The place for the Vologda Political Exile Museum was chosen not incidentally: Joseph Dzhugashvili, the very same Joseph Stalin, the future leader of the country, lived in exile in this two-storey house for several months in 1911-1912. However, he was not the first exile in Vologda. The “tradition was set up” in the XV century by Vasily II the Blind, exiled from Moscow by rivals in a race for the throne. In general, those who threatened the tranquility of the Tsars Ivan III, Ivan IV the Terrible and the Romanovs, often turned out to be in Vologda. Among them there was also Patriarch Nikon who led to the split in the Russian Orthodox Church in the 17th century.
In 1937, the house was turned into the Vologda Political Exile Museum. The interior of the room on the second floor, where Joseph Stalin lived, has been preserved here. The museum also keeps personal belongings and documents of those exiled in the XIX - XX centuries, including the writer Korolenko, Bolshevik Lunacharsky, the future Foreign Minister of the USSR Molotov, the philosopher Berdyaev and Lenin's sister Maria Ulyanova. A total of about ten thousand people were exiled to Vologda.