The biography of the city is measured by the lives and destinies of its residents. Each stage puts forward its own heroes, creators, or victims. Birth, search for identity, rapid rises and cruel disappointments, military disasters and attempts to overcome them, the expansion of territories, intellectual breakthroughs, and the "wind of change"—these plots form the narrative of Sverdlovsk in the 20th century, and each of them can be told through the lenses of personal stories.
The visitors are offered to set off on a journey from 1919 (the year when a new city with its host of heroes and mythologies was born on an old foundation of provincial Ekaterinburg) to 1991 (the year which brings the project of Soviet Sverdlovsk to a close).

Each of the 12 exhibition rooms tells its own story—the story of the city itself and of its residents, as well as of the key moments they shared. These stories are all connected: The journey leads you from the so-called "apostles of the revolution" Leonid Vainer and Yakov Sverdlov to the only female mayor in the history of the city, Anna Bychkova; from the patriarch of the Ural architecture Konstantin Babykin to the master of exemplary construction Boris Yeltsin; from the May Day meetings among the wooded stone ridge to the social experiments of the Youth Residential Complexes (MZhK) held in the same place, Kamenniye Palatki (Stone Tents) Rocks... There are plenty of signs and hints scattered all over the exposition, sometimes obvious, sometimes implicit, that help visitors see all this intertwining and all those intersections, while a cross-cutting thread of time doesn't let them go astray.

One of the buildings of the Gospromural Communal Complex, built in 1933, serves as a space for dialogue between the visitors and the heroes of the exhibition. This building, which had been originally designed as a kindergarten, then turned into a hospital and later—into atmospheric moldering ruins, a scenery for movies and photo shoots. Today it is undergoing yet another metamorphosis and is already a full-fledged participant in the set story.