Museum Fund of the USSR

the sum total of artifacts of natural history and material and intellectual culture in the USSR (regardless of the time of their origin, location, material composition, and technique of manufacture) that are of scholarly, scientific, political, historical, or artistic value. The statute concerning the museum fund of the USSR was confirmed by the Ministry of Culture of the USSR on July 26, 1965.

The museum fund of the USSR includes artifacts of natural history and material and intellectual culture under the jurisdiction of museums (including people’s voluntary museums), permanent exhibitions, and scholarly, scientific, and educational institutions and enterprises. The fund also includes collections and individual objects of museum value gathered by geological, paleontological, archaeological, and ethnological expeditions, regardless of the departmental affiliation of the institutions that organize the expeditions. Museums are in charge of the finding, acquisition, registration, study, scientific description, use, and storage of the artifacts of the musem fund of the USSR. The Ministry of Culture establishes the procedures for the acquisition, registration, storage, scientific description, and use of the artifacts of the museum fund of the USSR for all museums. In 1973 there were about 40 million individual items in the museum fund of the USSR.