The Lenin Museum exhibition

The renewed museum provides a vivid, comprehensive and critical view of the history Russia and Finland share. It takes visitors on a fascinating journey through some of the most remarkable events in our history: The Russian Revolution, the founding of the Soviet Union, Finland's independence, the Second World War and finally the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The exhibition looks at political and economic events on both sides of the border and how they affected everyday life. The exhibition's themes shed light on topics such as the gulag archipelago and its endless human tragedies, finlandisation from a hindsight perspective and the liberating effects of the perestroika. The time scale reaches from the last breaths of the Russian Empire to Putin's Russia and EU-era Finland.

The museum hall at the Tampere Workers' Hall is known as the birthplace of the Soviet Union – it's where Russian revolutionaries Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin met for the first time. This meeting that happened in 1905 had global impacts: the two men decided to arrange a revolution in Russia, found the Soviet Union and to let Finland become independent.