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A History of Moscow in 13 Dishes

Featured city guides.

What You Should Know Before Travelling to Moscow

Moscow is the city of golden domes, impressive architecture and some of the best museums in Europe. It’s a place which should make its way to every European travel bucket list. Due to years of closed-door policies, many may think it’s not the most visitor-friendly of places. Luckily, that’s not the case. While there are still things to improve on, it is a fun (and safe!) place to see. Here is all the information you need to be well-equipped for your adventurous journey to Moscow.

Brace yourself for a fair bit of commuting.

It might sound like a cliche, but Moscow is very big – and we mean it. An hour-long daily commute is nothing unusual for the locals. As a tourist, you will most likely be much closer to the city centre than an average Muscovite, but since many of the tourist attractions are dispersed across the city, commuting will nonetheless take up a large portion of your day. Luckily, Moscow’s public transport is excellent: Just about any point in the city centre is accessible by metro , and if you prefer on-land transport, there definitely is a tram or bus route to suit your needs. Public transport is the most effective and reliable way to travel around the city, but planning is the key.

Forget Google and download these useful apps

Yandex Transport is yet another of Moscow’s logistics essentials. It not only contains a detailed plan of the city, it also has information on all of the bus routes and gives you the real-life location of all the buses currently en route.

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Remember to have your passport with you

Russians love paperwork. An official document can go a long way in Russia. This also means that you need your passport to do anything even remotely official: Exchange money, buy a train ticket, sometimes even get into a museum. The police officers in the metro stations also have a habit of asking random passengers to show their IDs, so it’s better to always have it on you. If you’re uncomfortable carrying your passport around, you can make a photocopy of the photo page ahead of time, it should be enough in most cases.

If you want to see Lenin’s corpse, plan ahead

One of Moscow’s curiosities is Lenin’s Mausoleum. It is currently run mostly by volunteers and a visit there is free, but the mausoleum is only open on some days of the week at very specific times. Make sure to double-check the opening times here before going, and make sure to be there early – on some days, the queue is very long.

Make Kremlin a day-trip

The Kremlin is Moscow’s ultimate must-see, and rightly so: It is an incredible historical monument full of treasures you can only find there. When it comes to visiting the Kremlin, there are a few different options available. Make sure to read about all the different ticket combinations ahead of time and to show up early – the queues can get rather long and certain places in the Kremlin only let visitors in at specific hours. Do visit the Kremlin though; it is most certainly worth seeing.

There’s Wi-Fi everywhere

Free Wi-Fi is omnipresent in Moscow. Any bar, cafe or restaurant will almost certainly have it. Free Wi-Fi is also available in the metro. You don’t need to worry about the cell data (which can get really pricey in Russia if you’re using a foreign phone number). As long as your battery is charged, you can find your way or contact your family from almost anywhere.

Moscow is just the beginning!

Moscow is big and beautiful and very much worth seeing; it is also far from everything to see in this part of Russia. Moscow is surrounded by beautiful, very old towns which have witnessed the entire history of the country. They are collectively called ‘the golden circle’. There are tours available to some of the towns individually or to all of them at once. Depending on the route, the tours can take any time between a day and a week. If you have any time to spare, such a trip is a great step toward a fuller understanding of Russia.

KEEN TO EXPLORE THE WORLD?

Connect with like-minded people on our premium trips curated by local insiders and with care for the world

Since you are here, we would like to share our vision for the future of travel - and the direction Culture Trip is moving in.

Culture Trip launched in 2011 with a simple yet passionate mission: to inspire people to go beyond their boundaries and experience what makes a place, its people and its culture special and meaningful — and this is still in our DNA today. We are proud that, for more than a decade, millions like you have trusted our award-winning recommendations by people who deeply understand what makes certain places and communities so special.

Increasingly we believe the world needs more meaningful, real-life connections between curious travellers keen to explore the world in a more responsible way. That is why we have intensively curated a collection of premium small-group trips as an invitation to meet and connect with new, like-minded people for once-in-a-lifetime experiences in three categories: Culture Trips, Rail Trips and Private Trips. Our Trips are suitable for both solo travelers, couples and friends who want to explore the world together.

