The Pretender's Armour exhibition will tell how Emperor Alexander II's collection gained the armour of the False Dmitry, a.k.a. Dmitry I, the ill-fated tsar of Russia who falsely claimed to be Ivan the Terrible’s lost youngest son. After only 11 months of rule, members of the Russian nobility (boyars) assassinated him and shot the ashes of his body out of a cannon.

In 1868, his armour was "found by chance in Paris" by Egor Kemmerer, then the curator of the Arsenal at Tsarskoe Selo.