58 Fun Facts About Moscow

Moscow stands on the banks of which river?

The Moskva joins the Oka, which in turn feeds the Volga, so water from Moscow's river does reach Russia's most famous one, far downstream.

Which prince hosted an ally at Moscow in 1147, the city's first recorded mention?

Yuri Dolgorukiy's meeting is simply the first time Moscow is named, yet 1147 became the city's traditional founding date and Yuri its founder.

What is a resident of Moscow called in English?

Muscovite comes from Muscovy, the old Western name for the Moscow state; the mica called muscovite was 'Muscovy glass', once used there for window panes.

In Moscow in 1547, the 16-year-old Ivan the Terrible became the first Russian ruler crowned with which title?

Tsar is the Slavic form of Caesar, the Roman emperors' title; until then, Moscow's rulers had been crowned only as grand princes.

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

Peter the Great made St Petersburg his capital while Sweden still claimed the ground it stood on; the war for that coast did not end until 1721.

Whose government moved Russia's capital back to Moscow in March 1918?

Vladimir Lenin's government left Petrograd as German forces threatened the city; the Germans were gone within the year, but the capital stayed in Moscow.

What is thought to have started Moscow's great fire during Napoleon's occupation?

Russian sabotage: arsonists were caught setting fires, and the spreading flames soon drove Napoleon out of the Kremlin to a palace outside the city.

Which novel, set in 1930s Moscow, has the Devil visit the city as the magician Professor Woland?

The Master and Margarita: Bulgakov burned draft pages of the novel at his Moscow flat, just as his hero the Master burns his own manuscript.

The US led a boycott of Moscow's Summer Olympics over the Soviet invasion of which country?

Afghanistan: not one athlete was caught doping at the Moscow Games, yet former KGB officers allege the agency undermined the tests.

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

Luzhniki was demolished and rebuilt for the tournament, but its 1956 facade wall was kept for its architectural value.

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

CSKA came from a goal down to beat Sporting 3–1 in the 2005 final, played at Sporting's own home ground in Lisbon.

Which Western fast-food chain opened its first Soviet restaurant on Moscow's Pushkin Square in 1990?

McDonald's left Russia in 2022, and the Pushkin Square branch reopened under a new Russian owner as Vkusno i tochka, 'Tasty, and that's it'.

Moscow Metro announcers are male inbound and female outbound to help whom?

Sight-impaired riders can tell a train's direction by ear; passengers remember the rule as the boss calling you in to work and the wife calling you home.

When Moscow's Park Pobedy station opened in 2003, it had Europe's longest what?

Escalators: each runs 126 metres with 740 steps, so the ride up to the street takes about three minutes.

The bronze statue 'Compassion' at Moscow's Mendeleyevskaya metro station honours which animal?

A stray dog named Malchik lived at the station until a woman stabbed him in 2001; the public outrage that followed brought in donations for the statue.

Which American pianist won Moscow's first International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958, at the height of the Cold War?

Van Cliburn, a 23-year-old Texan, came home from Moscow to a ticker-tape parade on Broadway.

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

Sheremetyevo was built as a military airbase for the Soviet air force; it only switched to civilian flights in 1959.

During the August 1991 coup attempt, which leader climbed onto a tank outside Moscow's parliament to rally the crowd?

Boris Yeltsin climbed onto a tank and urged the troops not to turn on the people; the coup collapsed within three days, and by December the Soviet Union was gone.

The word 'kremlin' means what in Russian?

A fortress within a city: many old Russian towns have one, but Moscow's grew so famous that 'the Kremlin' became shorthand for the Russian government itself.

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

Italy had already supplied Aristotele Fioravanti, who rebuilt the Kremlin's main cathedral after the local builders' attempt collapsed; Ivan III then hired Italian fortress engineers for the walls.

Moscow's old title 'the Third Rome' cast which fallen city as the second?

Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, and a monk from Pskov later wrote that Moscow had inherited its place as the last seat of true Christian empire.

Which Kremlin landmark cracked in 1737's fire?

The Tsar Bell cracked when fire swept the Kremlin in 1737, soon after it was cast, and the biggest bell in the world has never once been rung.

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

Illuminated red stars replaced the tsarist eagles in 1935-37; made of ruby glass and mounted on bearings, each one swings round to face the wind.

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

Beautiful: 'krasnaya' meant that before it meant red, and the square had the name by the mid-1600s, so it has nothing to do with communism.

In 1987, teenager Mathias Rust landed what beside Red Square?

A light aircraft: Rust flew a rented Cessna from Helsinki, and Gorbachev used the embarrassment to force out his defence minister within days.

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

Kazan and Astrakhan were Tatar khanates on the Volga; taking them in 1552 and 1556 put the whole river under Moscow's control.

Who was the Basil of Saint Basil's Cathedral?

A holy fool: Basil wandered Moscow's streets and openly rebuked Ivan the Terrible, yet Ivan carried his coffin and he was buried where the cathedral stands.

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

Had him blinded, the legend says, but most historians call it a myth: the same builder is recorded on major projects after the cathedral was finished.

Which saint is shown on horseback on Moscow's coat of arms?

Saint George spears a dragon on the city's arms, and the same horseman sits on the breast of the double-headed eagle in Russia's national emblem.

As German forces closed on Moscow in 1941, where was Lenin's embalmed body sent for safety?

Siberia: the body sat out the war in the town of Tyumen, tended by its embalmers, and returned to Red Square once the danger had passed.

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

Joseph Stalin joined Lenin in the tomb when he died, but once the party had condemned his rule the body was taken out and buried by the Kremlin wall.

