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Russia

13 city guides · Europe

Cities in Russia (13)

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Kazan

Kazan is the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan — a region within the Russian Federation with its own parliament, constitution, and Tatar language — 1.3 million people at the confluence of the Volga and Kazanka rivers, 800km east of Moscow. Kazan is the historical capital of the Kazan Khanate (the successor state to the Golden Horde, established 1438), which was conquered by Ivan the Terrible in 1552 (the Siege of Kazan — one of the most consequential military events in Russian history, which opened the Volga basin and the road to Siberia to Russian expansion). The Kazan Kremlin (a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000) is unique in Russia: the only kremlin that contains both a mosque (the Qolşärif Mosque — a spectacular 6-domed Islamic building completed 2005 on the site of the original Qolşärif Mosque destroyed in 1552) and an Eastern Orthodox cathedral (the Annunciation Cathedral, built 1556 by Ivan the Terrible immediately after the conquest) within the same fortress walls. Kazan's population is approximately 50% Tatar (a Turkic Muslim people with their own language (Tatar, closely related to Bashkir, and mutually intelligible with Uzbek), culture, and cuisine) and 50% Russian — creating a city of genuine cultural duality rather than simple assimilation. The Kazan Federal University (founded 1804) is one of the oldest in Russia: Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Lenin were both students (Tolstoy left without graduating; Lenin was expelled for political activities). Best months: May–September.

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Krasnodar

Krasnodar is the capital of Krasnodar Krai — a city of 900,000 people in the Kuban steppe of southern Russia, 120km from the Black Sea and 160km from the Caucasus Mountains. Krasnodar was founded in 1793 as Yekaterinodar (Ekaterinodár — 'Catherine's Gift') by the Black Sea Cossacks (Чорноморські козаки — the Zaporozhian Cossacks who were resettled to the Kuban steppe by Catherine the Great after the dissolution of the Zaporozhian Sich in 1775, to serve as border defenders against the Ottoman Empire and the Caucasian peoples); renamed Krasnodar ('Red Gift') in 1920 by the Bolsheviks. Krasnodar Krai is the most agriculturally productive region in Russia: the chernozem (black earth — the world's most fertile soil type, with an organic matter content of 4–12%, compared to 1–3% for most agricultural soils) of the Kuban steppe produces approximately 10 million tonnes of grain per year (primarily wheat, the most productive wheat region in Russia — often called the 'Breadbasket of Russia') and the majority of Russia's sunflower seed (for sunflower oil), sugar beet, and wine grapes. The Krasnodar wine region (the most important wine-producing area in Russia, centred on the Taman Peninsula and Anapa) produces both indigenous Russian grape varieties and classic European varieties in a Black Sea microclimate comparable to Bordeaux. The Galitsky Park (one of the finest urban parks built in Russia in the 21st century, opened 2017) and the FC Krasnodar Stadium (one of the most impressive modern football stadiums in Europe) reflect the prosperity of the post-2000 period. Best months: April–October.

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Moscow

Moscow (Moskva) is the largest city in Europe — a metropolis of 13 million people built around the medieval walled fortress of the Kremlin (11th century) on the Moscow River. Russia's political, cultural and economic capital for most of the past 700 years, Moscow was built, burned, rebuilt and transformed repeatedly: by Ivan the Terrible, by Peter the Great (who moved the capital to St. Petersburg), by Napoleon (who burned it in 1812), by Stalin (who demolished half the historic centre and replaced it with the seven Stalinist skyscrapers — the "Seven Sisters"), and by the post-Soviet oligarchy. The result is one of the most layered and contradictory cities in the world: Byzantine gold-domed churches beside Soviet-era monuments, the world's most ornate metro system, and a street food culture built on dumplings and blini.

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Nizhny Novgorod

Nizhny Novgorod is Russia's fifth-largest city, positioned at the confluence of the Oka and Volga rivers — a geographic drama of two great waterways merging below a cliff-top kremlin that has given the city its defining panorama for 800 years. Founded in 1221 by Prince Yuri II as a fortress against Mongol incursion on the Oka-Volga confluence, Nizhny Novgorod grew in the 19th century into one of the wealthiest merchant cities in Russia on the back of the Nizhny Novgorod Fair (Yarmarki) — the largest trade fair in the world for most of the 19th century, where merchants from China, Persia, Central Asia and all of Europe met annually to trade silk, iron, grain, furs and tea in a temporary city of 150,000 traders that rose from May to September each year. The city produced Maxim Gorky (born 1868, who wrote The Lower Depths here in the poverty of the Millionnaya Street slums), Andrei Sakharov (the physicist who was exiled to Gorky, the Soviet name for the city, 1980–1986), and the mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky (who developed non-Euclidean geometry at the Kazan University but whose mathematics statue stands here). Today Nizhny Novgorod is the site of one of Russia's most dramatic architectural urban renewals — the Strelka (confluence point) has been transformed with a stadium from the 2018 FIFA World Cup, restored Art Nouveau buildings along Pokrovskaya Street (the local "Broadway") and a cable car across the Volga to the Mari village of Bor.

