day, a wreath-laying ceremony took place at the oldest technical university in Russia. Wreaths and flowers were laid at the foot of the memorial to the students and professors who died during the Great Patriotic War.

Mining Museum during the Siege of Leningrad

In 1918, the Soviet government relocated from Petrograd to Moscow. Subsequently, some of the Mining Museum's most valuable objects were transferred to the Diamond Fund, which did not, however, stop the natural-scientific repository from replenishing its collections.

Virtual Tour of the Mining Museum in St. Petersburg

The Mining Museum in St. Petersburg is three years older than America, while Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, can be considered the Museum’s rightful mother. Now by its size, it is the world’s third-largest natural-scientific exposition gathered in a building designed by Russian architect Andrey Voronikhin.

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Harzburgite: a symbol of Germany’s attraction to Russia

World War I halted Russian-German friendship for eight long years of bloodshed and mutual distrust. The Rapallo Treaty of April 1922 restored normal relations, and the credit for this went not to politicians, but to men of action. Such as the German scientist and businessman Friedrich Kranz.

Where on Earth are the deepest sinkholes

Living on the edge of a hole 240 meters deep and nearly half a kilometer in diameter is a dubious joy, but the residents of the South African town of Kimberley are quite happy. Their "Big Hole" is the world's oldest primary diamond deposit. From 1872 to 1914 it yielded three tons of the hardest and most expensive stone (14.5 million carats).

How the study of glacial boulders led Kropotkin to imprisonment in the Peter and Paul Fortress

Back in the second half of the 19th century, most geographers believed that about 10,000 years ago the territory of modern Russia was a "sea across which ice blocks were carried, leaving erratic boulders when they melted" (from a historical sketch by Vladimir Obruchev).

The hypothesis of the origin of the sorcerer Melchior and the alloy of the same name

The patent for melchior - an alloy of copper and nickel - was received by the French in 1827. The name was later given to it by the Germans. They caught the consonance in the pronunciation of the names of the inventors Mayo and Saurier with the name of the Evangelical sorcerer. It is customary to give primacy in obtaining "cheap silver" to the Chinese.

What did the author of “Sannikov Land” find in the Kazakh steppes

The Dzungarian Gate is a corridor, 50 kilometers long and 10 kilometers wide, between the mountain systems of the Altai and Tien Shan, the most important section of the main branch of the Great Silk Road. Here is the continental pole of the planet - the point of greatest distance from the world ocean.

How was the blue color reference obtained

Fourteen years ago, for the first time in 200 years, there was a new blue pigment. Scientists at the University of Oregon were experimenting with materials for electronics and unexpectedly received an inorganic compound with a rich blues color. It turned out that it is practically non-fading and, unlike its predecessor, cobalt, is not toxic.

How the poet Nekrasov, with the help of a bear, reasoned with the emperor

Alexander II personally harvested 150 bears during his not particularly long life. Some of the trophies went to the participants of the hunt, others were used as diplomatic gifts or donated to museums and educational institutions. The bear killed on 9 March 1865 in Lisino near St.

Why did Count Vorontsov needed the strongest walls in the world

Cobblestones, with the light hand of sculptor Ivan Shadr, are associated with the weapons of the proletariat. During the revolutionary events of 1917, all Moscow sidewalks, including Red Square, were paved with such stones. Today's heavy-duty diabase appeared on it only in 1930.

Why Russia starts near Minusinsk

The history of non-ferrous metallurgy in the south of the Krasnoyarsk Territory began not with the construction of a refinery in 1941, and not with the commissioning of one of the world's largest aluminum plants in the mid-1960s. The first bronze items were cast here by the Iranian-speaking Tagars long before the heyday of ancient Athens, in the 7th century BC.

How Madagascar bandits helped to modernize the mint of St. Petersburg

Russian monarchs thought broadly, but often dependently. For example, Peter the Great adopted from the British East India Company not only the scheme for building shipyards for St. Petersburg, but also the strategy of expansion to Asia and Africa. In chess, copying the moves of a stronger opponent will never lead to victory, but in politics this method can sometimes give unexpected results.

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Where is the evidence to prove that the bison is not an aurochs?

The law on regulation of hunting in the Russian Empire (1892) was still 90 years away, when the Emperor Alexander I took over the role of an official in issuing permits for shooting wild animals. It is true that such an order concerned only one area, Belovezhskaya Forest, and one species, the bison (or Bison bonasus in scientific jurisprudence). By the beginning of the 19th century, the vastest tract of forest in Europe remained the only place where these bison could live.

