The desk that is exhibited in the museum is believed to have belonged to Major General of the engineering and technical services Mikhail Tsarevsky. From December 1953 to July 1959, he was the supervisor of Construction 601 — that was the secret name of the construction of the future ‘Siberian Chemical Combine’. The exhibit was donated to the museum by the head of the Housing Management Office No. 4 Vladimir Babakov.

This is a pedestal desk with three drawers. There is a plywood inlay on the desktop. It is covered in green twill — a dense and durable cotton fabric. The desktop is decorated with a horizontal band called a frieze.

In the pedestals behind the doors there are tray-type drawers — three in each pedestal. A similar type of drawers was placed behind the facade of the furniture, their front wall was one-half of the height of the other three. The doors are hinged on swivel hinges and lockable. Keyholes are surrounded by key plates — decorative overlays. The underframe is connected with pedestals without glue and with the help of dowels — cylindrical rods. The pedestals rest on curly legs. All the wooden parts of the desk are well polished.

As the old-timers recollect, Tsarevsky’s character was legendary, and he himself ‘did not shy away from’ strong ‘expressions, but was forgiving, accessible and easy to communicate, did not persist in mistakes, people respected him. Mikhail Mikhailovich zealously scolded his subordinates for negligence and mismanagement, but at the same time, he was unusually attentive to his working group. The General personally knew not only the masters and foremen, but even the common workers.’

Since 1930, Tsarevsky supervised the construction of the Gorky Automobile Plant, then the Nizhny Tagil Metallurgical Plant, the Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute, the ‘Severonikel’ Combine on the Kola Peninsula.

During the war, under the command of Mikhail Tsarevsky, defensive structures were built beyond the Arctic Circle, and later on the Leningrad front. In 1943, he was promoted to Major General. After the war, his experience and organizational skills were in demand in the construction of nuclear complexes in Chelyabinsk-40 (Ozersk) and Krasnoyarsk-26 (Zheleznogorsk).

At that time the office design was ascetic. The Construction Administration 601 itself, according to the reminiscences of veterans, resembled a military headquarters. Most of the employees were either officers of the Ministry of State Security, or military construction units, or front-line soldiers: people wore military uniforms because they simply did not have other everyday clothes.

Mikhail Tsarevsky received many orders and medals. In 1949, he was awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor, the Stalin Prize was awarded for the construction of the Mining and Chemical Combine in Zheleznogorsk, and General Tsarevsky received his fifth Order of Lenin in Seversk, in 1956.