Exhibition “Secrets of the Perm Underground. 1905–1907”

About exhibition

The exhibition occupies three small rooms of the house where, in May 1906, on the initiative of and under the direction of Yakov M. Sverdlov, head of the Perm Committee of the Russian Social‑Democratic Labour Party, an underground print shop was established. From the entrance hall one can pass into the kitchen-vestibule and then into a room where the interior of the living quarters of the worker-underground members is recreated. Replicas of the printing equipment — a printing press, type cases with type, rollers for inking and printing — were commissioned from drawings at the Torgmash factory in Perm. The original equipment, seized by the police, was handed over to the local history museum in the 1920s. The exhibition also includes other materials on the underground work at the Perm Bolsheviks' print shop of M. P. Turkin, A. I. Kostareva, and D. G. Latyshev. Among these are material exhibits for the “case of the explosion in Khudyakova’s apartment,” confiscated by the police in 1905 and documenting the setup in Perm of an underground chemical laboratory for bomb production, and a chess table with a hidden compartment for storing leaflets, made by Vasily Gomzikov, a member of the Perm Committee of the Russian Social‑Democratic Labour Party.