The Kaluga Regional Local History Museum is one of the oldest in Russia. It opened on April 20, 1897 (according to the old style) in a 17th-century building known as the Korobov Merchants' Chambers. The original exhibition of the Provincial Historical Museum included five showcases with archaeological finds, numismatics, and household items. The museum could only be visited two days a week, and in its first year, it was visited by 500 people.

Museum leaders such as I.D. Chetyrkin, A.I. Martynovich, Lashevsky, P.A. Treiter, and V.I. Assonov collected and preserved letters from A.S. Pushkin, which were later transferred to the A.S. Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Since 1900, the museum has housed N.V. Gogol's pen. By 1904, the museum's collection numbered about 1,000 items, and in 1915, D.I. Malinin, a well-known local historian and head of the library, compiled an inventory of 1,200 items.

In 1918, the museum came under the management of the voluntary "Kaluga Society of Antiquities and Protection of Artistic Works," but in the same year, it was transferred to the Provincial Department of Public Education as the "Provincial Historical Museum" and received a protective charter.

The second, current building of the museum, the Zolotarev estate, was nationalized in 1919. After long efforts, on July 30, 1922, the estate was transferred to the museum, and by the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution, on November 7, 1922, the historical museum was opened.

In 1924, the City Museum "For Good Enlightenment" named after A.A. Ryzhichkin, founded in 1914, and the art museum, created in 1918, were incorporated into the museum. This combined museum was transferred to the Main Science Department in 1925 and consisted of three departments: natural history, history, and art, which were located in three separate buildings.

Since 1931, the museum has been called the regional basic state museum. Centralization positively affected its activities: exhibition areas increased, the number of themes and exhibits grew. The growth of collections was associated with the transfer of church and monastery property and items from estates to the museum. By 1939, the museum's funds numbered 10,000 items.

During the war, the museum was closed to visitors for 10 months and did not operate as a museum for only 78 days (during the occupation). It was not possible to evacuate the exhibits. The protocol of the commission of the Academy of Architecture of the USSR dated April 4, 1942, noted that about 10% of the museum's collections were looted by the fascists.

In 1944, the museum received regional status. In 1945, its funds contained 7,712 exhibits, of which 2,413 were on display. The museum's collection fund has been formed for over a hundred years and now includes more than 100,000 units in the main fund, categorized into collections such as "Archaeology," "Painting, Graphics, and Sculpture," "Photos and Negatives," "Rare Books and Documents," "Metal," "Precious Metals," "Wood," "Glass and Porcelain," "Fabrics," "Weapons and Armament," "Scientific-Natural," "Entomology," "Philumeny," "Numismatics," and others.