Moscow

Moscow, Russia

Saint Basil's Cathedral and the Kremlin wall glowing in warm sunset light on Red Square in Moscow.

Moscow holds the Kremlin, Red Square and a river city of about 13.3 million, still the political heart of Russia.

The place

Moscow is Russia's seat of government and the city with the most residents, a federal city spread along the Moskva in the middle of the country. Inside the municipal boundary live about 13.3 million people, and the high point, Teplostan Upland, stands 255 metres above sea level.

The historic core is a compact bend of the river. The Kremlin, a walled citadel, occupies a rise above the water, with Red Square immediately outside its eastern wall. Saint Basil's Cathedral closes the square's southern end in a cluster of patterned onion domes. Around that core, broad rings of boulevards and a dense metro carry the city outward into residential districts, industrial belts and new office clusters. Moscow-City, the international business centre, is a group of glass towers west of the centre, visible from the river and from the older skyline.

Green space is part of the everyday map. Gorky Park occupies a long bend of the Moskva, mixing walking paths with courts for sport and platforms for outdoor shows, and tree-lined embankments continue the walk in both directions. In winter the river freezes at the edges and the parks turn to snow; in summer the same banks fill with walkers. The scale is the thing a first-time visitor misjudges: a single errand can cross a distance that would be a whole town elsewhere, and the metro, rather than the street, is how most people stitch the city together.

Moscow has been a capital, lost that role, and taken it back. It remains the home of national government and a centre of theatre, galleries and Orthodox worship, while the business towers show a city that also runs on offices, universities and trade.

Its story

Moscow's ground was lived on long before a chronicle gave it a name. Finds tied to the Lyalovo culture point to Neolithic hunter-gatherers, and in the tenth century two Slavic peoples, the Vyatichi and the Krivichi, were on this part of the river. The Vyatichi are reckoned to have formed much of the population the later town grew out of.

A chronicle of the mid twelfth century is the first surviving mention, when the settlement was a minor border town of Rostov-Suzdal, one of the principalities left after Kievan Rus broke apart. Yuri Dolgorukiy and Sviatoslav Olgovich are recorded meeting there. Weight gathered through the rest of that century: a gorod, a fortified town, took shape on the hill, and the earliest Kremlin walls belong to the same period. Horde troops later destroyed the town in the same sweep that ruined Ryazan, and the timber city had to be raised again.

Daniel, Alexander Nevsky's youngest son, was the earliest prince to rule Moscow in his own right. His successors in the Grand Principality pulled neighbouring lands inward across the fifteenth century until the city sat at the middle of one Russian state. Once the realm took the title of tsardom in the sixteenth century, government and trade still ran through Moscow for a long stretch of years. Peter the Great then planted a new capital on the Baltic, Saint Petersburg, early in the eighteenth century, and Moscow spent the imperial era in second place, still full of merchants, churches and old families. The Duchy of Moscow, the Grand Principality, the Tsardom, the Russian Empire and, much later, the Soviet Union are the states that, in turn, ruled from or through this bend of the river.

What to see

Culture

Moscow's cultural life runs on galleries, a large theatre circuit and the Orthodox calendar, often in the same neighbourhood. Russian painting is the Tretyakov Gallery's brief. Pavel Tretyakov assembled it as a private holding and then gave it to the city. Icons and canvases from before the revolution, Andrei Rublev among the icon painters and Ilya Repin among the later ones, hang mainly in the older halls across the river; Soviet and newer work sits in the twentieth-century building, and the years around the revolution are where the two collections meet. The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts looks outward instead, lining up ancient cultures with European pictures from later centuries, antiquities and modern painting under a single roof.

Worship and looking at art sit side by side. Several Kremlin churches, and the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, still hold services, and a liturgy can take a chapel out of the tourist circuit. The informal city is Gorky Park and the Moskva embankments: dancing, games and a Sunday crowd when the weather is kind.

In an active church, cover your shoulders and knees, take off a hat if you are a man, and keep a headscarf to hand if you are a woman.

What to wear

Moscow dresses for a long winter, and the old wardrobe did too. Festive dress centres on the sarafan, a long pinafore, over a rubakha, a full-sleeved linen or cotton shirt, with embroidery at collar, cuffs and hem. Women covered their hair; the kokoshnik, a stiff crescent headdress, was for ceremonies and is now mostly stage and festival wear. Linen and wool were everyday textiles, silk and velvet the court ones. Sheepskin, felt valenki and a fur hat handled the deep cold.

Weekday Moscow looks like any large European business city: dark coats, tailored jackets, jeans, trainers and heavy winter boots, with sharper clothes around Theatre Square at night. Folk costume appears for performances, holidays and wedding photographs, not on the metro.

Visitors need a warm coat, hat, gloves and waterproof boots in the cold months, and lighter layers in July and August, when embankments are hot by day and cool at night. For churches, cover shoulders and knees, take shoes that slip off easily, and bring a scarf for women. Cobbles, metro stairs and slush punish thin soles in every season.

What to eat

Plan it

Best time. July and August suit walking in Moscow: August is the hottest month, and July the wettest and the most comfortable. Winter is long, cold and dark, better for museums and theatres than for river paths. Summer is warm and the Moskva parks get busy. Check a forecast before you book.

How long. 4–5

Getting there. Fly into Sheremetyevo and take the Aeroexpress to Belorussky railway terminal, or into Domodedovo and on to Paveletsky, then the metro into central Moscow. Confirm visa rules nationally, and city practicalities at https://visit-moscow-city.ru/.

Budget. mid

Tips

Etiquette

Nearby

Sources