A Saint, a Rat, and the Making of the Modern Museum: Mediation in Soviet Hygiene Museums

Abstract

This article examines how early Soviet hygiene museums redefined the role of the museum object in the context of mass education and ideological transformation, addressing a field that remains largely understudied. Taking as its point of departure the 1922 Moscow display of three mummified bodies—a saint, a counterfeit relic, and a rat—it asks how museums could produce knowledge without relying on a stable collection of distinctive artifacts. Drawing on primary sources including photographs and contemporary newspapers, it analyzes case studies from agit-trains to museums in Moscow, Dnepropetrovsk (now Dnipro, Ukraine), and Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Combining close analysis of exhibition design with attention to media and spatial narratives, the article situates these practices within Soviet museum theory and an international interwar context. It argues that hygiene museums developed a “language of things” in which meaning emerged through relationships between objects, images, texts, and new media, transforming museum displays into multisensory, even participatory environments. In doing so, they offer an alternative genealogy of modern museology centered not on museum collections, but on the forms of mediation through which museums produced and communicated knowledge.