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The forgotten legend of the Russian military-industrial complex

The Kalashnikov assault rifle is widely known throughout the world - in a sense, it has become one of Russia's symbols, along with bears, black caviar and oil. The most widespread small arms in service in one hundred and six countries are included in the Guinness Book of Records: more than 100 million units have been produced to date.

The man every chemist in the country worked for

Despite the fact that chemistry begins to be studied in the eighth grade and is indispensable in dozens of industries that are crucial for the economy, if an ordinary Russian is asked to name the names of great Russian chemists, the vast majority will limit themselves to Lomonosov and Mendeleev. Only a small part would add a third name - Academician Nikolai Kurnakov.

How a Pole enriched Russia

Russia is often referred to as a raw material country, giving this concept a negative meaning. They say that the subsoil is rich in minerals, but there are problems with value chains.

The Mother of the Polar Expedition and Grandmother of Marine Geophysics

The Arctic, its harsh nature and complex organizational and technical conditions have always attracted men. To work at drifting stations with the risk of being in icy water at any moment, to drive worn-out all-terrain vehicles in a snowstorm to the next survey, to drill wells in the ice...

How a White Guardsman Obtained the Stalin Prize and Became Director of MISIS Institute

The number of people who left Russia after the Civil War of 1917 reaches 2.5 million. For the most part, they were military, scientists, doctors, teachers, engineers, in general, intellectuals - creative, humanitarian and technical.

The “grandfather” of Russian railroads

The railroad complex in Russia is one of the largest in the world. It ranks second in terms of total track length, second only to the USA.

Vladimir Abazarov: “Take Megion oil, Motherland!”

The discovery of the largest field in Russia and the seventh largest in the world, called Samotlor, was a resounding victory for Russian geologists and drillers in 1965. At that time, few believed in the prospects of an oil deposit located under a huge lake, surrounded for many kilometres by impassable swamps.

Who in Russia was called “the miner’s general”

Today, business coaches often hear the "cautionary tale of the life of Parkes Cadman", who lived at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. A boy from a poor family, from the age of 11 he was forced to work in a mine as a "ponyboy" - driving a coal wagon.

How the director of the Geological Institute of the Academy of Sciences got on the pages of Solzhenitsyn’s novel

In 1949, the investigation of a large group of geologists, called the "Krasnoyarsk Case", resounded throughout the USSR. Twenty-seven people, including 4 academicians and corresponding members of the USSR Academy of Sciences and 10 professors, doctors of geological and mineralogical sciences, were put under investigation.

The Incredible Story of Mr. Mechanobre

His name was known and treated with great reverence by the heads of the largest mining and processing and metallurgical plants in the country, rectors of the relevant universities, and representatives of the academic community. And how not to know - machines of his design work today in at least 40 countries of the world.

Emeralds in Mining Museum. Video Collection

In The Tale of Tsar Saltan, Alexander Pushkin wrote about a squirrel cracking wondrous nuts. It is not by chance that the gemstones appeared in the fairy tale. In August 1931, when Pushkin finalised his poem, Saint Petersburg had been already taken over by the ’emerald fever’.

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’Jurassic Park’ in St. Petersburg

To get an idea of how Earth looked like in the distant past, one just has to look attentively at today’s living creatures. Some ancient animals still resemble their progenitors. Some organisms are no longer found. The others have survived without losing their original form.

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→ Vernissage

Mysteries of the Mining Museum: The two caskets of the Empress

Queen Elizabeth II often wears a diamond tiara. She also wears a collar of pearls and diamonds. Another favourite of hers is the brooch with a cabochon-cut sapphire and a drop-shaped pearl pendant, which she wore during a state visit to Russia in 1994. From Maria Feodorovna she has also a brooch with a huge sapphire and large diamonds.

Secrets of the Mining Museum: The Metal Saboteur

What is the job of the Special Forces? Quickly and, most importantly, to effectively carry out operations "with little blood on foreign territory". Palladium is capable of such a blow to the gold.

Mystical Riddle of Florentine Box

Amongst St. Petersburg Mining Museum exhibits, there is a unique 18th-century box. Its history is intertwined with both the Italian Medici family and the royal dynasty of the Russian Empire.

Silver-Induced Disease

Having silverware at home was at all times regarded as a sign of prosperity and luxuriousness. Kitchen utensils made of precious metal symbolised that their owner was of blue blood, which is somewhat surprisingly not a figurative expression. Often people who had expensive silver services turned blue literally.

Agressive Pearl-Bearing Clam

A hundred years ago or so, people risked their lives to get their hands on pearls. Not only it was dangerous to dive without gear, but some giant molluscs could grow that big they could actually kill.

