Moscow
Russia's capital, the largest city in Europe
No European city sprawls quite like Moscow. From the red-brick walls of the Kremlin, twelve concentric ring roads radiate outward across a low forested plain, swelling into a metropolis of nearly thirteen million people. Onion-domed cathedrals, Stalinist skyscrapers, and glass towers stand within sight of one another, and beneath the streets runs a metro system whose marble-and-chandelier stations were built as palaces for the people. It is at once medieval fortress, imperial seat, Soviet showpiece, and modern megacity layered on a single bend of the Moskva River.
Moscow occupies the gentle terrain of the East European Plain, rising in places to around 255 metres on the Teplostan Upland and dipping toward the Moskva, the river that gave the city its name. Winters are long and severe, with the river often freezing and snow blanketing the boulevards for months, and summers are warm and brief. The historic core is organized around the Kremlin and Red Square, with the city growing outward in rings as forests, parks, and reservoirs thread between the dense residential districts.
First recorded in 1147 as a wooden stockade of the princes of Vladimir-Suzdal, Moscow rose to dominate the gathering of Russian lands and became the seat of the tsars before Peter the Great moved the capital to his new city on the Baltic. The Bolsheviks returned the capital here in 1918, and through the twentieth century Moscow was the nerve center of the Soviet Union. Today it is Russia's political and financial heart, home to the Bolshoi Theatre, dozens of universities, and a concentration of wealth and power unmatched elsewhere in the country.