60 Fun Facts About Moscow

Moscow stands on the banks of which river, from which the city takes its name?

The name may come from an old Balto-Slavic root meaning 'wet' or 'marshy'; 49 bridges cross the river and its canals inside the city limits.

Under which year is Moscow first mentioned in the chronicles, as a meeting place of Yuri Dolgorukiy?

It was then a minor border town of Rostov-Suzdal; the 800th anniversary was marked with a special medal in 1947.

What is the English demonym for a resident of Moscow?

The city is also one of twelve Soviet Hero Cities and has long carried the epithet 'the third Rome'.

In which year was Ivan the Terrible crowned in Moscow as the first tsar of all Russia?

That same year fires destroyed much of the town, and in 1571 Crimean Tatars burned everything except the Kremlin.

Which ruler moved the Russian capital away from Moscow to a newly built city on the Baltic in 1712?

Moscow's population fell from 200,000 to 130,000 by 1750 before growing tenfold over the rest of the imperial era.

Who moved the capital back to Moscow on 12 March 1918?

Fearing invasion, he brought the government from Petrograd and the Kremlin once again became the seat of power.

What chiefly caused the 1812 Moscow fire during Napoleon's occupation?

Muscovites had been evacuated first; the Grande Armée was forced to retreat and was nearly annihilated by the winter.

In 1937 letters proposed renaming Moscow after Stalin as 'Stalindar' or 'Stalinodar'; what happened?

Stalin's remodelling of the city was less modest, bulldozing landmarks such as the Sukharev Tower for ten-lane avenues.

Moscow hosted the Summer Olympics in which year, amid a boycott led by the United States?

The boycott followed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; the yachting events were held far away in Tallinn.

Which Moscow stadium, the largest in the city, hosted the 2018 FIFA World Cup final?

It also staged the boycotted Olympics and the 2008 Champions League final, and a 2018 cable car links it to Sparrow Hills in five minutes.

Which Moscow club became the first Russian football team to win a UEFA competition, lifting the UEFA Cup?

In Soviet times CSKA represented the Armed Forces and Dinamo the Interior Ministry, so both were lavishly funded.

By 2018, which club had won more Russian Premier League titles than any other?

Spartak took ten of the first 26 Russian titles; its ice-hockey namesake and HC Dynamo Moscow, the second most titled Soviet team, keep the rivalries alive on the rink.

The Moscow Metro, celebrated for its chandeliers and mosaics, opened in which year?

Lazar Kaganovich ran the project, and British engineers from the London Underground who advised on it were later arrested for espionage and deported.

Park Pobedy station, 84 metres below ground, boasts the longest what in Europe?

The system is among the deepest in the world; its stations began as themed art installations, Elektrozavodskaya even honouring a nearby lightbulb factory.

Roughly how many passengers does the Moscow Metro carry each day, making it the busiest in Europe?

That is about 300 million rides a month; a new circle line opened in 2016 to relieve the overloaded Koltsevaya ring.

Moscow's ten mainline railway terminals are known by what Russian word?

Belorussky, Kazansky, Kiyevsky, Kursky, Leningradsky, Paveletsky, Rizhsky, Savyolovsky, Yaroslavsky and Vostochny are each named for the direction they serve.

Which was Moscow's main international airport, expanded with a new terminal for the Olympic Games?

Five commercial airports now serve the city, including Vnukovo and Ostafyevo.

The Moscow Ring Road that opened in 1961 and long marked the city boundary is known by which acronym?

Its 109 km of road ran right around the city; suburbs beyond it were only incorporated in the 1980s.

The word 'kremlin' means what in Russian?

Many Russian cities have one, but Moscow's is so famous that 'the Kremlin' became shorthand for the government itself.

Masters from which country built the Kremlin's present brick walls and towers in 1485–95?

Ivan III wanted a capital worthy of Constantinople; Pietro Antonio Solari designed the wall and towers and Marco Ruffo the prince's palace.

Under which prince did white limestone walls replace the Kremlin's oak palisade?

Those 1366–68 walls withstood a siege by Khan Tokhtamysh; the same prince won the Battle of Kulikovo against the Mongols in 1380.

How many cathedrals stand inside the Kremlin walls?

Along with five palaces, they occupy an irregular triangle of 275,000 square metres bounded by the river, Red Square and the Alexander Garden.

After the Revolution, the golden eagles on the Kremlin towers were replaced by what?

The wall beside Lenin's tomb became the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, where Stalin was reburied in 1961.

The word 'krasnaya' in Red Square's Russian name originally meant what?

The modern word for beautiful, krasivaya, derives from it; before the name spread the square was called Pozhar, the 'burnt-out place'.

Red Square is roughly how long?

It is about 70 metres wide and almost rectangular; a moat once separating it from the Kremlin was paved over in 1812.

Ivan the Terrible built Saint Basil's Cathedral to commemorate the capture of which two cities?

Ivan raised a wooden church after every victory of the Kazan war, and by the end of the Astrakhan campaign the site held a cluster of seven of them.

How many onion domes crown Saint Basil's Cathedral?

Each dome tops a separate church clustered around a central chapel; a tenth chapel was added in 1588 over the grave of Vasily the Blessed himself.

By legend, what did Ivan the Terrible do to Saint Basil's architect so it could never be repeated?

Historians call it a myth: the same builder later worked on the Cathedral of the Annunciation and the walls of the Kazan Kremlin.

What is the official name of the church commonly called Saint Basil's?

It has been run as a division of the State Historical Museum since 1928, though weekly services resumed in 1997.

