Since 1948 the 325th Aviation Repair Plant has worked at the Taganrog-Central air base, overhauling transport aircraft and helicopters. Then came the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, signed in 1990, which capped the arsenals of the Cold War's two blocs and required vast numbers of tanks, artillery, and aircraft to be destroyed. Many combat planes of the Soviet and later Russian air forces were sent for disposal, and the Taganrog plant became a base for scrapping frontline aviation. It was the kind of order that erases machines by the hundred, each one a product of enormous engineering effort, bound for the breaker's yard.

Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Stoyanov and the base commander, Colonel Alexander Kornienko, appealed up the chain to the 4th Air Army. Their request was modest and stubborn: let us keep at least one specimen of every aircraft type coming through for dismantlement, engines and avionics removed, airframes preserved. The army's commander, Vladimir Mikhaylov, approved. On 23 April 1995 he ordered four aircraft spared from the scrapping program, a MiG-21bis, a MiG-23M, a MiG-25BM, and a Su-22. Others soon followed, among them a pair of Czechoslovak trainers, the L-39 Albatros and L-29 Delfin, the vertical-takeoff Yak-38, and the humble biplane An-2. From a demolition base grew a collection.

Today the museum holds a dozen types of aircraft, and visitors are allowed to climb inside each one, an intimacy most air museums never permit. The rarest resident is that MiG-25BM, a specialized variant of the fearsome high-speed interceptor, of which only around forty were ever built. The one at Taganrog appears to be the sole survivor, a machine that would have been cut into scrap had two officers not spoken up. As of 2022 the museum's keepers were campaigning for official city recognition of their collection. It is an unusual monument: not to a battle or a leader, but to the impulse to preserve, to the idea that even the tools of war are worth saving for the people who come after.