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Russian nesting dolls are called matryoshka dolls (North Americans have incorrectly adopted the word babushka, but that just means grandmother in Russian). In 1890, the first one to carve a set was Vasily Zvyozdochkin from a design by Sergey Malyutin, who was a folk crafts painter in Abramtsevo.

Matryoshka dolls are a set of wooden dolls of decreasing size placed one inside the other. The set separates, top from bottom, revealing a smaller figure painted the same way inside, which has, in turn, another figure inside of it, and so on. The number of nested figures is traditionally at least five, but with expert craftsmanship (they are constructed from one block of wood) can sometimes be up to several dozen.

A block of wood is cut in half and then a chunk of wood is carved out of the top and bottom pieces. The chunks are formed into an oval shape and matching pieces are put together and then painted. The smallest, innermost doll is typically a baby lathed from a single piece of wood. The figures inside may be of either gender but are mostly female.

Over the years, the dolls were painted in a traditional colorful style as a woman, dressed in a sarafan, a long and shapeless Russian peasant jumper dress. Nowadays they are painted with any kind of theme from Russian leaders to Walt Disney characters to an observant Jewish family.  The most common amount of nestings is five though his original one had eight.