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Novosibirsk

Novosibirsk is the largest city in Siberia and the third-largest in Russia — a city that grew from nothing to one million people in just 60 years, founded in 1893 at the crossing point where the Trans-Siberian Railway bridge was built across the Ob River. The speed of growth was extraordinary: in 1893 there was nothing here; by 1926 it had 120,000 people; by 1962 it had one million. This rapid expansion gives Novosibirsk a character unlike any other Russian city — there is almost no pre-Revolutionary architecture because the city barely existed before the Revolution; instead it has extraordinary examples of Soviet constructivist architecture, Stalinist neo-classical buildings and a cultural ambition expressed in the largest opera house in Russia (bigger than the Bolshoi), the Novosibirsk Philharmonic and the academic science city of Akademgorodok (founded 1957 on Khrushchev's initiative as a model Soviet science city 30 km south, now home to Novosibirsk State University and 35 research institutes). The Ob River and the Novosibirsk Reservoir (called the "Ob Sea" — the largest man-made reservoir in Asia, 200 km long) provide the outdoor escape — beach culture in summer, ice fishing and skiing in the Siberian winter that drops to -35°C. Novosibirsk is also the gateway to the Altai Republic (6 hours south), one of the most spectacular mountain wilderness areas in Russia.

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Omsk

Omsk is Russia's sixth-largest city and the second city of Siberia, sitting at the confluence of the Om and Irtysh rivers on the West Siberian Plain — a strategic position that made it the capital of the White Army government of Admiral Kolchak during the Russian Civil War (1918–1920) and, before that, the administrative capital of all of Siberia during the Tsarist period when it was the seat of the Governor-General. The city is most famous in literary history as the place where Fyodor Dostoyevsky spent four years (1850–1854) in a Siberian prison camp following his arrest for attending a revolutionary literary circle — the experiences of hard labour, illness, spiritual transformation and proximity to the peasant and criminal classes in Omsk directly produced Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov; the Omsk Dostoyevsky museum and the reconstructed stockade are among the most visited literary sites in Russia. Omsk is also an oil refinery and industrial centre — the largest oil refinery in Russia is here — but the historic city centre along the Irtysh River (the 1765 Uspenskiy Cathedral, the Tobolsk Gate of the fortress walls, the Kolchak headquarters building and the sprawling Lyubinsky Prospekt) has considerable architecture from the Tsarist period. The Irtysh and Om rivers together with the extensive city parks (Omsk has the most green space per capita of any Russian city) give the city an unexpectedly pleasant outdoor life for one of its industrial reputation.

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Rostov-on-Don

Rostov-on-Don (Rostov-na-Donu) is the largest city in the south of Russia and the administrative centre of Rostov Oblast and the Southern Federal District — a river port city of 1.14 million on the right bank of the Don River, 46 km from where the Don flows into the Sea of Azov. The city was founded as a Russian fortress in 1749 to control the Don estuary and was called "the gateway to the Caucasus" — from Rostov, the road and railway lead south to the Greater Caucasus mountains, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Rostov-on-Don is the economic capital of southern Russia (the agricultural hub of the Don Cossack steppe, with the Don River as the historic divide between Europe and Asia) and the city was significantly rebuilt and expanded in the Soviet era after WWII devastation — German forces occupied the city twice (1941 and 1942), and the second occupation lasted 7 months (July 1942 - February 1943) before being liberated by the Red Army during the Battle of Stalingrad encirclement. The city is known as "Rostov-Papa" (Father Rostov) in the Russian criminal tradition — the city had one of the most significant criminal organisations in the USSR and this reputation persisted into the 1990s. The cultural life centres on the Rostov State Philharmonic Hall (the second-largest concert hall in Russia after the Moscow Grand Hall), the State Museum of Fine Arts (significant holdings of Russian art including the Peredvizhniki movement), and the Gorky Drama Theatre (one of the finest constructivist theatre buildings in Russia, 1935). The Don Cossack heritage (the Cossack villages — stanitsy — in the surrounding Don Steppe) and the cuisine of the Don region (fresh-caught Don fish: sudak/zander, bream, sterlet, carp) are the defining cultural experiences.

