Russia

Travel advice: the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office currently advises against all travel to Russia. We will only confirm arrangements here when official advice allows, so please check the current FCDO travel advice before planning.

Russia stretches across eleven time zones, but for most European visitors it has meant its two great cities. Moscow is the political and historic centre, built around the Kremlin, Red Square and the onion domes of St Basil's Cathedral. Its metro stations, decorated with chandeliers, marble and mosaics, are works of art in their own right. St Petersburg, founded by Peter the Great in 1703 as a window on Europe, is a city of canals, pastel palaces and wide avenues, with the Hermitage collection in the Winter Palace and the summer palaces at Peterhof and Pushkin outside town.

Russian cuisine is built for long winters: borscht and shchi soups, pelmeni dumplings, blini with sour cream or caviar, and beef stroganoff. Tea is drunk at all hours, and the culture of ballet, classical music and literature runs deep in both cities. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky and the Bolshoi and Mariinsky theatres are part of the reason so many travellers once came. Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery and Pushkin Museum and the canals and bridges of St Petersburg at night, raised to let ships pass during the summer, are among the classic sights.

Our catalogue includes a Russian Federation rail tour linking Moscow and St Petersburg. It is listed for reference only while the travel advice above applies, and we would be glad to discuss alternative journeys, for example to the Baltic states or Finland, in the meantime. Helsinki, Tallinn and Riga each share part of this northern history and architecture, and all three are easy to combine by ferry or with private transfers.