The collection began to form at the beginning of the 50s, when on June 15, 1954 it was created The Museum of Bulgarian-Soviet Friendship with the task of implementing party and state policy on the search, collection, study, preservation, display and popularization of movable cultural monuments, museum values and documents reflecting Bulgarian-Russian and Bulgarian-Soviet relations from the Middle Ages to the present day. After the closing of the museum, the fund is at the disposal of the National History Museum and becomes part of its collections.
As of 2014 Collection "Bulgaria and the Slavic World" totals over 100 units, including a variety of material and documentary materials from the Middle Ages, Renaissance, New and Modern history. The fund wealth accumulated over 000 years through collection activities, ransoms and donations on the territory of Bulgaria and the countries of the former Soviet Union can conditionally be divided into several groups: Slavic ceramics from Bulgaria, Ukraine and Russia, numismatics, weapons, badges, uniforms, household fabrics, flags, ecclesiastical, applied and fine arts, documents from the Renaissance, new and modern history, old and rare editions, photographs from the period 1876 - 2000 , periodicals from the period 1878 - 2000, posters and posters, philately, fine and applied art, space, cinema-photo-phono archive, over 25 frames of microfilms of documents about Bulgarian history, searched in Russian and Ukrainian archives and other materials distributed in the Main Fund, Research Support Fund, Exchange Fund, Fund Library and Scientific Archive.
Part of the collection is also a large group of exhibits directly related to the history of Bulgaria, donated by the largest Russian and Ukrainian museums in the 60s and 70s. Among them we will mention the watercolors of the Austrian artists Schaefer and Zelos - about 30 in number, representing scenes from post-liberation Bulgaria, donated by the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) in 1972.
The mentioned museum objects are only a small part of the rich and diverse collection "Bulgaria and the Slavic World". The changed socio-political conditions in the country after 1989 allowed these long-standing exhibits to become part of the exhibition and promotion activities of the National History Museum, through which the representations of the Bulgarian-Russian and Bulgarian-Soviet political, military-political, diplomatic, cultural, economic, church, etc. relationships and connections were greatly enriched.
