The museum's lineage runs back to 1868, when the Governmental Statistics Committee opened the first public collection in Vitebsk. After the Russian Revolution, the private collection of A. Brodovskiy became the seed of a new Vitebsk Governmental Museum in 1918. Six years later, in 1924, the city consolidated its scattered holdings - the Church Archeology Museum, the archives of the Vitebsk Archival Commission, the Statistics Committee's history collection, the Fedorovich and Brodovski private libraries - into a single institution and moved it into the old city hall. The hall, with its slim Baroque tower, had been the symbol of municipal Vitebsk since the 1700s. Putting the museum inside it was an argument: the city's history belongs in the city's most recognizable building.

Walk into the artistic museum and you find the names that Vitebsk gave Russian and Belarusian painting: Ilya Repin, Isaac Levitan, Ivan Shishkin, Ivan Khrutski. The pride of the collection, though, is the work of Yehuda Pen. Pen ran the Jewish art school where a young Marc Chagall first picked up a brush around 1900, and the museum holds his canvases as the missing link they are - the teacher whose students would scatter to Paris, New York, and the avant-garde of the Russian Revolution. Vitebsk between 1918 and 1922 was, briefly, one of the most radical art cities in the world: Chagall ran the People's Art School, and Kazimir Malevich joined him to teach Suprematism before the two fell out. Most of that art moved away or was destroyed. What remains, here, is the soil it grew from.

Between 1941 and 1944, the Nazis ran a Sicherheitsdienst prison in Vitebsk. The cellars are now part of the museum - a small, dim exhibition called the Vitebsk patriots museum, which uses photographs and personal effects to name the people held there. Vera Khoruzhaya is the figure most often remembered: a Belarusian Communist partisan organizer who was captured in late 1942 and executed by the Germans. She was twenty-nine years old. The exhibition does not soften any of it. Vitebsk's Jewish population, which numbered roughly 40,000 before the war, was almost entirely murdered during the German occupation, with mass killings beginning in 1941. The museum's job in these rooms is to make sure the names do not disappear into a number.

Eight kilometers outside the city, on a bend of the Western Dvina, sits Zdravnevo, the country manor where Ilya Repin spent his summers between 1892 and 1902. He bought the estate with the proceeds of a single painting - the famous Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks - and used it as a refuge from Saint Petersburg's society. The manor is now a branch of the museum. Reproductions of his paintings hang in the rooms where he sketched them; letters and documents show the routines of a working artist who fished in the morning and painted in the afternoon. It is one of the few places in Belarus where you can stand inside the daily life of a major 19th-century Russian painter and feel the scale of it as a human thing rather than a textbook entry.

The collection of masonic items in the numismatics rooms is unexpected. So is the assemblage of 18th-century pistols, the local embroidery from villages along the Dvina, and the World War II materials that occupy entire halls. The point of a regional history museum, in a place like Vitebsk, is not to dazzle. It is to refuse the erasures. Every empire that passed through this city - the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, briefly the Third Reich - tried to overwrite what came before. The museum holds the layers in place so that future Vitebsk can read them. The ratusha tower above the cases has watched the city burn down and rebuild itself. The objects inside it remember why.