Russia

I landed at Sheremetyevo on a February morning when the thermometer read minus twenty-two and my French logic told me I had made a catastrophic mistake. The customs officer didn’t smile — nobody smiles in Russian airports, I would learn, it’s a currency saved for later — and I dragged my bag through the arrivals hall into a wall of cold so absolute it actually clarified things. By the time the taxi hit the MKAD ring road and Moscow’s silhouette appeared through the frost-fogged window, I felt something I hadn’t expected: curiosity, raw and untouched by any guidebook.

Red Square is not overrated. I know that sounds like heresy from a traveler who prides himself on avoiding the obvious, but there it is. Standing in front of Saint Basil’s Cathedral at dusk, when the snow starts to fall and the coloured onion domes disappear into the grey sky one by one, the scale of the thing reaches you somewhere behind the sternum. The real Russia, though, exists in the side streets of Chistye Prudy, in the Winzavod art center, and in the tiny Georgian restaurants where the khachapuri arrives on boards too heavy to lift and the wine is from Kakheti and costs almost nothing. Russians eat late and they eat seriously. I once sat at a table in Patriarch’s Ponds until half past midnight over a plate of pelmeni and a carafe of homemade horseradish vodka that someone’s aunt had sent up from Voronezh.

Saint Petersburg is a different country entirely — a Europe that chose the wrong timeline, baroque and crumbling and desperate to prove something. I spent three days inside the Hermitage and barely touched the surface. But what stayed with me was walking the Neva embankment alone at 2 a.m. during the White Nights, when the sky never quite went dark and the bridges were raised for the cargo ships and the whole city felt suspended between one century and the next. That particular quality of light — grey-gold, neither day nor night — is specific to this latitude and this season, and I have not found it anywhere else.

When to go: May to June for Saint Petersburg’s White Nights — surreal and worth the crowds. September in Moscow for clear skies and turning birch trees. Avoid January and February unless you are genuinely prepared for the cold or specifically chasing it.

What most guides get wrong: They sell Russia as a monolith of bleakness and political dread, when the actual experience — at least before you reach the state architecture — is one of relentless warmth from strangers, tables that keep refilling themselves, and a black humour so finely calibrated it takes you three beats to realise you’ve been included in the joke. The country is complicated. So is everywhere worth visiting.