The Cherepovets Museum of Local History — part of the Muzeynoye Obyedineniye, the city's municipal museum association — covers the Vologda region before the steel age arrived. That means the Volga-Baltic waterway system, which passes near Cherepovets and connects the Baltic to the Caspian; the creation of the Rybinsk Reservoir in the 1940s, which flooded enormous stretches of the upper Volga valley; and the traditional crafts of the region, including lacework and woodcarving. It is a solid provincial history museum of the Russian type.
The collection is strongest on the local impact of Soviet industrialisation — the building of the Severstal plant in the 1950s, and before that the dramatic reshaping of the river landscape by Stalin-era canal works. If you are travelling through the Vologda region with any interest in how the USSR transformed the Russian north, the museum is a useful complement to the better-known collections in Vologda itself. The museum is in the city centre, near the Sheksna embankment.