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Bolshoy Gostiny Dvor
One of the world’s first indoor shopping malls, the ‘Big Merchant Yard’ dates from between 1757 and 1785 and stretches 230m along Nevsky pr (its perimeter is more than 1km long). This Rastrelli creation is not as elaborate as some of his other work, finished as it was by Vallin de
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Tolstoy Literary Museum
The Tolstoy Literary Museum is supposedly the oldest literary memorial museum in the world (founded in 1911). In addition to its impressive reference library, the museum contains exhibits of manuscripts, letters and artwork focusing on Leo Tolstoy’s literary influences and output.
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Architecture Museum
The pretty village of Nizhnyaya Sinyachikha, about 150km northeast of Yekaterinburg and 12km north of the town of Alapaevsk, is home to an excellent open-air Architecture Museum. Here you find 15 traditional Siberian log buildings, featuring displays of period furniture, tools and
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Novospassky Monastery
Novospassky Monastery, a 15th-century fort-monastery, is about 1km south of Taganskaya pl. The centrepiece of the monastery, the Transfiguration Cathedral , was built by the imperial Romanov family in the 1640s in imitation of the Kremlin’s Assumption Cathedral. Frescoes depict the
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Tchaikovsky House
From 1885, Pyotr Tchaikovsky spent his summers in Klin, 75km northwest of Moscow. In a charming house on the edge of town, he wrote the Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty , as well as his famous Pathétique Symphony No 6 . After he died in 1893, the estate was converted into a museum. T
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Monastery of the Holy Martyrs
After the Romanov family was shot in the cellar of Dom Ipatyeva, their bodies were discarded in the depths of the forests of Ganina Yama, 16km northeast of Yekaterinburg. In their honour, the Orthodox Church has built the exquisite Monastery of the Holy Martyrs at this pilgrimage s
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Novodevichy Convent & Cemetery
A cluster of sparkling domes behind turreted walls on the Moscow River, Novodevichy Convent is notorious as the place where Peter the Great imprisoned his half-sister Sofia for her part in the Streltsy rebellion. The oldest and most dominant building in the grounds is the white Smo
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Kamenny Island
Century-old dachas (country cottages) and mansions, inhabited by very wealthy locals, line the wooded lanes that twist their way around Kamenny (Stone) Island. The island is punctuated by a series of canals, lakes and ponds, and is pleasant for strolling at any time of year. At its
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Alexandrovsky Park
This leafy park, laid out in 1845, wraps in an arc around the Kronverk moat and Artillery Museum. Its too close to traffic to ensure a peaceful escape but, if you have kids in tow, it harbours a few attractions worth considering, the best of which is the Planetarium , offering show
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Dostoevsky Museum
Fyodor Dostoevsky lived in flats all over the city, mostly in Sennaya, but his final residence is this ‘memorial flat’ where he lived from 1878 until he died in 1881. The apartment remains as it was when the Dostoevsky family lived here, including the study where he wrote The Broth
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Aptekarsky Ogorod
This lovely, thoroughly revamped gardens is Moscows chief source of flower power and thats a not a cultural metaphor. It really is full of flowers, as well as shade and dozens of inviting benches. Established in 1706, the garden was originally owned by the Moscow general hospital t
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Hermitage Gardens
All the things that have improved Moscow parks no end in recent years fill this small, charming garden to the brim. Today it is possibly the most happening place in Moscow, where art, food and crafts festivals, and concerts occur almost weekly, especially in summer. Apart from welc
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Chekhov House
‘The colour of the house is liberal, ie red’, Anton Chekhov wrote of his house on the Garden Ring, where he lived from 1886 to 1890. The red house now contains the Chekhov House-Museum, with bedrooms, drawing room and study all intact. Musical performances are held here several tim
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Museum of the Defence & Blockade of Leningrad
The grim but engrossing displays here contain donations from survivors, propaganda posters from the blockade period and many photos depicting life and death during the siege. An audio guide in English was about to be made available in 2014, which will compensate for the lack of Eng
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Bolshoy Dom
Noi Trotsky’s monolithic design for the local KGB headquarters (and currently the St Petersburg headquarters of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, its successor organisation) is referred to by everyone as the ‘Bolshoy Dom’ or ‘Big House’. It’s a fierce-looking block of granite b
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Khabarovsk Territorial Museum
Located in an evocative 1894 red-brick building, this museum contains an excellent overview of Russian and Soviet history. Galleries take you decade by decade through the past with fascinating propaganda posters, old film clips, audio snippets, black and white photos (like the sad
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130 Kvartal
What does a city boasting some of Siberia’s most impressive original timber architecture do to improve the visitor experience? Yes, that’s right, recreate an entire quarter of yet more wooden buildings, some transported here from other locations, some fake. The unromantically-named
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Museum Of Soviet Arcade Machines
Growing up in the 1980s USSR was a peculiar, but not necessarily entirely bleak experience. Here is an example – a collection of about 40 mostly functional Soviet arcade machines. At the entrance, visitors get a paper bag full of 15-kopeck Soviet coins, which fire up these recreati
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Bunker
On a quiet side street near Taganskaya pl, a nondescript neoclassical building is the gateway to the secret Cold War–era communications centre. The facility was meant to serve as the communications headquarters in the event of a nuclear attack. As such, the building was just a shel
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Melnikov House
The only private house built during the Soviet period, the home of Konstantin Melnikov stands as testament to the innovation of the Russian avant-garde. The architect created his unusual home from two interlocking cylinders – an ingenious design that employs no internal load-bearin
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