The concept of the “youth museum”, introduced here into scholarly usage, is intended to overcome the formal limitations of existing definitions – “children’s”, “school”, “student”, and “university” museums — while synthesizing and foregrounding the most consequential functional aspects of contemporary museum practice. A diachronic reconstruction of the functional system of the modern youth museum suggests that the content-and-communication complex associated with this term constitutes an integral element of museum culture as such. The authors locate the origins of university museum activity in the natural-history museums of the Enlightenment; the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford may be regarded as the first of its kind. Russian institutions of higher learning (including Moscow University and the Mining Institute) embarked on the creation of their own teaching museums as a key component of educational formation at roughly the same time as European universities; in both Europe and Russia, private benefactors played a substantial role in this process. Across the centuries, the museum functioned as a major alternative medium through which the young could acquire value orientations; it also served to legitimize particular cultural and ideological doctrines in the minds of new generations, thereby shaping youth sociocultural self-identification within a given mental community. The educational orientation of museums toward youthful audiences has, in turn, entailed a continuous search for new communicative resources capable of enhancing receptivity, appeal, and the efficacy of scholarly and public enlightenment. By identifying the principal motives and vectors of a youth museum’s work, the authors propose a model for an innovative scientific-educational structure designed to address pressing sociocultural tasks of the present. The theoretical premises developed on this basis have made it possible to design and test, within a contemporary university museum environment, an original system of activities positioned as the “youth museum” of Moscow University. In practice, the clusters of such a system emerge across multiple sites within particular university campuses and beyond them, while maintaining a unified developmental concept, a program of remote events, and a digital catalogue of holdings. It is precisely through the development of a university youth museum that diverse groups of contemporary youth may be most effectively engaged – not merely with a museum of a classical type, but with mobile, networked scientific and educational projects sustained by the museum community.