Bribes Paid in Copper Were Once Customary in Russia

Two hundred years ago, the gold fever took Russia by storm. Hereditary nobility, merchant adventurers, ordinary people — everyone was leaving their settlements, abandoning their routine life, and heading straight to Siberia. These events followed the Senate edict allowing to freely look for and mine precious metals.

The Metal That Costs More Than Gold

Some 500 years ago, Spanish conquistadors led by Francisco Pizarro captured the last Incan emperor Atahualpa. Although a ransom for Atahualpa's release was paid with gold, the emperor was still executed. Soon the conquest of Peru was completed; the indigenous people kept fighting off for a few more decades, but the Spanish had firearms in their hands. This drew a final line under the invasion of the country.

Fancy ’Diamonds’ for the Poor

Few people know why d'Artagnan duelled Athos and Aramis, whilst everyone knows the story of Porthos. The Gascon found himself entangled in Porthos' cloak and thereby learnt that a sumptuous dressing embroidered with gold was made of buffalo leather.

What Size Was the Prehistoric Dragonfly?

The unresolved mysteries of evolution are still there to solve them. Many evolution stages have not been fully understood yet, and humankind seeks to find answers to what animals that lived on our planet millions of years ago looked like.

Russian Mineral-Resource Sector’s Coat of Arms

The term 'coat of arms' can be traced back to the 12th century, with the start of heraldic tradition arising from the Crusades. The crusaders were dealing with the self-identification issues at the time - they needed to know who was the one who accomplished the 'feat' and who was who on a level resembling modern 'friend-or-foe' systems.

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The Empress Catherine II St. Petersburg Mining University became a venue for the Grand Challenges scientific and technical works competition among talented schoolchildren of the Leningrad Region. As explained by the university management, this event is part of a global project to integrate the systems of higher and secondary education.

The Mother of the Polar Expedition and Grandmother of Marine Geophysics

Student from Burkina Faso: “Western ’partners’ are siphoning off our resources and pocketing the profits”

Etienne Ségda is a student at Empress Catherine II Saint Petersburg Mining University. He comes from a small country in West Africa called Burkina Faso. It ranks only 206th in terms of GDP, although it is a major exporter of gold, marble and manganese. Natural resource extraction is done mostly by foreigners.

Alfred Nordmann: we cannot afford to stop cooperating with Russia on critical issues of global development

Professor Alfred Nordmann of the Darmstadt Technical University (Germany) visited St. Petersburg Mining University. The scientist was brought to St. Petersburg by the initiative to hold an international conference on the philosophical understanding of technological progress at the oldest technical university in Russia.

Vladimir Litvinenko: “A student’s scholarship and a faculty member’s salary should contribute to the university’s goal”

Vladimir Litvinenko, Rector of Empress Catherine II St. Petersburg Mining University, stated the need to increase the differentiation of monthly payments to students and teachers. He called encouragement of those who honorably show themselves in their work and extracurricular activities, including material, an integral part of the university's ideology.

How a White Guardsman Obtained the Stalin Prize and Became Director of MISIS Institute

Rector of Mining University met with students of Agrarian University of St. Petersburg

On Wednesday, February 28, Rector of Mining University Vladimir Litvinenko, who is also a proxy for Russian presidential candidate Vladimir Putin, held a meeting with students of St. Petersburg State Agrarian University, which is located in Pushkin. The topic of the meeting was "State policy in the field of engineering education".

St. Petersburg Mining University showed the simulators used by students

One of the conceptual features of the process of modernization of higher technical education in Russia is a sharp increase in the time allocated for industrial practice.

St. Petersburg Mining University spoke about the ideology of the School Leader competition

25 school principals from different Russian regions received incentive grants of 50 and 100 thousand rubles for popularization of engineering education and active cooperation with the Empress Catherine II St. Petersburg Mining University, where a pilot project on modernization of the system of personnel training for the national economy is being implemented today.

Employers told what results they expect from the process of modernization of higher education

Насколько востребованы сегодня выпускники бакалавриата при приёме на работу?

The amount of economic effect from the work submitted for the state award became known

The Academic Council of the Empress Catherine II St. Petersburg Mining University has voted to nominate for the Russian Government Prize in Science and Technology 2024 a work dedicated to improving labor safety during the exploitation of deposits located at great depths.

Russian-Iranian relations in the field of scientific co-operation reach a new level

Scientists from Empress Catherine II Saint Petersburg Mining University and Shiraz University held the first teleconference, during which they discussed the roadmap for the upcoming research of joint research groups.