Culture Trips are deeply immersive 5 to 16 days itineraries, that combine authentic local experiences, exciting activities and 4-5* accommodation to look forward to at the end of each day. Our Rail Trips are our most planet-friendly itineraries that invite you to take the scenic route, relax whilst getting under the skin of a destination. Our Private Trips are fully tailored itineraries, curated by our Travel Experts specifically for you, your friends or your family.

We know that many of you worry about the environmental impact of travel and are looking for ways of expanding horizons in ways that do minimal harm - and may even bring benefits. We are committed to go as far as possible in curating our trips with care for the planet. That is why all of our trips are flightless in destination, fully carbon offset - and we have ambitious plans to be net zero in the very near future.

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Alice Randall Made Country History. Black Women Are Helping Tell Hers.

In “My Black Country,” the musician and author who cracked a Nashville color barrier is telling her story — and hearing her songs reimagined.

By Grayson Haver Currin

Reporting from Nashville

The country singer Rissi Palmer could not understand why Alice Randall was emailing her.

By fall 2020, when Palmer received the message, Randall was a Nashville institution, not only the first Black woman to write a chart-topping country hit but also a novelist whose books undermined entrenched racial hierarchies. Palmer herself was no slouch: “ Country Girl ,” her 2007 anthem of rural camaraderie, had been the first song by a Black woman to infiltrate country’s charts in two decades. She had just started “Color Me Country,” a podcast exploring the genre’s nonwhite roots and branches.

But 11 years earlier, Palmer had fled Nashville, hamstrung by contract disputes, with “my tail between my legs,” she recalled recently in a video interview from her North Carolina kitchen.

Randall, however, was very interested in Palmer — and her history. Working as a writer-in-residence at Vanderbilt University, she had urged the school’s Heard Libraries to acquire Palmer’s archives: notebooks, sketches, a dress worn during her Grand Ole Opry debut.

“I’ve been in this business since I was 19. I made the charts when I was 26. I’ve had these items the whole time,” said Palmer, 42. “No one has ever called me and said they had value, until Alice. There are more important people, but she saw value in me.”

Randall also saw something of herself — and a glimpse of gradual progress — in Palmer. After breaking a Nashville color barrier when her treatise about being an overworked mother, “XXX’s and OOO’s (An American Girl),” became a 1994 hit for Trisha Yearwood, Randall quit writing country songs.

“My songs were only going to work if I sang them, or if we found the Black woman who could,” Randall said on a recent afternoon over heaping meat-and-three plates at Arnold’s, a Nashville mainstay that opened in 1982, a year before she arrived. Every few minutes, someone else — a former congressperson, a prominent downtown investor, the restaurant’s scion — stopped to shake hands. “But I didn’t think we would find the star, and my characters were being erased.”

Just as one of the world’s biggest stars, Beyoncé, makes her own long-gestating country turn , Randall’s people have been restored on a new compilation, “My Black Country,” which arrives April 12. A dozen Black women — Palmer , Rhiannon Giddens , Allison Russell — reimagine Randall’s best-known songs in their own voices, for their own lives. In a corresponding memoir, releasing April 9, Randall weaves her country career into a corrective genre history that reorients its Black past, present and future.

“I had never heard my own songs sound in real life like they sounded in my imagination,” Randall, 64, said of the album’s sessions, grinning broadly behind tears. “That was a Sankofa moment, a Juneteenth moment — good news at long last.”

For years, Randall’s daughter, the writer and scholar Caroline Randall Williams, had encouraged her mother to publish a memoir. She had lived, after all, a remarkable life: Born in Detroit to parents who fled penury and racism in Alabama and Ohio, Randall witnessed the rise of Motown. Her father, a silk-suited tough guy who ran a laundromat and reportedly knew the Bible and “Macbeth” by heart, was a titan of the city’s Black community, a friend of Anna Gordy who dazzled his daughter with her feats.

Randall rubbed childhood elbows with the prodigal Stevie Wonder and sparkled stage-side in a homemade dress when the Supremes debuted at the Copacabana. After her parents split, her mother moved her to Washington, D.C., where Randall was “a Black girl in an overgrown Southern town,” she writes, attending private school alongside white bohemians. She and her mother later moved in with a man on a farm outside of the city. Soon after Randall started high school, he raped her. A John Prine cassette helped saved her life, allowing her to pour out “some of everything haunting me into it.” She escaped to Harvard. And that was all before she moved to Nashville, started a publishing company, met her first husband through working on the set of a Johnny Cash music video, became a mother and wrote best-selling novels.

