The MUR Museum has almost a century of history - it was founded in 1925.
To the right of the entrance to the hall there is a desk and a chair - this is a reconstruction of the workplace of the “criminal investigation agent”.
That is what the employees of the department were then called, later they were renamed into detectives.
Next to the table is a French-made safe, made in 1905, which MUR got from the tsarist detective police.
Opposite the “agent’s” table is a small exposition dedicated to the predecessors of Soviet detectives – a coat, a bowler hat from the beginning of the 20th century and a photograph of the head of the Moscow detective police, Arkady Koshko.
He took over this post in 1908 and became famous for the introduction of a file of criminals.
There is also a photo of a service-search dog named Tref.
The following story is told about Koshko and Tref in the museum.
One day, the head of the detective found an old woman in the corridor of his department, who wandered along the corridors.
She explained that she had heard about the dog, which itself determines the criminals.
If he barks once, he is a thief; if he barks twice, he is a murderer.
“And if three is a fool,” the head of the detective police joked.
Hacking tools from the MUR Museum
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They brought the dog to the old woman.
She immediately handed the cutlet to the beast, but Club did not accept the treat from someone else's hands.
And barked three times.
"Oh, I'm really stupid!
the old woman exclaimed.
“They probably feed you oranges here, but I brought cutlets.”
The evolution of bear cubs
We move further - to the stand with the thieves' tool.
There are an abundance of "crowbars", master keys and other hacking tools.
There is an umbrella on a string in the window.
Thieves, the museum employee explains, used it like this: after punching a small hole in the floor with a chisel, the attacker lowered the umbrella on a rope, and then continued to expand the hole to the size he needed, and the garbage fell into the umbrella.
Indeed, quite a few tools of crime have been collected here, because the key task of the museum is educational and methodological.
Models that reproduce crime scenes in miniature repeat the appearance of the premises, furniture, there is even a “corpse” with bodily injuries.
Other mock-ups show methods of cracking safes with various devices used by safecrackers.
One of the stands is dedicated to exposing counterfeiters brothers Alexei and Nikolai Lopukhov.
They had a camera in their arsenal, as well as clichés for fake chervonets of the 1937 model and fake passports.
The criminals were exposed shortly before the start of the Great Patriotic War - on May 30, 1941.
The counterfeiting technique of the Lopukhov brothers
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At the cash desk of the Moscow office of the State Bank, in the bags of trading organizations, during a random check, fake bank notes in denominations of 10 chervonets issued in 1937 were found.
The next day, Aleksey Lopukhov was detained in one of the stores in Moscow while trying to cash in a counterfeit banknote.
In Alexei's apartment, his brother Nikolai was detained and a whole suitcase of counterfeit banknotes was found.
And during a search at the place of residence of Nikolai, they found equipment for making counterfeit banknotes and passports.
During interrogations, Nikolai told how he created the technique of making clichés and watermarks.
The Lopukhovs were sentenced to death, and all their equipment is now in the window along with samples of "products".
There was a place in the museum on Petrovka and modern cyberbearers.
In particular, the technique that modern thieves install in ATMs, read the PIN codes of cards with their help, and then empty the accounts of their victims is presented.
Killers and victims
There are exhibits in the museum that are not for the faint of heart.
These are photos from crime scenes of various gangs.
There were many of them in the 1920s.
Vasily Kotov's gang, for example, hacked their victims with axes: 116 were killed on their account.
The murderers were caught in 1922.
But even later in the Soviet Union, criminals for the sake of insignificant, in fact, profit killed without hesitation.
This happened even before the Great Patriotic War.
In December 1936, a delegate to the VIII Extraordinary All-Union Congress of Soviets, teacher Maria Vladimirovna Pronina, was killed in the Kuibyshev region.
The museum has her photograph and materials about the investigation, to which the MUR employees were connected.
Pronina was killed simply for a suitcase.
There was no political motive in the case.
Two axes in one of the windows are material evidence in the case of Vladimir Ionesyan, a serial killer who introduced himself as an employee of Mosgaz.
Photos of killers, pedophiles, including modern ones, are presented in abundance in the MUR Museum.
Moscow detective legends
Once, Anatoly Volkov, who headed the MUR in 1962-1965, decided to turn to the famous soothsayer Wolf Messing with a request to assist in solving crimes.
The museum says that Messing, having got into the office of the head of the formidable department, was initially frightened.
He began to assure that the stories about his extraordinary abilities, that he allegedly, bypassing the guards, came to Stalin - all these are just rumors, he is just an artist.
Certificates "Murki" and Ionesyan's axes
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"I see you don't want to help us.
Well, let's pass, I'll note, ”Volkov said and, signing the paper, said goodbye to Messing.
But a few minutes later, the artist again knocked on the door and said that they forgot to put a seal on the pass, and without it they would not let go from Petrovka, 38.
“Now I believe that you are just an artist,” the head of the criminal investigation department laughed.
There are many legends about MUR, but not all of them are true.
“There was no Black Cat gang, and Zheglov and Sharapov were collective images, they didn’t have prototypes,” the museum employee assures.
But other literary and film heroes had prototypes.
For example, the detective Vyacheslav Krivenko, who worked at the MUR from 1957 to 1964, is called in the museum the prototype of Colonel Kostenko, the hero of Yulian Semyonov's novels and feature films based on them.
The museum has a book by Yulian Semyonov "Petrovka, 38" with a dedication of the writer, addressed to Krivenko.
In the TV series Born of the Revolution about the Soviet police, the character Nil Kolychev appears in several episodes - an old detective who served in the tsarist police, risking his life to save the file of criminals, and then teaching young workers to detective work.
The MUR Museum has a photo of Vladimir Saushkin, who is considered the prototype of Kolychev.
He served in the tsarist detective police, and then in the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department.
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The following story is told about Saushkin.
Once, at an event in the Column Hall of the House of Unions, the Breguet gold watch was stolen from the chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council, Lev Trotsky.
Saushkin identified several pickpockets, asked them to bring them to him and explained as clearly as possible who they took the watch from and how upset the owner was.
The thieves first said that they "do not work here, but have a cultural rest."
But soon one of his interlocutors approached Saushkin and said that “Comrade Trotsky dropped his watch in the aisle, and it’s better for the detective to pick it up before someone takes it away.”
So "Breguet" returned to its owner.
Unlike many colleagues of that time, Saushkin was not repressed and died in his bed in 1939.
Not all Murovites are so lucky.
In the Stalin years, even workers with an irreproachable, from the point of view of the regime, worker-peasant origin were repressed.
Of the five heads of the MUR arrested in those years, four were shot, and one years later left the camp and then sought the return of the orders for a long time.
Now museum visitors are told about their merits and solved cases.