Museum sights in Russia
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State Hermitage Museum
There are art galleries, there are museums, there are the great museums of the world and then there is the Hermitage. An unrivalled collection of art treasures housed in the magnificent palace from which the Romanov tsars ruled the Russian Empire, the State Hermitage will inevitably be the focus of any first visit to St Petersburg, and rightly so. At the information kiosk of the State Hermitage Museum you can pick up a free colour map of the museum, available in most European languages. Immediately after ticket inspection you can hire an audio guide (R250) with recorded tours in English, German, French, Italian or Russian. Groups enter from the river side of the Winter Pa…
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Armoury
The Armoury dates back to 1511, when it was founded under Vasily III to manufacture and store weapons, imperial arms and regalia for the royal court. Later it also produced jewellery, icon frames and embroidery. During the reign of Peter the Great all craftspeople, goldsmiths and silversmiths were sent to St Petersburg, and the armoury became a mere museum storing the royal treasures. A fire in 1737 destroyed many of the items. In the early 19th century, new premises were built for the collection. Much of it, however, never made it back from Nizhny Novgorod, where it was sent for safekeeping during Napoleon’s invasion in 1812. Another building to house the collection was …
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Gulag History Museum
In the midst of all the swanky shops on ul Petrovka, an archway leads to a courtyard that is strung with barbed wire and hung with portraits of political prisoners. This is the entrance to a unique museum dedicated to the Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies, better known as the GULAG. Guides dressed like guards describe the vast network of labour camps that once existed in the former Soviet Union and recount the horrors of camp life. Millions of prisoners spent years in these labour camps, made famous by Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago. More than 18 million people passed through this system during its peak years, from 1929 to…
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Regional Museum
The Regional Museum is one of Siberia’s best. Its wonderfully incongruous 1912 building combines art nouveau and Egyptian temple-style features. Arranged around a Cossack explorer’s ship are models, icons, historical room interiors and nature rooms where you can listen to local birdsong and animal cries. The basement hosts a splendid ethnographic section comparing the historical fashion sense of shamans from various tribal groups. The gift shop sells old coins, medals, postcards and excellent maps.
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ZKP Tagansky Cold War Museum
On a quiet side street near Taganskaya pl sits a nondescript neoclassical building. This is the gateway to the secret Cold War–era communications centre, ZKP Tagansky. Operated during the Cold War by Central Telephone and Telegraph, the facility was meant to serve as the communications headquarters in the event of a nuclear attack. As such, the building was just a shell and served as entry into the 7000-sq-metre space that is 60m underground.
Now managed by private interests, the facility is being converted into a sort of museum dedicated to the Cold War. Unfortunately, not much remains from that era. The vast place is nearly empty, except for a few exhibits set up for …
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Historical Museum
The Historical Museum charges per single-room floor. The best is Buddiyskoe Iskustvo (3rd floor), displaying thangka, Buddhas and icons salvaged from Buryatiya's monasteries before their Soviet destruction. Note-sheets in English fail to explain the fascinating, gaudy papier-mâché models of Khvashan's eight unruly sons urinating at one another.
Note the Gungarba shrine table (every Buryat home once had one), the Atsagat medical charts (Tibetan medicine was apparently standard here until the 1940s) and the walnut necklace on grey, clown-faced Sagan Obugen (walnuts were exotic in Buryatiya). The less-interesting 2nd floor traces Buryat history in maps, documents and artef…
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Vladivostok Fortress Museum
Attention fort fans: Vladivostok teems with sprawling, rather unique subterranean forts (130 in all) built between the 1880s and early 20th century to ward off potential Japanese (or American) attacks. Neophytes are best sticking with the easily accessible Vladivostok Fortress Museum, overlooking Sportivnaya Harbour. This hilltop museum is built in a fort that operated from 1882 to 1923, and is now home to many cannons and a five-room indoor exhibit of models, photos and artefacts – all refreshingly subtitled in English. You can climb onto (and aim) anti-aircraft guns pointing towards Hokkaido. You reach the fort from ul Zapadnaya.
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Borodino Panorama
Following the vicious but inconclusive battle at Borodino in August 1812, Moscow’s defenders retreated along what are now Kutuzovsky pr and ul Arbat, pursued by Napoleon’s Grand Army. Today, about 3km west of Novoarbatsky most and Hotel Ukraina (where Russian commander Mikhail Kutuzov stopped for a war council) is the Borodino Panorama, a pavilion with a giant 360-degree painting of the Borodino battle. Standing inside this tableau of bloodshed – complete with sound effects – is a powerful way to visualise the event.
