State Historical Museum

This guide to the State Historical Museum on Red Square in Moscow opens with a mural of Russian rulers, from Princess Olga to Alexander the Third, plastered over inside the entrance hall in the 1920s. You'll hear about Vladimir Sherwood, the Anglo-Russian architect whose grandfather ran cotton machinery for a tsar, and how he won a public competition to build this red-brick fantasy of old Muscovy on the site of a Baroque medicine store. The guide follows the museum's opening in 1883 before Soviet rule buried its imperial decor beneath white paint and constructivist bleakness.