Moscow and St Petersburg

The long cobbled square beneath the Kremlin's eastern wall has been Moscow's marketplace, execution ground, parade ground and stage for more than five centuries. Its name comes from an old word, krasnaya, that meant "beautiful" as well as "red". Around it stand the red-brick State Historical Museum, the arcaded nineteenth-century GUM shopping galleries, the small rebuilt Kazan Cathedral, the Resurrection Gate and, against the Kremlin wall, Lenin's Mausoleum. Together with the Kremlin, the square was inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1990.

TipThe square is closed at short notice for parades, concerts and official events, and security checks are routine. Do not photograph police, soldiers or anything that might be considered political activity.

Built in 1555 to 1561 for Ivan the Terrible to mark the capture of Kazan, the Cathedral of the Intercession, as it is formally called, is really a cluster of nine chapels on one base, each crowned with its own tower or dome. The swirling, striped and faceted onion domes, painted in their present colours in later centuries, have become the emblem of Russia itself. Inside, narrow passages and staircases painted with flowers lead between small, tall chapels. The building is a branch of the State Historical Museum, and services are held on some feast days.

The triangular fortress on Borovitsky Hill holds the seat of the Russian presidency, but also a group of buildings open to visitors that tell the story of medieval Muscovy. Cathedral Square is the heart: the Dormition Cathedral, where tsars were crowned; the Archangel Cathedral, with the tombs of Moscow's grand princes and early tsars; and the Annunciation Cathedral, the tsars' private chapel, with icons attributed to Theophanes the Greek and Andrei Rublev. Nearby sit the Tsar Bell and Tsar Cannon, both too big ever to have been used. The Armoury Chamber holds a dazzling treasury of crowns, thrones, coronation robes, ceremonial carriages, silver and Fabergé eggs.

TipThe Kremlin Museums' website gives museum hours of 10:00 to 17:00 (the Armoury until 18:00), closed on Thursdays, with timed entry sessions for the Armoury. The Ivan the Great Bell Tower was listed as temporarily closed in October 2026. Buy tickets only through the official site or the ticket office in the Alexander Garden.

On the site of a demolished Soviet hotel right beside Red Square, Zaryadye opened in 2017 as a landscaped park that compresses Russia's natural zones, from tundra to steppe and birch forest, into a few terraced hectares. Its most popular feature is a V-shaped concrete bridge that juts out over the Moskva river without touching the other bank, giving one of the best views back to the Kremlin walls and St Basil's. The old churches and the merchant houses of Varvarka Street, among the oldest buildings in central Moscow, run along the park's northern edge.

The merchant Pavel Tretyakov began collecting Russian painting in the 1850s and gave his collection to the city in 1892; his gallery, in a fairy-tale façade designed by the painter Viktor Vasnetsov in the Zamoskvorechye district across the river, remains the finest place to see Russian art. Medieval icons lead on to eighteenth-century portraits, the landscapes of Shishkin and Levitan, the realist dramas of Repin and the shimmering visions of Vrubel. Andrei Rublev's famous Trinity icon, long the gallery's greatest treasure, was transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church in 2023. Twentieth-century art, including Malevich's Black Square, hangs in a separate building on Krymsky Val by Gorky Park.

Founded in 1524 on a bend of the river south-west of the centre, this walled convent was a fortress on the approach to Moscow and a retreat, sometimes forced, for royal and noble women, including Peter the Great's half-sister Sofia. Its towers and its Smolensk Cathedral, with sixteenth-century frescoes, are exceptionally well preserved examples of the "Moscow baroque", and UNESCO listed the ensemble in 2004. Next door, Novodevichy Cemetery is the resting place of writers, composers and politicians, among them Chekhov, Gogol, Bulgakov, Shostakovich, Khrushchev and Yeltsin. Parts of the convent have been under restoration for years, so some buildings may be closed.

