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Coverage / Russia

Russia

Eastern Europe

The largest country on earth, spanning eleven time zones from the Baltic to the Pacific. Its draws range from the imperial museums and theatres of St Petersburg and Moscow to the brown bears and volcanoes of Kamchatka and the frozen depth of Lake Baikal. Russia is under a US State Department Level 4 Do Not Travel advisory; the experiences listed here are real and operating, and each carries that advisory.

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What you can do in Russia

Museums & Galleries

St PetersburgJan Feb May Jun Jul Sep DecSt Petersburg is where you go to stand inside the collection of the Russian tsars. The State Hermitage occupies the Winter Palace and four adjoining buildings on the Neva, and its holdings run to some three million items, from Scythian gold to a room of Rembrandts and two Leonardo Madonnas. You can spend a full day and see a fraction of it. The building itself is the point as much as the paintings: the Jordan Staircase, the malachite hall, the throne rooms of an empire, all restored after the siege. The city around it is a museum in the open air, laid out on the Neva delta as a European capital in the early eighteenth century, and the short white-night summer keeps the galleries and embankments light past midnight. Serious visitors pair the Hermitage with the Russian Museum for Russian art and a canal walk past the Church of the Spilled Blood. It is unhurried, indoor culture at the highest level, which also makes it one of the few things worth the trouble in a country under a Do Not Travel advisory.

Photography Expeditions

Lake BaikalFeb MarFor a few weeks in late winter Lake Baikal turns into the most photogenic ice on earth. The lake freezes so clear that you can see straight down into the black water, and pressure ridges shove slabs of turquoise ice into stacks along the shore. Around Olkhon Island and the small settlement of Listvyanka, photographers work the transparent ice, the methane bubbles frozen in columns, the ice caves hung with icicles at Cape Khoboy, and the blue grottoes on the rocky capes. The light is long and low at that latitude, and the frozen surface becomes a road, so a guided vehicle can reach compositions far from any shore. Olkhon adds a cultural layer, as the heart of Buryat shamanism, with Shaman Rock at Khuzhir the classic frame. This is a specialist cold-weather shoot rather than a casual visit: temperatures sit well below freezing, and the ice only sets hard enough to drive on from about mid-February to late March. Away from the ice, the same lake in summer is a hiking and boat destination, but the winter ice is the reason serious photographers make the trip to Siberia.

Wildlife Safaris

KamchatkaJul Aug SepKamchatka is one of the great brown bear grounds on the planet, and Kuril Lake in the south is where you go to see them. In the summer salmon run, dozens of bears fish the shallows and river mouths within sight of a guarded viewing platform, and the surrounding reserve holds Steller's sea eagles overhead and the odd fox at the treeline. This is wild, unprovisioned bear watching in a caldera lake, not a fenced park. Getting there is part of it: the lake sits inside the South Kamchatka Sanctuary with no road access, so you fly in by helicopter over steaming volcanoes and the ash fields of past eruptions. Most trips build the bears into a longer expedition that climbs an active volcano such as Avachinsky or Mutnovsky and, on the coast, runs a boat out to look for orca and Steller sea lions in Avacha Bay. It is a demanding, weather-dependent corner of the Russian Far East, and the payoff is close time with the marquee species: brown bear, orca, sea eagle. The season is short, roughly July to September, when the snow is off the passes and the salmon are in.

Witness / Attend

MoscowJan Feb Mar Apr May Oct Nov DecThe Bolshoi is the reason to sit in a Moscow audience. The company traces its founding to 1776, and the columned theatre on Theatre Square, rebuilt after fire and fully restored in 2011, is one of the grand stages of world ballet and opera. Seeing Swan Lake or a Tchaikovsky opera in the historic hall, under the chandelier and the tiers of red and gold, is a different experience from any touring production. The repertoire runs the Russian classical canon the company created, from Petipa ballets to Boris Godunov, on both the Historic Stage and the smaller New Stage. Tickets are sold in rubles at the theatre box office and through the official site, and the season runs from autumn to summer with a full winter programme. Around it, Theatre Square, the Kremlin museums and Red Square make the centre a dense cultural day. This is an ongoing performance institution rather than a one-off festival, so you choose a date from the published playbill. It sits, like everything in the country, under a Do Not Travel advisory, and the practical barriers to attending from abroad are real.

Best months at a glance

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Museums
Photography
Wildlife Safaris
Witness / Attend