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Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg (Sankt-Peterburg) is Russia's most European city — built by Peter the Great (1703) to be Russia's "window to Europe" on the swampy delta of the Neva River, with palaces and canals designed by Italian, French and German architects. The result is the most magnificent 18th-century baroque city in the world: the Winter Palace (the Hermitage), the Peterhof fountains, the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo (with the Amber Room), the Peter and Paul Fortress, and the extraordinary White Nights of summer (when it never truly gets dark). Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich all lived here — and the October Revolution of 1917 that changed the world happened in these streets.

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Sevastopol

⚠️ IMPORTANT TRAVEL ADVISORY: Sevastopol is located in Crimea, which was annexed by Russia from Ukraine in 2014 in a move not recognised by most of the international community, the United Nations, or the European Union. Since February 2022, with the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the region has been a military zone — Sevastopol is the main base of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and a primary military target. Most Western governments (UK, EU, USA, Canada, Australia) advise against all travel to Crimea. The peninsula is under Russian military law, communications are restricted, and the airport and sea crossings are closed to most international visitors. Do not travel to Sevastopol during the current conflict. This guide is provided for historical and cultural reference. Sevastopol (population 500,000 at the 2014 annexation) is a city of extraordinary strategic and military heritage on the southwestern tip of the Crimean Peninsula — its entire history as a modern city is defined by two epic sieges: the Siege of Sevastopol 1854-1855 (the Crimean War siege by British, French, Ottoman and Sardinian forces; the city held for 349 days before the Russian garrison abandoned and destroyed it; the siege gave the world the concept of modern military nursing — Florence Nightingale served at the Selimiye Barracks across the Black Sea in Scutari treating the wounded from Crimea) and the Siege of Sevastopol 1941-1942 (the 250-day German-Romanian siege of the city during WWII; the city was awarded the title "Hero City" in 1965 — one of twelve Soviet cities to receive this designation for extraordinary resistance; the Panorama Museum showing the 1855 assault is the most significant visual memorial to either siege). The ancient Greek colony of Chersonesos (founded 5th century BC — a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2013; the only ancient Greek colony in the Crimea with substantial preserved ruins: the theatre, the agora, the tower and the medieval basilica floors in the stone-paved city; it was here that Prince Vladimir of Rus was baptised in 988, introducing Orthodox Christianity to the Kievan Rus and thus to Russia and Eastern Europe) is located at the edge of Sevastopol city.

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Tula

Tula (population 480,000; 193 km south of Moscow — approximately 2 hours by express train; the administrative centre of the Tula Oblast in central Russia) is one of the most historically significant provincial cities in Russia, renowned for three things it has produced for centuries: samovars (Tula has manufactured the decorative copper and silver samovar — the traditional Russian hot-water urn — since 1778, when the first recorded Tula samovar factory opened; the Tula samovar has been the standard of samovar quality in Russia for 250 years, and the phrase "taking a samovar to Tula" (везти самовар в Тулу) is the Russian equivalent of "carrying coals to Newcastle"), gingerbread (the Tula pryanik — the traditional Russian printed gingerbread (the dough is imprinted with wooden moulds bearing religious icons, the Tula kremlin or the text "Tula pryanik"; the pryanik has been made in Tula since at least the 17th century and is the most famous regional food product in central Russia), and weapons (the Tula Arms Plant, founded by Peter the Great in 1712, is the oldest and most famous armaments manufacturer in Russia — the factory produced the AK-47's ammunition, the PPSh-41 submachine gun used in World War II, the Mosin-Nagant rifle and many of the most significant weapons in Russian military history). The Tula Kremlin (1514-1520 — one of the best-preserved kremlins in Russia outside Moscow; the red-brick fortress with 9 towers and the Cathedral of the Assumption (1764)) anchors the historic city centre. But the defining cultural landmark of the Tula region is Yasnaya Polyana (12 km south of Tula — the estate where Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828, lived for most of his life, wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and is buried under a simple unmarked mound of earth in the birch forest, as he requested): the most important literary estate in Russia and one of the most visited literary pilgrimage sites in Europe.

