Kharkiv Historical Museum named after M. F. Sumtsova is a direct descendant of the Museum of Slobid Ukraine created in 1920 named after G. S. Skovorody, which in 1920—1922 was headed by the famous Ukrainian historian, ethnographer and public figure Academician M. F. Sumtsov. In 1920—1930 the museum became a regional center for the study of traditional and modern phenomena of culture and life, as well as the first Ukrainian museum in Kharkiv, which aimed to widely popularize the treasures of national culture.The museum was founded on January 21, 1920 [4] on the initiative of a famous public figure of the city of Kharkov. Ethnographer, Ukrainian folklorist, literary critic and scholar in the field of domestic museum studies, Professor Nikolai Fedorovich Sumtsov. Ukrainian historian, philosopher, one of the founders of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences Dmytro Ivanovich Bagaliy, orientalist historian, Ukrainianist Andrey Petrovich Kovaliy, interesting researcher of the Ukrainian people Raisa Sergeevna Dankovska (who after Sumtsov's death was from 1923 to 1929 before the leadership). Ethnographer, dialectologist and folklorist Dmitry Konstantinovich Zelenin became the ethnographic direction, and then the formation of the ethnographic department of the museum. Zelenin paid much attention to Ukrainian ethnography, and it was on the basis of the museum that he began to create a thorough study of the ethnography of the Eastern Slavs at the request of the German philologists R. Troutman and M. Fasmer.