Which Greek god drives the bronze four-horse chariot above the Bolshoi Theatre's entrance?

Apollo, god of music and the arts, suits an opera house; his chariot and the columns below it also featured for years on Russia's 100-ruble note.

Which ballet was first performed at the Bolshoi Theatre on 4 March 1877?

Swan Lake later became a signal of trouble: Soviet television ran it in place of news when leaders died, and again during the August 1991 coup.

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

Large, or simply 'big': the name set it apart from the nearby Maly, or 'Small', Theatre, which staged plays while the Bolshoi took opera and ballet.

Moscow's Ostankino television tower was completed in 1967 to mark what?

50 years since the October Revolution was the occasion; in August 2000 a fire high inside the tower blacked out television across the Moscow region.

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

The Palace of the Soviets rose only a few floors before war came; its steel frame was cut up for defences, and the flooded pit later became an open-air swimming pool.

Which piece of music celebrates the same military victory that Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was built to give thanks for?

The 1812 Overture and the cathedral both mark Napoleon's defeat; Tchaikovsky wrote it to order, calling it 'very loud and noisy' and probably lacking in artistic merit.

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

The Seven Sisters gained a cousin abroad: Warsaw's Palace of Culture and Science was built to a similar design as a Soviet 'gift', and many Poles came to see it as a symbol of domination.

Which of the Stalinist high-rises stood as the tallest building in Europe for more than three decades?

Moscow State University's tower on Sparrow Hills was built partly by thousands of prisoners; nothing in Europe rose higher until a Frankfurt office tower passed it.

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

A textile merchant: Tretyakov spent decades buying the work of Russian painters, then in 1892 gave the whole collection to the city of Moscow.

Priam's Treasure, ancient gold taken from Berlin in 1945 and long hidden in Moscow's Pushkin Museum, was dug up at which city?

Troy: Heinrich Schliemann dug up the gold in the 1870s, Soviet troops carried it off from Berlin, and Moscow denied having it for nearly fifty years.

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

Maxim Gorky's park lent its name to the thriller Gorky Park, but Soviet officials refused to let the 1983 film shoot there, so Helsinki stood in for Moscow.

The old English boat that a teenage royal found at Izmaylovo, now a Moscow park, is nicknamed the 'grandfather' of what?

Russia's navy: unlike local craft, the little boat could sail against the wind, which fascinated the boy and began the passion for ships that built a fleet.

Losiny Ostrov, a forest national park that reaches inside Moscow's city limits, is named after which animal?

Moose, called elk in Europe, give the park its Russian name, 'Elk Island'; the forest survived because it was long the tsars' guarded hunting ground.

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

Falcon hunting: 'sokol' is Russian for falcon, and Sokolniki means 'falconers', after the royal bird handlers who were housed here centuries ago.

In the record 2010 heatwave, what smothered Moscow and sent residents out in face masks?

Wildfire smoke from forest and peat-bog fires choked the capital, and at the peak the city's health chief said deaths were running at twice the usual rate.

Until 2018, what ran on Moscow time across all Russia?

Train timetables: a Soviet-era rule kept every station clock and ticket on Moscow time, so travellers in the far east could end up needing a ticket dated a different day.

Old Moscow's proverbial nickname 'forty times forty' was a boast about the city's huge number of what?

Churches: 'sorok sorokov', forty forties, was a figure of speech for a skyline crowded with domes and the roar of their bells, not an exact tally.

Which Moscow building, put up around 1900 as an insurance company's offices, became the feared headquarters of the Soviet secret police?

The Lubyanka went up in 1898 for the Rossiya insurance firm; after the revolution the secret police seized it and ran a prison inside.

Which cosmonaut, killed on a 1968 training flight, lies in the Kremlin Wall?

Yuri Gagarin came home safely from orbit, then died seven years later, aged 34, when the jet trainer he was flying with an instructor crashed.

After Moscow's November 1941 parade, where did the troops march?

Straight to the front: the Revolution Day parade went ahead to show the capital would be held, and the columns kept marching, out of the square and on towards the fighting.

Before big public holidays, Moscow has paid for planes to fly out and do what?

Seed rain clouds: chemicals make the clouds empty before they reach the city, so parades stay dry while places outside Moscow get the early downpour.

The 'hotline' set up between Moscow and Washington in 1963 was a response to which Cold War scare?

The Cuban Missile Crisis showed how slowly messages crossed between the two capitals; the link that followed was a teleprinter line, never the red telephone of the films.

Moscow's university of 1755 is named after which scientist?

Mikhail Lomonosov won his place at a Moscow academy by passing himself off as a nobleman's son, then rose to become Russia's leading scientist and a celebrated poet as well.

The Boulevard Ring and Garden Ring, two of Moscow's ring roads, follow the lines of what?

Old city walls: both defences were pulled down and their loops became roads; the Garden Ring, once lined with householders' gardens, is now a multi-lane highway with barely a garden in sight.

In 2012 a Moscow skyscraper took the title of Europe's tallest building from which London tower?

The Shard had been officially opened only that July when Mercury City Tower passed it at 338 metres; Moscow towers then kept trading the title among themselves.

Who was Anatoly Karpov's young challenger in the Moscow world chess match abandoned without a winner after 48 games?

Garry Kasparov was trailing 5-3, with 40 games drawn, when officials stopped the match; he won a fresh one later in 1985 and took the title.

Before it was wound down and closed in 2020, Moscow's trolleybus network held what distinction?

World's largest as recently as the 2010s: the wires first went up in 1933, but in 2020 the city closed the network in favour of battery-electric and ordinary buses.