The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts

This guide to the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow begins in 1945, when Soviet soldiers pried open a plywood crate in a stone quarry outside Dresden and found Raphael's Sistine Madonna hidden inside by retreating German forces, along with the whole Dresden Gallery. It follows the paintings' decade as a state secret inside this very building, and the spring of 1955 when the doors finally opened to Bruegel, Titian, Vermeer and Rubens the public had been told were lost. Walk these galleries slowly, the same rooms that once held a museum's worth of secrets.