The Moscow Metro, opened in 1935, was built as a "palace for the people", and its central stations are among the most lavish public interiors of the Soviet era. Komsomolskaya on the circle line, under the square shared by three main railway stations, has a vaulted yellow ceiling with chandeliers and mosaics; Mayakovskaya has steel arches and ceiling mosaics of Soviet skies; Ploshchad Revolyutsii, by Red Square, has bronze figures of soldiers, workers and farmers, and passengers rub the nose of a border guard's dog for luck. Novoslobodskaya's stained-glass panels and Kievskaya's mosaics are also worth the ride.

TipRide outside the morning and evening peaks to look at the stations properly. The FCDO lists transport networks among places where terrorist attacks could occur.

About 70 kilometres north-east of Moscow, the monastery founded around 1337 by St Sergius of Radonezh is the spiritual centre of Russian Orthodoxy and the first stop on the Golden Ring. Within its white walls are the small fifteenth-century Trinity Cathedral, which holds the saint's relics and for which Rublev painted his Trinity, and the much larger Dormition Cathedral of the later sixteenth century, its blue domes scattered with gold stars, with the tomb of Tsar Boris Godunov outside. The lavra is a living monastery and seminary, busy with pilgrims, monks and bells, and UNESCO listed it in 1993.

TipDress modestly: women are expected to cover their heads and wear skirts below the knee, and men should not wear shorts. Suburban trains leave from Moscow's Yaroslavsky station.

Suzdal is the jewel of the Golden Ring: a small town of meadows, a winding river and more than fifty churches and monasteries, protected from industrialisation in the nineteenth century when the railway passed it by. Its own kremlin holds the thirteenth-century Cathedral of the Nativity, with blue domes sprinkled with gold stars and bronze "Golden Doors" engraved with biblical scenes. Across town, the fortified Saviour Monastery of St Euthymius rings with a bell concert at the top of the hour in summer, and the open-air Museum of Wooden Architecture gathers log churches, windmills and peasant houses from villages across the region. Suzdal is famous for medovukha, a light mead.

TipSuzdal has no railway station; buses and taxis run the 30 or so kilometres from Vladimir. Stay overnight to see the town after the day groups leave.

Standing alone in a water meadow where the Nerl meets the Klyazma, this tiny white-stone church of 1165 is often called the most perfect building in Russia. Prince Andrei Bogolyubsky built it near his residence at Bogolyubovo, and its slender proportions and carved figures of King David, lions and griffins on the façades have been copied and admired ever since. Its reflection in spring floodwater is one of the classic images of the country.

TipIt's a walk of about 1.5 kilometres across the meadow from Bogolyubovo; in the spring flood the path can be under water, and the only way across is by boat.

Before Moscow's rise, Vladimir was the capital of north-eastern Rus', and its twelfth-century monuments are the best surviving examples of the white-stone architecture that UNESCO listed together with Suzdal in 1992. The Golden Gate of 1164, once the main entrance to the city, still stands on the main street. The Dormition Cathedral, set high above the river, holds frescoes of the Last Judgement painted in 1408 by Andrei Rublev and Daniil Chorny, and the nearby Cathedral of St Demetrius is covered from top to bottom with hundreds of stone carvings of saints, beasts and plants.

TipFast trains link Vladimir with Moscow's Kursky station in under two hours, making it the easiest Golden Ring base.

St Petersburg began here, on Hare Island in the Neva, in May 1703, and the star-shaped fortress was the first thing Peter the Great built. Its needle-sharp gilded spire belongs to the Peter and Paul Cathedral, where almost every Russian emperor from Peter onwards is buried, including Nicholas II and his family, whose remains were interred here in 1998. The Trubetskoy Bastion was a political prison whose inmates included Dostoevsky's contemporaries and early revolutionaries. A cannon is fired from the Naryshkin Bastion every day at noon, and the beach below the walls fills with sunbathers on warm days.

