The Russian Defense Department.



This is at a sculpture garden where the statues of deposed Communist leaders
have gone to rest. It's quite a sad sort of place, but very interesting.



In the same sculpture garden.



The Duma, home of the Russian government.



This statue of Karl Marx faces the Bolshoi theater.



And here is the Bolshoi--the famous theater for ballet and opera.



Moscow metro stations are works of art, with chandeliers, elaborate plaster mouldings, statues,
mosaics, etc. Stalin wanted them to be "the people's palaces," and they are.



The Lubyanka was a famous prison and also headquarters of the KGB.
(If you've read Anna Akhmatova's Requiem then you know about the lines outside the Lubyanka.)



The KGB museum was just as forbidding (and fascinating) as you'd think
it would be. It was originally set up in 1984 to give
new recruits to the Russian Secret Service an idea of the history of the organization,
but its focus became boosting the KGB's image (yes, they have a PR department).
By the way, the KGB is now the FSB.



Some precariously-perched window painters who saluted when I started to take their picture.



A gigantic (some say tacky) monument to Peter the Great on the river in Moscow.



The extremely rickety stairs we climbed to get to Sparrow Hills, overlooking Moscow.



Boozing it up at an Irish pub in Moscow.
This was the beginning of a very long night that ended with us
loudly singing national anthems in front of the Kremlin.



Around St. Petersburg / Around St. Petersburg (II) / Around Moscow / Church on Spilled Blood / Dostoevsky in St. Petersburg /
The Kremlin and Red Square / Moscow Churches / Night Train to Moscow / On the Neva / Palace Square / Peterhof / Peter and Paul Fortress /