Russia

Frommer's Moscow & St. Petersburg (Frommer's Complete)

• Savvy insider tips on exploring the treasures of the Hermitage Museum and the Kremlin.
• Outspoken opinions on what's worth your time and what's not.
• Exact prices, so you can plan the perfect trip whatever your budget.
• Off-the-beaten-path experiences and undiscovered gems, plus new takes on top attractions.

Find great deals and book your trip at Frommers.com

St. Petersburg (Eyewitness Travel Guides)

Includes: Vasilevskiy Island, Petrogradskaya, Palace Embankment, Gostinyy Dvor, and Sennaya Ploshchad.

Moscow (EYEWITNESS TRAVEL GUIDE)

The guide that shows you what other travel books only tell you!

A city of opulent architecture, striking art, and history of epic proportions, Russia's cultural showplace is vividly depicted in DK's Eyewitness Travel Guide: Moscow. The guide covers the city's five main sections with street-by-street maps and 3-D aerial illustrations that lead you to many magnificent sights. View major works of Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse, and Botticelli at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. Examine art collected by the tsars and their families at the State Armory. Additional sections highlight the Bolshoy Theatre, St. Basil's Cathedral, and the Tretyakov Gallery. In the Beyond Moscow chapter explore the Novodevichiy Center, the elaborate gardens at the Kuskove Estate, and the village of Kolomenskoe. The guide also provides an enthralling overview to the city's turbulent history, outstanding cultural contributions, remarkable people, and regional cuisine.

Trans-Siberian Handbook: Seventh Edition of the Guide to the World's Longest Railway Journey (Trailblazer Guides)

Russian: Lonely Planet Phrasebook

Don't let your Russian experience become Russian Roulette! Pick up this phrasebook instead, and begin communicating with ease.

Special Features:
*Comprehensive food section
*Tips on cultural etiquette
*Useful phrases for finding accomodations, dealing with health emergencies and hitting the town
*Easy-to-use pronunciation guide
*Two way dictionary and sentence builder

St Petersburg (City Guide)

Discover St Petersburg

Unearth the connection between an Italian architect and a famous beef dish at the Stroganov Palace
Plug into St Petersburg's avant-garde art and music scene in a former squat
Beat a total stranger with birch branches at the local banya
Join the newlyweds for champagne and dancing in the shadow of the Bronze Horseman

In This Guide:

One passionate author with over twenty years' experience of St Petersburg
Full-color coverage of the unparalleled Hermitage museum
Meet the locals: a photographer/journalist/bar owner, an artist and a violinist show you their town
Content updated daily - visit lonelyplanet.com for up-to-the-minute reviews, updates and traveler insights

Imperium

The Polish journalist whose The Soccer War and The Emperor are counted as classics of contemporary reportage now bears witness in Imperium to the disintegration of the Soviet Union. This magisterial book combines childhood memory with unblinking journalism, a radar for the truth with a keen appreciation of the absurd.

Imperium begins with Ryszard Kapuscinski's account of the Soviet occupation of his town in eastern Poland in 1939. It culminates fifty years later, with a forty-thousand-mile journey that takes him from the haunted corridors of the Kremlin to the abandoned gulag of Kolyma, from a miners' strike in the arctic circle to a panic-stricken bus ride through the war-torn Caucasus.

Out of passivity and paranoia, ethnic hatred and religious fanaticism that have riven two generations of Eastern Europeans, Kapuscinski has composed a symphony for a collapsing empire—a work that translates history into the hopes and sufferings of the human beings condemned to live it.

Moscow (Lonely Planet City Guides)

Delight in the iconic onion domes of St Basil’s Cathedral, treat yourself to world-class ballet at the Bolshoi, be dazzled by chandeliers in the metro and get steamed and washed at a banya. From the splendour of the Kremlin to fine dining haute-russe, you’ll discover a city that’s cloaked in history and embracing the future. Revel in this frenetic, changing capital with this best-selling guide.

Discerning Reviews – hand-picked eating and sleeping options from Georgian cuisine to the best renovated Soviet hotels

Muscovite Nightlife – elite clubs, bohemian bars, cafés, opera and ballet

Cultural Context – insightful history coverage puts Moscow’s past and present in perspective

Full Color Maps – detailed, grid-referenced maps and a metro plan

In-Depth Language Chapter – includes Cyrillic script

Russia & Belarus (Lonely Planet Travel Guides)

Cosmopolitan cities, bubbling volcanoes, spectacular mountains and breathtaking art - Russia is as diverse as it is dramatic, while Belarus satisfies those in search of a Soviet experience. Untangle the conspiracy theories and immerse yourself in the rich heritage - from Minsk to Moscow, Siberia to Kamchatka, make sure you're carrying this best-selling guide to the world's most enigmatic destination.

Cultural Context - in-depth background information brings you up to date on Belarusian politics and Tuvan throat-singing.

Discerning Reviews - hand-picked listings from our team of expert authors reveal Moscow's swankiest clubs and Siberia's finest adventure tours.

140+ Maps - detailed, grid-referenced maps throughout.

Comprehensive Language Chapter - includes Cyrillic script.

In Siberia

In Siberia explores a region of astonishments, where "white cranes dance on the permafrost, where a great city floats lost among the ice floes, where mammoths sleep under glaciers." Colin Thubron's latest chronicle also delivers its subject from rumor into reality. An expanse larger than the entire United States, Siberia is undoubtedly a country of contrasts, which elicits from the author both awe and melancholy. Here on one hand is a northern wilderness "shattered into a jigsaw of ponds and streams," and on the other a "black detritus of factories and ruins." No less memorable than the landscape are the people that Thubron encounters. He gathers their stories like rough jewels, showing us a self-proclaimed descendant of Rasputin, an isolated Jewish community, and a parade of "indestructible babushkas."

Woven among the often bitter and eroding memories of a Siberian past is a sense of new freedom. After all, this is the first time in Russia's history when foreigners can travel freely throughout the region--and its inhabitants can comment openly about their government without fear of reprisal. Thubron coaxes an institute official at the Akademgorodok Praesidium to speak his mind:

His face was heavy with anger. "We have one overriding problem here. Money. We receive no money for new equipment, hardly enough for our salaries. There are people who haven't been paid for six months." Then his anger overflowed. He was barking like a drill sergeant. "This year we requested funds for six or seven different programmes! And not one has been accepted by the government! Not one!"

Thubron's portrait is as elegant as it is evocative. But just as notably, his journey to the east manages to break the long and destructive Siberian silence. --Byron Ricks

As mysterious as its beautiful, as forbidding as it is populated with warm-hearted people, Syberia is a land few Westerners know, and even fewer will ever visit. Traveling alone, by train, boat, car, and on foot, Colin Thubron traversed this vast territory, talking to everyone he encountered about the state of the beauty, whose natural resources have been savagely exploited for decades; a terrain tainted by nuclear waste but filled with citizens who both welcomed him and fed him—despite their own tragic poverty. From Mongoloia to the Artic Circle, from Rasputin's village in the west through tundra, taiga, mountains, lakes, rivers, and finally to a derelict Jewish community in the country's far eastern reaches, Colin Thubron penetrates a little-understood part of the world in a way that no writer ever has.