Read War and Peace

A married woman, a cavalry officer and a train; "all happy families are alike".

A successful judge falls ill and works out, over three months of dying, that he lived the whole thing wrong.

Explore the Winter Palace and its 3 million artworks

Peter the Great’s "Russian Versailles" with its cascade of gilded fountains.

The Church on the Blood where the Romanovs died, on the border of Europe and Asia in the Urals.

Carved wooden houses of the Siberian merchants and Decembrist exiles, an hour from Lake Baikal.

Three rooms of pine, built in three days in 1703; the first building in St Petersburg.

A White Sea island fortress-monastery that became the first camp of the Gulag.