Students of St. Petersburg Mining University spoke about their impressions of the new dormitory

This academic year, St. Petersburg Mining University commissioned two new dormitories for non-resident students. However, the term "dormitory" in the usual sense of the word is not quite appropriate here.

Polar explorers of the St. Petersburg Mining University spoke about the new residential complex of the Vostok research station in Antarctica

Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin put the new wintering complex of Vostok station into trial operation via video link. It is 1,200 kilometres from the nearest coast and is located on a lifeless ice plateau at an altitude of over three and a half kilometres.

A material capable of increasing the profitability of aluminum production several times has been created

Empress Catherine II Saint Petersburg Mining University continues a series of laboratory experiments aimed at creating a fundamentally new technology for the production of aluminum. Now it is produced by electrolysis of alumina solution in molten cryolite, and this process takes place in apparatuses with horizontally arranged anode and cathode.

Novatek assessed the urgency of modernizing Russia’s higher education system

The Empress Catherine II St. Petersburg Mining University continues to implement a pilot project to improve the system of personnel training for the national economy. One of its characteristic features is the enrollment of students exclusively in the specialties of basic higher education with a study period of 5.5 years.

Iran: Instructions for use. Part IV: Results

At the end of January 2024, a representative delegation from Empress Catherine II Saint Petersburg Mining University spent a working week in Shiraz, the second capital of the Islamic Republic of Iran, at the invitation of Shiraz University.

Iran: Instructions for use. Part III: Science

In the context of a mobilised economy and the solidarity of the population with this position of the state, there is no other option but to build relations with industry, paraphrasing the slogan "Everything for the front, everything for victory". That is, any research or development should serve the task of intensive technological development of the country.

How Madagascar bandits helped to modernize the mint of St. Petersburg

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Humans descended from monkeys, and philosophy descended from corals

The oldest known image of the labyrinth dates back to 1200 BC. Its author lived in the Peloponnese. Not far from the island of Crete, where later, according to Athenian mythology, the inventor Daedalus, the father of the winged Icarus, built a labyrinth for King Minos. In it, Theseus defeated the Minotaur and was able, with the help of Ariadne’s thread, to return back.

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The secret of the rise and fall of empires is kept by the most “creative” mollusks

The bubonic plague pandemic in the middle of the 14th century in Europe alone killed about 30 million people. People unwittingly began to think about sanitation. In some German duchies orders were issued for the production of exclusively closed vessels. Thus the classic beer mugs with hinged lids appeared. Seventy million years before the plague, the bivalve mollusks rudists evolved in the same direction.

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Where is the evidence to prove that the bison is not an aurochs?

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A Small Victory for Senegalese Sovereignty

Senegalite, an aqueous aluminum phosphate, is named after the country where it was first found. It happened in 1976. Senegal, independent from France since 1960, had then constitutionally enshrined a multi-party system. The most westernized country on the African continent took another step toward developing its own political culture, which naturally did not cancel out the influence of soft power from the former metropolis. One of its manifestations: the authorship of all the basic scientific materials on Senegalite belongs to the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris.

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Earthly life emerged from stone: Prophecies of Oparin and Obruchev

On May 3, 1924, Soviet scientist Alexander Oparin reported to the Russian Botanical Society his theory of the origin of life on Earth. The essence of his hypothesis is the chemical transformation of non-living matter into organic matter. The so-called primary broth.

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Why the Mining University was named after an opponent of Lenin

The year 1956 marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Georgy Plekhanov, the Russian Marxist theorist whose works Lenin called the most important ”textbook of communism.” In honor of the anniversary, the Mining Institute in St. Petersburg was named after the revolutionary. At first glance, this seems an ordinary occurrence, but the paradoxical situation was that Plekhanov was a Menshevik and almost openly accused the Bolshevik leader of treason against his homeland. Twenty years after 1917, such figures were, as Beria put it, ”washed into camp dust.

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An Oil Startup from the Gulag

The most popular and memorable image that appears in all the movies about the extraction of ”black gold” is the fountain gushing from the well under pressure. But few people know that in Russia there is only one field where oil is extracted in underground mines and can only be obtained by one method - preheating.

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How a Strategic Military Alloy Became a Symbol of Consumer Goods

Why is a mechanical mincer made of silumin 10 times cheaper than its stainless steel counterpart? If only because the threads of the clamping screw made of this aluminum-silicon alloy can tear off after the first attempt to secure the classic kitchen appliance to the countertop.

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How much is the Earth’s core worth

In economics, there is a surefire way to increase income by more than three and a half times in less than four months without doing anything. You just need to become a monopolist in the global iridium market and at the right moment suspend production.

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