About us

The site Russian Crafts  domain was registered in late 90-s and it was the first site in Russia and one of the first sites in the world which started Internet sales of Russian crafts and products. The site was primitive and naive, made using  old good HTML but it worked. The aim of the site was  simple - to sell Russian nesting dolls directly to customers from other countries.

Now there are plenty of good Internet shops  and physical shops everywhere in the world and a customer can buy any matryoshka nesting dolls and other Russian crafts but 12 years ago it was not simple. On-line payments were processed not so easy as this is now, shipping took longer time, the world in general was not so open as it is nowadays and very few customers took risk to order something from Russia. Though there was no risk - we sent things in advance, people receive goods and only then made payments. Can you imagine it now? No I can not imagine but it was so.

Then with time beside nesting dolls we (why we? - this is not correct as always all these 12 years there was only 1 person who run the site and provided all sales) started to sell some other popular Russian goods - lacquer boxes, hand-painted brooches of different types, porcelain teapots, tin soldiers and other in addition to those which you can see at the Russian Crafts site now. There is a wonderful web service WayBack Machine which allow to see how a site looked many years ago, this is a kind of machine which can ride us to past and to see how the site lived, developed, transformed.

In old time my task was not only to offer products for sale but to gather and give information about Russia. In 1991 the USSR was destroyed and the iron curtain felt down. There was a big interest to events in new Russia and many tourists came here to see all by own eyes. Many people sent me requests with different questions devoted to Russia so I arranged such articles into some sections: Russian folk tales, Russian traditions, Russian cuisine.

With time I realized that the shopping cart software did not allow to organize information in proper way so I decided to make a separate content section using the modern software which allows to communicate with customers and visitors in more open and free manner.

If you have some notes and comments on the site, if you have any idea which you would like to share with me, please, free to contact me.

Sincerely yours Michael Terletski,
St.Petersburg, Russia, 2012