The 10 Best Travel Experiences in Russia

Lake Baikal holds a fifth of the planet's unfrozen fresh water and is both the world's deepest and oldest lake, ringed by taiga forest and mountains in Siberia.

Its clarity lets you see many metres down in summer, while in winter the surface freezes into clear blue ice sheets thick enough to drive on.

Most visitors base themselves in Listvyanka or on Olkhon Island to explore the shoreline and villages.

The State Hermitage occupies the Winter Palace and four adjoining buildings on Palace Square, holding one of the world's largest art collections — over three million objects spanning Rembrandt, da Vinci and Impressionist masterpieces inside gilded Romanov staterooms.

A full circuit covers roughly 20 kilometres of galleries, so most visitors pick a handful of wings rather than attempt everything in one visit.

Peter the Great's answer to Versailles on the Gulf of Finland, where a Grand Cascade of 64 fountains and 200 gilded statues drops from the palace terrace into a canal running out to the sea.

The whole system is gravity fed and uses no pumps at all.

The fountains are switched on with ceremony each spring and shut off in October.

The iconic multicoloured onion domes of St Basil's Cathedral have made it one of the most recognisable buildings in the world.

Built by Ivan the Terrible between 1555 and 1561, the cathedral sits at the southern end of Red Square and is now a museum.

The world's longest railway line runs just under 9,300km from Moscow to Vladivostok, crossing seven time zones and skirting Lake Baikal, the world's deepest lake, over a journey that can take a full week without stopovers.

Most travellers break the trip into stages, stopping in cities like Irkutsk and Ulan-Ude before rejoining a later train.

Red Square is Moscow's central plaza, framed by the Kremlin's fortified walls, the red-brick towers of the State Historical Museum, the glass-roofed GUM arcade and Lenin's Mausoleum.

It has staged state parades, revolutions and coronations for over five centuries and remains the city's default gathering point — a vast cobbled space distinct from the single view of St Basil's Cathedral at its southern end.

Kizhi Pogost is an open-air ensemble of wooden churches on a small island in Lake Onega, built with traditional log construction and no iron nails in the original structure.

The 22-domed Church of the Transfiguration, raised in 1714, is the centrepiece of a wider museum-reserve of relocated wooden chapels, houses and windmills from across Karelia.

It's reachable only by boat in summer or over ice in winter, keeping it genuinely quiet.

Europe's highest point is a dormant twin-peaked volcano in the Caucasus, its snow-capped summit visible from the surrounding valleys long before you arrive.

Cable cars now climb much of the lower mountain, opening sweeping glacier views to more than just summit climbers.

The upper slopes remain a serious high-altitude route, glaciated and genuinely hazardous in poor weather.

A small thermally-warmed lake in the Altai Mountains, where underground springs stir blue clay into constantly shifting turquoise swirls against a backdrop of pine forest.

Never freezes even in the Siberian winter, staying an otherworldly warm turquoise year-round.

Suzdal is a Golden Ring town that never industrialised, leaving a skyline of onion domes and log houses largely unchanged since the 18th century.

Its walled kremlin, the Nativity Cathedral's blue star-studded domes and a wooden Church of St Nicholas moved here from another village sit alongside a working monastery and open-air museum.

No building rises above two storeys, so the whole town reads as one continuous historic scene.