For a few weeks either side of the summer solstice, St Petersburg, at almost 60 degrees north, never gets properly dark: the sun dips just below the horizon and the sky stays a luminous blue-grey all night. Crowds gather along the embankments to watch the Neva's drawbridges rise in the small hours so that ships can pass; Palace Bridge, between the Winter Palace and Vasilyevsky Island, is the most famous, its spans lifting against the dawn sky. The bridges open nightly through the navigation season, roughly spring to late autumn, not just during the white nights.

TipOnce the bridges are up, the islands are cut off from the centre until early morning, so check the opening schedule before crossing back late at night.

The green-and-white Winter Palace, designed by Bartolomeo Rastrelli and completed in 1762, was the main residence of the tsars, and together with the neighbouring buildings it houses the State Hermitage, one of the largest art museums in the world. Catherine the Great began the collection in 1764 with a purchase of Western paintings, and it now runs from Egyptian antiquities and Scythian gold to Rembrandts, two Leonardo Madonnas and Spanish and Flemish masters. The palace rooms are as much of an attraction as the art: the white-and-gold Jordan Staircase, the Malachite Room and the Pavilion Hall with its golden Peacock Clock. The impressionist and modern collections hang across Palace Square in the General Staff Building.

TipThe museum is traditionally closed on Mondays. Pick two or three sections in advance; walking every room would cover many kilometres.

The gilded dome of St Isaac's, one of the largest domed cathedrals in the world, dominates the city's skyline. Designed by the French architect Auguste de Montferrand and built from 1818 to 1858, it is framed by huge single-piece granite columns, and the interior glitters with malachite, lapis lazuli and mosaic icons. Climbing the steps to the colonnade around the drum gives a fine panorama over the rooftops, the Admiralty spire and the Neva. The cathedral is run as a state museum, with services held in a side chapel.

The city's main street runs about four and a half kilometres from the Admiralty to the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, and Gogol, Pushkin and Dostoevsky all set scenes along it. Walking its western half takes in the curved colonnade of the Kazan Cathedral, the art nouveau Singer House with its glass globe (now a bookshop), the Eliseev food hall, the long arcades of Gostiny Dvor and the Anichkov Bridge with its four bronze horse tamers. Side canals, the Griboyedov and the Fontanka, cross it and make good places to escape the crowds.

Built between 1883 and 1907 on the spot where Emperor Alexander II was mortally wounded by revolutionaries in 1881, this church is a deliberate throwback to medieval Muscovite style in a city of classical façades. Its enamelled and gilded onion domes recall St Basil's, but the real wonder is inside, where around 7,500 square metres of mosaics cover every wall, pillar and vault. A canopy marks the stretch of cobbled embankment where the emperor fell.

Peter the Great's summer palace on the Gulf of Finland, about 30 kilometres west of the city, is famous above all for its fountains. The Grand Cascade tumbles down from the Grand Palace in a stairway of gilded statues to the fountain of Samson tearing open a lion's jaws, then a canal runs straight to the sea. The Lower Park is filled with more than a hundred fountains, some of them trick fountains that soak passers-by, and Peter's small seaside villa, Monplaisir. Peterhof was occupied and largely wrecked during the Second World War; what you see today is the result of decades of painstaking restoration.

TipThe fountains run only in the warm season, roughly late spring to early autumn. In summer, hydrofoils have traditionally run from the embankment by the Hermitage.

At Tsarskoye Selo, in the town of Pushkin south of St Petersburg, Rastrelli's turquoise, white and gold Catherine Palace stretches for over 300 metres beside a landscaped park of lakes, pavilions and bridges. The suite of state rooms culminates in the Amber Room, whose original panels were looted by German forces in 1941 and never found; the recreated room, completed in 2003 after more than twenty years of work, gleams in honey-coloured amber. The nearby Alexander Palace was the last home of Nicholas II and his family.

TipThe museum says it sells tickets only on its own website and at its ticket desks, and warns against unofficial sites. Its visitor information centre was closed from 14 October to 3 November 2026.