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Krayevyedchesky Museum
The varied exhibits of the Krayevyedchesky Museum include good features on Sami and Pomor history and the Anglo-American occupation. There's a good souvenir shop, and museum guides can be hired for city tours in English.
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Ulyanov Family House-Museum
The Ulyanov family house-museum is where Vladimir Ilych and his family lived for three years from 1890 to 1893.
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Borodino Museum
In 1812 Napoleon invaded Russia, lured by the prospect of taking Moscow. For three months the Russians retreated, until on 26 August the two armies met in a bloody battle of attrition at the village of Borodino. In 15 hours more than one-third of each army was killed – over 100,000 soldiers in all. Europe would not know fighting this devastating again until WWI. The French seemed to be the winners, as the Russians withdrew and abandoned Moscow. But Borodino was, in fact, the beginning of the end for Napoleon, who was soon in full, disastrous retreat. The entire battlefield – more than 100 sq km – is now the Borodino Field Museum-Preserve, basically vast fields…
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Gallery of European & American Art of the 19th & 20th Centuries
The Pushkin Fine Arts Museum is expanding and the first step was to move its excellent collection of 19th- and 20th-century European art next door into its own gallery. A collective ticket to both museums, as well as the Museum of Private Collections, is available for adults/students for R500/300.
The new gallery contains a famed assemblage of French Impressionist works, based on the collection of two well-known Moscow art patrons, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. It includes representative paintings by Degas, Manet, Renoir and Pisarro, with an entire room dedicated to Monet. Rodin’s sculptures include pieces from the Gates of Hell and the Monument to the Townspeople o…
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Levitan House Museum
Plyos is a tranquil town of wooden houses and hilly streets winding down to the Volga waterfront, halfway between Ivanovo and Kostroma. Though fortified from the 15th century, Plyos’ renown stems from its role as a late-19th-century artists’ retreat. Isaak Levitan, Russia’s most celebrated landscape artist, found inspiration here in the summers of 1888 to 1890. The playwright Anton Chekhov commented that Plyos ‘put a smile in Levitan’s paintings’. The oldest part of town is along the river, as evidenced by the ramparts of the old fort, which date from 1410. The hill is topped by the simple 1699 Assumption Cathedral (Uspensky sobor), one of Levitan’s favourite painting…
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Mikhailovsky Castle (Engineer’s Castle)
A much greater Summer Palace used to stand at the south end of the Summer Garden. But Rastrelli’s fairy-tale wooden creation for Empress Elizabeth was knocked down in the 1790s to make way for the bulky Mikhailovsky Castle. The son of Catherine the Great, Tsar Paul I, was born in the wooden palace and he wanted his own residence on the same spot. He had the current edifice built complete with defensive moat as he (quite rightly) feared assassination. But this erratic, cruel tsar only got 40 days in his new abode before he was suffocated in his bedroom in 1801. The style is a bizarre take on a medieval castle, quite unlike any other building in the city. In 1823 it became …
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Museum of Decorative & Folk Art
Just beyond the Garden Ring, this museum showcases the centuries-old arts and crafts traditions from all around Russia and the former Soviet republics. It includes all the goodies you might find in souvenir shops or at the Izmaylovo Market, but these antique pieces represent the crafts at their most traditional and their most authentic. Of the 40,000 pieces in the collection, you might see painted Khokhloma woodwork from Nizhny Novgorod, including wooden toys and matryoshka dolls; baskets and other household items made from birch bark, a traditional Siberian technique; intricate embroidery and lacework from the north, as well as the ubiquitous Pavlov scarves; and playful …
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Geological Museum
Located in the upper floors of the geology faculty of the university, this huge room contains several kilometres of fossils, rocks and gems – a veritable treasure chest of geological finds. The precious and semiprecious stones will certainly have you gawking at Mother Nature’s handiwork: sparkling amethyst crystals (one from the Altai mountains that is 1.5m long!); huge chunks of malachite from the Urals; and a gorgeous gypsum ‘rose’ from Astrakhan. Also on display are prehistoric rocks and fossils, dinosaur fragments, animal skulls and mammoth tusks. The centrepiece of the museum is a huge map of the Soviet Union made entirely of precious gems. The winner of the Paris Wo…
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Strelka
Among the oldest parts of Vasilevsky Ostrov, this eastern tip is where Peter the Great first wanted his new city's administrative and intellectual centre. In fact, the Strelka became the focus of St Petersburg's maritime trade, symbolised by the colonnaded Customs House (now the Pushkin House).
