The National History Museum occupies a Neoclassical 1970s building two blocks south of the central park. Its strength is the Bessarabian and Soviet-period material — banknotes, propaganda posters, partisan-era weapons, and a permanent exhibit on the famines of 1946–47, which the museum was one of the first institutions to openly document after independence.
The ground-floor diorama of the 1944 Iasi-Chisinau Offensive is a Soviet-era survivor — fifty-five metres of painted panorama and three-dimensional foreground showing the Red Army's push across the Prut. The upper floors cover prehistoric Cucuteni-Trypillia ceramics, medieval Moldova, and the church treasure room. Closed Mondays; English captions are patchy.