This brush for removing traces of chalk off a card table is thought to have belonged to the Ivashev family. On December 7, 1993, it was donated to the museum by Tatyana Vasilievna Zuckschwerdt, the great-granddaughter of the Decembrist Ivashev. This event took place during the opening ceremony of the Turinsk Decembrists House Museum.

The historian of Russian culture Juri Lotman noted that gambling met “strong moral opposition, ” and it was technically prohibited as immoral at the turn of the 19th century. Books of secular etiquette warned young people against gambling addiction, which led to debt and bankruptcy. For example, the book called “Rules of Social Life and Etiquette” written by Yuryev and Vladimirsky reads the following,

Despite all this, cards were played everywhere. It was customary to separate gambling card games, the success in which mostly depended on chance, from those where the winnings equaled the quick wit and attentiveness of the players.

In the 19th-century Russia, a game of shtos, where victory was determined by pure luck, was gaining popularity. Andrey Dostoevsky, the brother of Fyodor Dostoevsky, recalled,

The popularity of this card game was also reflected in Russian literature. Shtos was played by Hermann and Chekalinsky in Alexander Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades”, Arbenin in Mikhail Lermontov’s “Masquerade”, Khlestakov in Nikolai Gogol’s “The Government Inspector”, and Nikolay Rostov in Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”.

The players are divided into the banker, who shuffles the cards, and punters (“a person who gambles”). The game can be played one-on-one or with an indeterminate number of punters. Each player receives a deck of cards. Punters choose one card from the deck, on which they bet an amount equal to that announced by the banker. Then, one by one, the cards from the banker’s deck are revealed, and the punter who can guess the final card wins. As a rule, the banker and punters are seated on opposite sides of an elongated rectangular table covered with green cloth, which serves to record rates and debts, as well as make all calculations.