Moscow has lacked a network of official tourist offices since the demise of the Soviet era. Intourist, formerly the government tourist agency, can be useful and has offices in the Kosmos Hotel at 150 Prospekt Mira (tel. 495/753-0003; www.intourist.ru) and closer to downtown at 11 Stoleshnikov Pereulok (tel. 495/234-9509). Hotel concierges and tour desks are likely to have as much information as Intourist, or more. Most hotels and many newspaper kiosks in the center of town sell maps in English (ask for a karta na angliiskom, pronounced "kar-ta na ahn-glees-kom"). Pick up a copy of the free English-language daily The Moscow Times for weather, exchange rates, entertainment listings, and more. The newspaper is not sold at newsstands, but most of the hotels (particularly the high-end ones) carry copies.
Map Confusion -- Beware of maps and guidebooks printed before the mid-1990s, which may include the Soviet-era names of many streets and metro stations instead of the new ones.
Stalin's Seven Sisters
By the end of your first day in Moscow, you're bound to have noticed at least one of these sky-scraping, turreted castles to Communism. Seven of them cut into the city skyline, immediately differentiating the city from any other in the world. Initiated under Stalin, Moscow's "Seven Sisters" emerged in the 1950s and came to embody an architectural style dubbed "Stalin Gothic" that was emulated in buildings throughout the Communist world.
The buildings are immediately recognizable by their tapered towers, glass spires, and solid stone enormity. Architecturally, they combine features of Russian 17th-century churches, Western Gothic cathedrals, and American skyscrapers of the 1930s. Many were built by German prisoners of war. The grandest example is the main building of Moscow State University, lording over the city from the peak of Sparrow Hills. Containing 32km (20 miles) of corridors, this 5,000-room building is best viewed at a distance, ideally from the lookout platform above the Moscow River. Another impressive sister is the Kotelnicheskaya apartment building (1 Kotelnicheskaya Naberezhnaya), which housed the Communist elite in decades past and now includes some of the city's priciest real estate, even if its infrastructure is in need of an upgrade. A second apartment building, Krasnaya Presnya Tower at Kudrinskaya Square, once housed Soviet aviation elite. Two more of the Stalin Gothic buildings are hotels (Hotel Ukraina, 2/1 Kutuzovsky Prospekt; and Hotel Leningradskaya, near the Leningradsky Train Station at 21/40 Kalanchevskaya Ulitsa). The remaining two are government buildings (the Foreign Ministry on Smolenskaya Sq., and the Transport Ministry on the Garden Ring Rd. at Krasniye Vorota). Even modern developers have caught the Stalin Gothic bug: The biggest real estate project in recent years is the Triumph Palace apartment complex in northwest Moscow, one of Europe's tallest structures -- you're sure to spot it on your way in from the airport.
The biggest castle of all -- and the one that served as a boilerplate for the others -- never reached fruition. The Palace of Soviets was intended to be the most elaborate ode to Communist power that Stalin could conceive, planned for the site of the razed Christ the Savior Cathedral. The plans were sabotaged by infighting and later by World War II, and the site became a public swimming pool, and remained so until the end of the Soviet era. Today a new cathedral stands on the site, one so grandiose that some call it an Orthodox version of the Palace of Soviets. Original designs of the Palace of Soviets are among the exhibits at Shchusev Museum of Architecture at 5/25 Vozdvizhenka Ulitsa (tel. 495/291-2109; Metro: Biblioteka Imeni Lenina; admission $3/£1.50). It's open Tuesday to Friday from 11am to 7pm, Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 6pm.
