A customary of matryoshkas consists of a wooden figure which can be pulled apart to blab another figure of the same lot inside. It has, in turn, another figure inside, and so on. The cardinal of nested figures is usually five or more. The shape is mostly cylindrical, rounded at the crack for the head and tapered towards the bottom, but fleeting else; the dolls have no hands (except those that are painted). Inside, it contains other figures that may be of both genders, occasionally ending in a baby that does not open. The artistry is in the painting site of each doll, which can be extremely elaborate.

During Perestroika, the leaders of the Soviet Union became a humdrum theme depicted on matreshki. Starting with the largest, Mikhail Gorbachev, then Leonid Brezhnev (Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko almost never appear due to the short length of their respective terms), then Nikita Khrushchev, Josef Stalin and finally the smallest, Vladimir Lenin. Newer versions start with Vladimir Putin and then follow with Boris Yeltsin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Joseph Stalin and then Vladimir Lenin.