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Vladimir

Vladimir (population 340,000; the capital of Vladimir Oblast; 190 km northeast of Moscow on the Klyazma River; accessible from Moscow in 1h40 by express train from Moscow Kursky station) is one of the oldest and most historically important cities in Russia — the capital of the Vladimir-Suzdal Principality (the most powerful principality in medieval Rus' from the 1150s to the Mongol invasion of 1238) and the cultural and spiritual centre of Russian civilisation before Moscow rose to prominence. The three UNESCO World Heritage monuments of Vladimir (inscribed 1992 as part of the "White Monuments of Vladimir and Suzdal") represent the finest surviving examples of 12th-century Russian white-stone architecture: the Assumption Cathedral (the Uspensky Sobor — built 1158-1160 by Prince Andrei Bogolyubsky, expanded 1185-1189, with the frescoes by Andrei Rublev (1408), the most important icon painter in Russian history; the cathedral served as the template for the Assumption Cathedral in the Moscow Kremlin); the Cathedral of St. Demetrius (the Dmitrievsky Sobor — built 1193-1197 by Prince Vsevolod the Big Nest; the finest example of white-stone carved decorative sculpture in medieval Russia: the three tiers of carved stone reliefs covering all four external walls with 1,500 carved figures (lions, griffins, centaurs, saints, warriors, plants and animals) in the most elaborate programme of Romanesque-influenced stone carving in Eastern Europe); and the Golden Gate (the Zolotye Vorota — the triumphal arch built 1158-1164 by Andrei Bogolyubsky as the main ceremonial entrance to the city). Suzdal (35 km north of Vladimir — the UNESCO open-air museum city of 10,000 residents with 53 churches, 5 monasteries and the most intact wooden peasant house architecture in Russia) is accessible as a day trip from Vladimir.

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Vladivostok

Vladivostok (population 605,000; the administrative centre of Primorsky Krai (the Maritime Province); the terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway (9,289 km from Moscow); the largest Russian city on the Pacific Ocean; Russia's main Pacific military and commercial port on Peter the Great Bay in the Sea of Japan) is one of the most dramatically situated cities in Russia: the city is built on a series of steep hills (the "sopki") around the Golden Horn Bay (the Zolotoy Rog — the inlet named for the Golden Horn of Constantinople by the Russian naval officer who discovered it in 1859; the same geographical form — a deep sheltered inlet branching off a larger harbour), with the two cable-stayed bridges built for the APEC 2012 summit (the Russky Bridge (2012) — the longest cable-stayed bridge in the world at the time of completion, spanning 1,104 m between the mainland and Russky Island; and the Golden Bridge (2012) — the cable-stayed bridge over the Golden Horn Bay that is the most photographed image of modern Vladivostok) forming the most architecturally dramatic urban skyline in the Russian Far East. Vladivostok was founded as a Russian military post in 1860 and became the main base of the Russian Imperial Pacific Fleet; the city was closed to foreigners for the entire Cold War period (1958-1992) and only opened to international visitors in 1992 (the year after the Soviet collapse) — the 34-year isolation explains both the remarkable preservation of the early 20th-century Imperial Russian architecture (the Art Nouveau railway station, the neo-Gothic churches, the merchant houses on Svetlanskaya Street) and the slight air of a city still adjusting to its rediscovered role as Russia's "window to the Pacific" (the echo of Peter the Great's phrase about St. Petersburg as Russia's "window to Europe"). The Pacific seafood of Vladivostok (the king crab (the Paralithodes camtschaticus — the "kamchatka crab", the largest crab in the world; up to 1.8 m leg span, 9 kg; harvested from the waters of the Sea of Okhotsk and the Bering Sea north of Vladivostok), the scallops, the sea urchin (the Strongylocentrotus nudus — the Pacific sea urchin; the Vladivostok "ikra" (the sea urchin roe) is considered the finest in Russia), the mussels and the various Pacific salmonids) is the primary gastronomic attraction of the Russian Far East.

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Volgograd

Volgograd (population 1,010,000; the administrative centre of Volgograd Oblast; on the western bank of the Volga River at the point where the Volga and the Don rivers are closest (the Volga-Don Canal connecting the two rivers was built in 1952; the point where the canal meets the Volga is 50 km south of the city); the most historically significant city on the Volga) is the city of the Battle of Stalingrad — the largest, most deadly and most strategically decisive battle of the Second World War (and thus, most historians argue, the most important single battle in modern history): the 200-day battle (August 23, 1942 — February 2, 1943) between the German 6th Army (initially 300,000 soldiers, commanded by Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus) and the Soviet forces (the 62nd Army, commanded by General Vasily Chuikov) resulted in the encirclement and capture of the German 6th Army (91,000 survivors, including 24 generals and Field Marshal Paulus — the first German Field Marshal ever to be captured), the death of approximately 1.1 million Soviet soldiers and civilians and approximately 850,000 German and Axis soldiers, the destruction of virtually every building in the city, and the decisive turning point of the war (after Stalingrad the German army never again launched a major strategic offensive in the east). The Mamayev Kurgan memorial complex (the hilltop above the Volga where the most intense fighting of the Battle of Stalingrad occurred; the hill changed hands 14 times in 140 days) with the "Rodina-Mat' Zovyot!" ("The Motherland Calls!") statue (85 m from the base of the pedestal to the tip of the sword — the largest free-standing sculpture in the world from 1967 to 1989, when it was overtaken by the Buddha at Spring Temple in China) is the most important war memorial in Russia and one of the most visited tourist sites in the entire country.

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