Abstract. The article discusses the origin and development of the institute of museums operating on a voluntary basis (public, folk, school museums, etc.) in the USSR museum network. The change of this institute into para-museum structures was studied, whose activity, due to their legal status, is not fully covered by the current legislation on museums. Also studied are the profiles of museums that were characteristic of public museums.

Public museums were mainly of a comprehensive profile and supplemented by budget museums. Public museums were a factor in the development of the network of state museums, since they could potentially become branches of state museums or separate from independent budgetary state institutions.

In the development of the network of public museums, a systemic law of peripheral development was manifested, according to which everything new in the system arises precisely at the peripheral levels of the system, where systemic connections are weak. Indeed, the activities of public museums were less regulated than the work of budget museums, which gave a greater degree of freedom for the development of public museums.

The main task of public museums was to promote the Marxist-Leninist worldview and the achievements of communist construction, to increase the education and culture of Soviet people, their aesthetic education and the formation of a sense of Soviet patriotism. And, no less important, to direct the leisure of the population in a direction significant for the state.

The activity of public museums in identifying and collecting exhibits made it possible to identify genuine monuments of material and spiritual culture among the peoples, with the subsequent inclusion of the latter in the museum fund of the USSR.

An analysis of the organizational and legal form of public museums created during the USSR period indicates that they were created without the formation of a legal entity and overwhelmingly were structural units of enterprises, institutions or organizations.

Ignoring the issue of the need for legal regulation of public relations related to the restoration, development and activities of public museums since the early 1990s marginalized this institution and led to the emergence of para-museum formations that, under the guise of museums, fulfill other goals and objectives. It should be noted that such neglect, we believe, mediated the impoverishment of the funds of public museums and the dispersal of the objects of these museums in private hands.

Key words: museum network, museum system, classification of museums, museum activity profiles, public museums, folk museums, school museums, para-museum organizations, museum law.