The two Rostral Columns, archetypal St Petersburg landmarks, are studded with ships' prows and four seated sculptures representing four of Russia's great rivers: the Neva, the Volga, the Dnieper and the Volkhov. These were oil-fired navigation beacons in the 1800s (their gas torches are still lit on some holidays).
The Strelka has one of the best views in the city, with the Peter & …
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Nabokov Museum
This lovely 19th-century town house was the suitably grand childhood home of Vladimir Nabokov, infamous author of Lolita and arguably the most versatile and least classifiable of modern Russian writers. Here Nabokov lived with his wealthy family from his birth in 1899 until the revolution in 1917, when they sensibly left the country. The house features heavily in Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory, in which he refers to it as a ‘paradise lost’. Indeed, he never returned, dying abroad in 1977. There’s actually relatively little to see in the museum itself, save for some charming interiors (don’t miss the gorgeous stained-glass windows in the stairwell, which are not t…
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Alexander Blok House-Museum
This museum occupies the flat where poet Alexander Blok spent the last eight years of his life (1912–20). The revolutionary Blok believed that individualism had caused a decline in society’s ethics, a situation that would only be rectified by a communist revolution. The 4th floor has been preserved much as it was when Blok lived here with his wife Lyubov (daughter of Mendeleev). After touring the simple but historic home, descend to the 2nd floor, where Blok’s mother lived. When the poet fell ill in 1920, his family moved into this apartment where he finally died a year later. Here, a literary exhibition demonstrates the influence of Blok’s work, as well as some original …
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Hermitage Storage Facility
In case you did not see enough stuff at the museum in town, the storage facility of the Hermitage provides a superb reason for dragging yourself out to northern St Petersburg. Inside the state-of-the-art complex you'll be led through a handful of rooms housing but a fraction of the museum's collection. This is not a formal exhibition as such, but the guides are knowledgeable and the examples chosen for display - paintings, furniture, carriages - are wonderful.
The highlight is undoubtedly the gorgeous wool and silk embroidered Turkish ceremonial tent, presented to Catherine the Great by the Sultan Slim III in 1793. Beside it stands an equally impressive modern diplomatic…
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Pushkin Literary Museum
Housed in a beautiful empire-style mansion dating from 1816, this museum is devoted to Russia’s favourite poet’s life and work. Personal effects, family portraits, (mostly) reproductions of notes and handwritten poetry provide insight into the work of the beloved bard. Tours (adult/child costs R120/50) are held daily at 1pm and 3.30pm. The elegant interior re-creates a fancy 19th-century atmosphere, especially the grand ballroom, which is decorated with mirrors, sconces, chandeliers and heavy drapes. Several rooms are dedicated to Pushkin’s specific works, demonstrating the links between his personal life and the poetry he produced. Perhaps the most interesting exhibit is…
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Bulgakov House-Museum
Author of The Master and Margarita and Heart of a Dog, Mikhail Bulgakov was a Soviet-era novelist and playwright who was labelled a counter-revolutionary and censored throughout most of his life. His most celebrated novels were published posthumously, earning him a sort of cult following in the late Soviet period. Bulgakov lived with his third wife Yelena Shilovskaya (the inspiration for Margarita) in a flat on the Garden Ring from 1931 until his death in 1940. Back in the 1990s the empty flat was a hang-out for dissidents and hooligans, who painted graffiti and wrote poetry on the walls. Nowadays, the walls have been whitewashed and the doors locked, but there is a small…
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History, Architecture & Art Museum
Today the kremlin houses the main exhibits of the city's History, Architecture & Art Museum. Forty-minute kremlin tours in English are available from the excursions department (722 511) in the Gavriilovsky Korpus. The museum's history and natural history section, in the same building, ranges from stuffed wildlife to stuff on Stalin's periods of exile in Vologda.
Those with a morbid streak will appreciate the female skeleton from the 2nd century BC and the astounding, Hieronymus Bosch-like anonymous painting from 1721, Strashny Sud (Frightful Trial).
The museum's art section on the east side of the main courtyard includes some astonishing examples of Vologda lace and embro…
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Glinka Museum of Musical Culture
Musicologists will be amazed by this massive collection of musical instruments from all over the world. The museum boasts over 3000 instruments – handcrafted works of art – from the Caucasus to the Far East. Russia is very well represented – a 13th-century gusli (traditional instrument similar to a dulcimer) from Novgorod, skin drums from Yakutia, a balalaika (triangular instrument) by the master Semyon Nalimov – but you can also see such classic pieces as a violin made by Antonio Stradivari. Recordings accompany many of the rarer instruments, allowing visitors to experience their sound. This incredible collection started with a few instruments that were donated by …
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