Old postcards Museum of Crystal in Gus-Crystal

The Crystal Museum in Gus-Khrustalny opened in May 1983, after ten years of restoration, inside St George’s Cathedral. The cathedral was built in 1892–1903 at the expense of glassworks owner Yuri Nechaev-Maltsov to a design by the architect Leon Benois, with interiors by Viktor Vasnetsov. The town itself grew up around a glass manufactory that the Maltsov merchant family began building on the Gus River in 1756.

The 1987 set is about the exhibits rather than the building: each card is a close-up of glass. There are pieces for the decorative “Ryazan” service and from the “Khlebosolny” (Hospitable) service, a sweet bowl, a goblet, glasses, a liqueur set, and a punch bowl with glasses and a tray.

Another group shows decorative compositions with titles — “Duet”, “Fantasy”, “Space”, “Laurels”, “In Memory of the Young” — plus a “Glass Bouquet”. Together they show Soviet art glass of the 1980s working both in tableware and in themed exhibition pieces.

For glass collectors, these vintage postcards double as a guide to the shapes and titles the museum displayed in the late 1980s.