A soup tureen is a type of tableware for serving soup or broth. As a rule, it was a wide and deep container with handles, sometimes with legs. Tureens could have different shapes: oval, round, triangular. They were created in the form of animals, birds and fruits. They were made of porcelain, silver and other materials. It is believed that this piece of kitchen utensils appeared in France in the 17th–18th centuries and was a sign of the material well-being of its owners.

The soup tureen in the collection of the Ulyanov family Apartment-Museum is round in shape, doesn’t have a lid, is made of white clay with a blue border along the upper edge, and has two handles on the sides. There is a green stamp on the bottom, which features a double-headed eagle and the text: “Т-во М.С. Кузнецова” (M.S. Kuznetsov’s Partnership).

This household item was produced at the factory called “M.S. Kuznetsov’s partnership for the production of porcelain, earthenware and majolica”. This production was considered one of the largest in its area in the territory of the Russian Empire at the end of the 19th — beginning of the 20th century. It was founded by the future “king of Russian porcelain”, industrialist and entrepreneur Matvey Sidorovich Kuznetsov. The plant existed from 1889 to 1917, after which it was nationalized.

The soup tureen belonged to Anna Ilyinichna Ulyanova-Elizarova, the elder sister of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, in connection with the creation of the Ulyanov family Apartment-Museum, Claudia Pavlovna Anokhina provided great assistance in replenishing the museum collection. She was an old acquaintance of Anna Ilyinichna and the wife of one of her pupils, Dmitry Egorovich Baramzin. She lived in Anna Ilyinichna’s apartment on 9 Manezhnaya Street in Moscow.

A researcher at the museum, Augustina Dmitrievna Dernova, who was working on the creation of the exhibition at that time, visited Anokhina in the summer of 1968. Claudia Pavlovna told her a lot of interesting things about the period when she joined the family of Anna Ulyanova. She was closely acquainted with Lenin’s sister Maria Ilyinichna, his brother Dmitry Ilyich, as well as his wife Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya and was able to save valuable things, books, photographs and letters of those times.

Claudia Pavlovna donated to the museum the items that belonged to Anna Ulyanova-Elizarova and the Ulyanov family. Among them was Anna Ilyinichna’s soup tureen. The news of this event was published on the front page of the newspaper Pravda on October 26, 1969.