Moscow Guide
Krasnaya Presnya, Fili and the southwest
The Museum of the Great Patriotic War
Address: Behind the Memorial Obelisk
Opening time: Tues– Sun 10am–7pm; closed last Thurs of each month
Price: R120
This vast concave structure raised on stilts and surmounted by a spiked bronze dome contains the ultimate exposition of World War II from the Soviet perspective: the Museum of the Great Patriotic War (muzey Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny). What Russians call the Great Patriotic War is only deemed to have begun in 1941 with Hitler's invasion of the USSR, and ended with the liberation of Prague two days after the formal German surrender that's taken in the West as VE Day. This ethnocentric bias is more excusable than most, since Soviet losses – of approximately 27 million – were greater than any other country's, and even Churchill acknowledged that it was the Red Army that "tore the guts from the Nazi war machine". Don't miss the dioramas behind the Hall of Memory in the basement, depicting the critical battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk and the Dnieper, the siege of Leningrad and the fall of Berlin. Upstairs, the main exhibition is arranged in chronological order round the outside of a Hall of Glory whose dome is 50m in diameter.