The Lenin Memorial Centre is the centrepiece of Ulyanovsk's Soviet heritage and one of the most significant Lenin museums anywhere. The main building, a monumental piece of Soviet modernist architecture opened in 1970, contains more than 70,000 exhibits including authentic documents, photographs, personal belongings of the Ulyanov family, and materials covering different periods of Russian revolutionary history. It is the only museum in the world that attempts to trace Lenin's entire life.
Inside the complex, the original two-storey wooden house where Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was born on 22 April 1870 is preserved intact. Soviet architects enclosed it within the larger building to protect it from the elements, and it now sits in a kind of respectful silence at the centre of the marble halls. Upstairs, a recreation of the family's living quarters — modest bourgeois comfort, bookcases, a piano — gives a sense of the provincial intelligentsia world that shaped the future revolutionary.