This website likely uses a semantic vector space like CLIP or BERT space. Which is based on co-occurrence of words, it doesn't have a harder logic behind it. Soviets probably had cylinders in some machinery which is why it pulled.
Curious whether the embeddings come off the images or the catalog text, because in my experience museum metadata is wildly uneven (half the Met's older records are basically "Vase, terracotta"). Also, do you dedupe across institutions?
Just dumping a million results on the user to doom-scroll through is a bit problematic in terms of UI/UX.
EDIT: Ok, there is, but it needs a query...
soviets were big into seals and govt procedures . maybe?