“Most of her life was in those novels, turned around and sideways,” Williams said, framed by books in the sprawling home her mother bought two decades ago, where Williams is raising her own family. “But she is an intensely discreet person who shares what she’s willing to share, not one word more.”

In 2018, though, Randall was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. The time to share a more direct, personal history of her primary scenes — Detroit, in the 2020 novel “Black Bottom Saints,” and Nashville, in “My Black Country”— had come. “I asked myself, ‘If I have five years left to live, what am I going to do?’” Randall said. “I’m going to love this family, take trips with my friends and tell these two stories.”

Randall’s Nashville was one of perseverance, back doors and unlikely allies. Soon after she arrived, the only Black woman she saw in the music licensing agency Ascap’s massive Music Row headquarters was Shirley Washington, who greeted visitors with a coffee or Coca-Cola. She sneaked Randall into the boardroom to write and gave her intel about who to meet and where to shop. The self-portrait that emerges is one of relentless work: booze-free nights studying other songwriters at the Bluebird Cafe, building a company to pitch songs to stars, a writing practice that bordered on the sacred.

“When I first got here, I would wake up in the middle of the night, write down all the songs on the radio and study them. There was no way I could afford them all,” Randall said. “I didn’t have any musical skills, so I had to use my literary analysis. I had to find my authority.”

Randall has always been a world-builder. At age 3, in Detroit, her first song demanded her father not leave her for the bar (he took her). “My Black Country,” both the album and the book, suggests a widening path Randall helped create. Its producer, Ebonie Smith, studied the recorded versions of Randall’s songs, which were often Trojan horses for getting progressive ideas onto country radio, and encouraged the performers to find their own ways into the texts. Adia Victoria ’s “Went for a Ride,” an entendre-rich tale of a beautiful Black cowboy, ripples with exquisite ache. Williams transforms “XXX’s and OOO’s,” the hit written in part about her, into a spoken-word taunt.

In the book, Randall posits Los Angeles as the capital of Black country and widens the genre’s lens to encompass Swamp Dogg and the Pointer Sisters. Most striking, though, is her First Family of Black Country, a lineage she argues is anchored by the early Grand Ole Opry star DeFord Bailey and the pianist and songwriter Lil Hardin Armstrong, extending through Ray Charles and Charley Pride to the likes of Palmer and Lil Nas X. It is a sharp rejoinder to the standard country origin story, where the sound spills from pre-Depression sessions by acts including the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers in Bristol, Tenn .

“I was injured by that mythology, and I am interested in creating counter-narratives,” Randall said. She bounded among topics — Barbie dolls, transcontinental train travel, the influence of Donna Summer on Dolly Parton and drag culture — before gliding back toward this unifying thesis. “It took 41 years of doing this and teaching to understand that if you tell people just that much, it transforms them. You can make a different First Family. I want to start the discussion.”

Now, of course, there is another branch on the family tree: Beyoncé. Randall long heard rumors about the star’s latest direction, and watching the Super Bowl with friends when news of “Cowboy Carter” broke, they shared an epiphany: “Oh my God. This changes your life.” For decades, Randall had waved the banner of Black women in country; on the eve of a project that reintroduced her Black country characters, she now had backup.

The next day, Randall listened through laptop speakers and transcribed Beyoncé’s new songs. She made notes: the singing cowboy tradition, looking for God, the conceptual underpinnings of “sweet redemption.”

“I typed the lyrics to study because that’s what I did when I got here,” she said, waving the annotated sheets and smiling. “I had to bring my authority.”

Explore the World of Country Music

Zach Bryan’s country-rock-adjacent rumbles have made him one of music’s most popular new stars . On the first night of his arena tour, he showcased his bond with the fans that brought him there.

A fan asked his Oklahoma radio station to play a new Beyoncé song. The request was rejected, reigniting a debate about the exclusion of Black musicians from country music .

Jelly Roll, one of 2023’s surprise success stories in the music industry, has become known as much for emotional openness as for hit songs .

CMAT, whose real name is Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, combines country music’s enduring themes of heartbreak and self-destruction with camp humor and a distinctly Irish sense of the absurd .

The rising singer Morgan Wade is disciplined about her sobriety, fitness and songwriting. But a bond with the reality-TV star Kyle Richards has thrust her into an uncontrollable world of fame .