The Soviet Union spent the 1920s and 1930s pouring resources into Arctic exploration, partly for science, partly for the symbolism of conquering the impossible. By 1930 the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute needed a museum to show the public what Soviet polar work was achieving. The institute had no building. The basements of the Fountain House, where Anna Akhmatova was then living, served as storage for the growing collection. In 1933 the Leningrad City Council handed over the recently closed Nikolskaya church on Marata Street, and over the next three years architect Alexander Sivkov gutted the interior to make room for exhibits. On January 8, 1937, the museum opened to the public. Its first director was Nikolay Pinegin, an artist who had also been a polar explorer.

The centerpiece, then and now, is an enormous segment of a globe showing the Arctic in raised relief up to the sixtieth parallel north. Built in 1936 from cartographic data assembled by Yuly Shokalsky, it lets visitors lean over the top of the world the way a navigator might bend over a chart. Around it, the original 1930s dioramas still survive: Tundra in Winter, Tundra in Summer, Bird Bazaar, Walrus Rookery, the Shokalsky Glacier on Novaya Zemlya, and the icy gap of Matochkin Shar Strait. They were built when the Soviet Union was racing to claim the Arctic, when Otto Schmidt was leading expeditions across the ice and the country was building the legend of the polar pilot. The dioramas show that moment with all its mid-century theatricality intact.

Soviet polar achievement was real, even when wrapped in propaganda. The country built the world's first nuclear icebreaker, the Lenin, launched in 1957 and now preserved in Murmansk. Soviet scientists established Vostok Station near the South Pole in 1957 and have run it through every Antarctic winter since, recording the lowest natural temperature ever measured on Earth, minus 89.2 Celsius, in 1983. The museum's collection traces all of it: ship models of the nuclear icebreaker fleet, instruments from drifting ice stations, photographs from Antarctic crews, the everyday gear of people who lived for months at a time in places designed to kill them. A 2019 exhibition marking sixty years of the Lenin showed eight scale models of the icebreakers that followed her.

Since 1991 the small St. Petersburg Edinoverie community of the Russian Orthodox Church has been pressing to take the building back. Edinoverie is an unusual branch — Old Believers who reconciled with the official Russian Orthodox Church in the nineteenth century — and they have a real historical claim on Nikolskaya. One of the two side chapels was returned to them years ago. In 2014 the federal property agency approved transferring the rest, before reversing the decision when the community could not produce a preservation plan for the federally protected monument. Director Viktor Boyarsky pointed out the obvious problem: the dioramas are too large to move without destroying them. He was dismissed in 2016, reportedly after clashing with the meteorological service that runs the museum. The standoff continues, with the church requesting and being refused, and the dioramas staying put.

Some of the museum's recent exhibitions point in directions you might not expect. Uelen Bone showed carvings by Chukchi masters from the easternmost tip of Russia. Real People featured photographs of a Nenets reindeer-herding family on the Yamal Peninsula. Four-Legged Fighters of the Arctic, in 2019, looked at the dogs, reindeer, and horses that worked the northern front during World War II. A new Arctic garden is planned for the courtyard. The museum has always done two things at once: tell the heroic Soviet story of icebreakers and ice stations, and tell the older story of the people who actually live in the polar north. Both are still being told under the dome on Marata Street.