The tomb on Red Square where Lenin's embalmed body lies was designed by which architect?

He drew on the Step Pyramid and the Tomb of Cyrus; the first wooden version was ready just six days after Lenin died in January 1924.

Whose embalmed body lay beside Lenin's in the mausoleum from 1953 to 1961?

During de-Stalinization the body was moved out and buried by the Kremlin wall; in 1941 Lenin himself had been evacuated to Tyumen in Siberia.

The glass-roofed GUM department store on Red Square was known before the 1920s by what name?

Built in 1890–93 by architect Pomerantsev, its 242-metre facade held some 1,200 shops by 1917.

The Bolshoi Theatre's neoclassical facade appears on which Russian banknote?

Its ballet company, with more than 200 dancers, is by far the largest in the world.

Which Tchaikovsky ballet premiered at the Bolshoi on 4 March 1877?

The company itself dates from 1776, when Catherine II licensed Prince Urusov and English tightrope walker Michael Maddox to stage entertainments.

The word 'Bolshoi' in the theatre's name means what?

Its smaller sibling, the Maly ('Small') Theatre, was also part of the Imperial Theatres before 1917.

The Ostankino Tower, Europe's tallest free-standing structure, was completed in 1967 to mark what?

Nikolai Nikitin's 540-metre concrete needle was the world's tallest structure until 1974 and the first to pass 500 metres.

What never-finished colossal building was meant to replace Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, demolished in 1931?

Its steel frame went up in 1937, was dismantled after the German invasion, and Khrushchev turned the flooded pit into the world's largest open-air swimming pool.

The original Cathedral of Christ the Saviour hosted the 1882 world premiere of which piece?

The rebuilt cathedral, finished in 2000, is 103 metres tall, the third-tallest Orthodox church in the world.

The Stalinist skyscrapers scattered around central Moscow are collectively nicknamed what?

Built 1947–57, they were the tallest buildings in Europe; two more were planned but never built.

Which of the Stalinist high-rises remained the tallest in Europe until 1990?

The 240-metre tower on Sparrow Hills opened when the university moved there in 1953.

The Tretyakov Gallery grew from the private collection of Pavel Tretyakov, who was what?

Near its newer building sits Museon, the 'graveyard of fallen monuments', where toppled Soviet statues were dumped after 1991.

Wikipedia compares the halls of Moscow's Pushkin fine-arts collection to which London institution?

It was co-founded by the father of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva.

The Central Park of Culture and Rest, founded in 1928, is officially named after which writer?

It borders the Neskuchny Garden, Moscow's oldest park and a former imperial residence with a 15,000-seat open-air Green Theater.

Izmaylovsky Park, created in 1931, is how many times the size of New York's Central Park?

Moscow averages 27 square metres of park per person, against 6 in Paris and 8.6 in New York.

Losiny Ostrov, Russia's first national park, borders Sokolniki Park; its name means what?

Nicknamed the 'city taiga', it is wild enough that elk are still seen there.

Sokolniki Park takes its name from what activity once practised there for the tsars?

The falconers' home lay well outside the city in the 18th century; it became a municipal park in 1878.

The lowest temperature ever recorded in Moscow, in January 1940, was approximately what?

The record high is 39 °C, set during the 2010 heatwave; December 2017 was the darkest month on record with six minutes of sunshine.

Moscow Standard Time runs how many hours ahead of UTC?

Daylight saving is no longer observed, and by longitude the average solar noon in Moscow falls at about 12:30.

Before 1917 Moscow was poetically described as the city of how many churches?

The Patriarch of Moscow still resides at the Danilov Monastery, founded by the city's first prince Daniel around 1282.

Which architect designed Moscow's 1922 hyperboloid radio tower on Shabolovka Street?

He also engineered the metal-and-glass vaults over GUM; the 'wicker' tower was judged worn out by the 1950s.

Moscow's population in the 2021 census was roughly how many?

Add 1.8 million registered 'guests' and an estimated million undocumented migrants, and the real figure nears 16 million.

Over which winter was the Battle of Moscow fought?

Sixteen divisions of volunteers were raised among Muscovites, and the city was declared under siege from 20 October 1941.

Moscow holds which climatic distinction among the world's megacities?

It is governed as a federal city and ties with Hong Kong for the second-highest number of billionaires of any city.

Which craftsman built the new walls of 1584-91 that held back the Crimean Tatars in 1591?

An outer earth rampart with 50 towers followed in 1592, backed by a chain of fortified monasteries to the south and east.

Roughly how many standardised prefabricated apartment blocks house most of Moscow's population?

Built to solve the post-war housing crisis, they make Moscow by far the city with the most high-rise buildings.

In which year was Lomonosov Moscow State University founded?

Its 240-metre main building on Sparrow Hills was the tallest building on the continent when completed.

Which earthwork rampart joined Kitay-gorod and Bely Gorod as Moscow's 16th-century outer defences?

Kitay-gorod, the White City and the Earthen City formed three circular defences; the Boulevard and Garden Rings now trace those old walls.

Completed in 2016 in the Moscow City business district, the Federation Tower ranks where among Europe's buildings?

The Moscow International Business Center on the Krasnopresnenskaya embankment was planned from 1992 as Eastern Europe's first such zone.

Moscow's circus on Tsvetnoy Boulevard is named after which famous clown?

The city also has the separate Moscow State Circus, and the Moscow Zoo draws more than 1.2 million visitors a year.

Before its dismantling began in 2014, Moscow's trolleybus network held what distinction?

It ran almost 600 km of wire across 104 routes with 1,740 vehicles before mayor Sergey Sobyanin began replacing it.