Nizhny Novgorod

Russia's fifth-largest city – sometimes referred to as the country's 'third capital' – would likely go unnoticed by most travellers if not for its arresting hilltop kremlin, overlooking the confluence of two wide rivers: the Volga and Oka. This is the locale where merchant Kuzma Minin and Count Dmitry Pozharsky (men commemorated in a monument in front of Moscow's St Basil’s Cathedral) rallied a popular army to repel the Polish intervention in 1612. It's also the city (then known as 'Gorky') where late Soviet scientist-dissident Andrei Sakharov was banished in the 1980s as punishment for opposing the Soviet Union's 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.