Museums near Experimentanium

Art · since 2016

Museum of Russian Impressionism

outstanding

The term “Russian impressionism” is contested, and this is the only institution that investigates rather than illustrates it. The value is the exhibition programme: works come here from private collections that would otherwise never be seen.

Konstantin Korovin, Valentin Serov, Igor Grabar, Nikolai Bogdanov-Belsky. The building is a converted cylindrical flour store of the Bolshevik factory — a rare case of industry turned into a museum.

4.9 km from here · Leningradsky Prospekt 15, bldg 11 · ·

· No. 51

Unusual · since 2021

The Museum of Cryptography

significant

The only museum in Russia about the cipher and about how a message reaches the person it is meant for — a subject nobody else takes up. It is made to present-day museum standards: object, explanation and working mechanism stand on equal terms, and it can be followed without a guide. A holding of world rank there is not and cannot be: the subject is young. Bletchley Park tells the story of the men who broke the machine; here the machine itself is put in a line six thousand years long, and Enigma is one entry in it. And a separate circumstance: the building is the former Marfino sharashka, a prison for scientists where Solzhenitsyn was held and about which In the First Circle was written. The museum says so plainly.

Cipher machines of the twentieth century, the German Enigma among them. Soviet scrambling apparatus. Sections on the ciphers of antiquity and on cryptography now. A display about the Marfino sharashka, within its own walls.

5.9 km from here · Botanicheskaya Street 25, building 4 · ·

· No. 72

History · since 2012

The Jewish Museum

significant

Come for two things at once: the Bakhmetevsky garage by Melnikov and Shukhov, a building of world significance, and the history of Russian Jewry told from inside as nowhere else. The holdings of originals are modest, and that is worth knowing beforehand.

The building itself — the Bakhmetevsky garage of 1926–1927, one of Konstantin Melnikov’s principal works with steel structures by Vladimir Shukhov; the Café on Basseynaya, a reconstruction of shtetl life.

6.4 km from here · Obraztsova 11, bldg 1a · ·

· No. 47

Art · since 2015

The AZ Museum

significant

A one-artist museum, Anatoly Zverev, grown out of a private collection. Its value is not scale — the rooms are few and the works small — but the way of showing: an exhibition here is built as a statement, with sequence and light, rather than hung along the walls, and in Moscow that is rare. About Zverev himself an honest word is owed: an uneven artist, part of whose legacy rests on the speed of the hand rather than on depth, and his best things have to be picked out. The museum does not conceal this, which is why it is believed.

Painting and drawing by Anatoly Zverev from Natalia Opaleva’s collection. Exhibitions setting Zverev beside other artists of his circle. Work by Vladimir Nemukhin and other nonconformists.

6.6 km from here · 2nd Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street 20–22 · ·

· No. 73

Architecture and estates · since 1918

Ostankino

outstanding

A palace wholly of wood and wholly pretending to be stone, with a theatre hall that a turn of the machinery converted into a ballroom. Buildings of the kind can be counted on the fingers, and surviving eighteenth-century stage machinery is rarer still: the Georgian Theatre Royal at Richmond keeps its, Drottningholm keeps its, and this is the third name on that short list. It was built by serf architects for a serf theatre, and that fact cannot be subtracted from the estate: the brilliance here stands on unfreedom, and the museum says so. Go knowing the main thing: after years of restoration the museum is opening in parts, and in August 2026 the palace-theatre itself was still at work.

The theatre hall with its machinery, which turned it into a ballroom. The Egyptian and Italian pavilions. A collection of light fittings and carved wood. The Church of the Life-Giving Trinity of 1683 beside the palace.

6.7 km from here · 1st Ostankinskaya Street 5 ·

· No. 68

Unusual · since 1912

The Museum of Music

outstanding

One of the largest collections of musical instruments in the world and the only place in Russia where the instrument is shown as an object of history. One can go from horn and gusli to Murzin’s synthesiser, named with Scriabin’s initials — the machine on which the music for Solaris was written. Here too is kept the State Collection of unique instruments: Stradivari, Guarneri, Amati. The Horniman shows the instrument as ethnography and the Royal College of Music shows it as performance history; here both lines run in one room, and the electronic one continues them. One thing must be known: the collection is a working one, instruments are lent to musicians, and they are not always to be found in the case.

Instruments of the peoples of the world, from Russian gusli to the Japanese koto. The ANS synthesiser of Yevgeny Murzin, named with Scriabin’s initials. Autographs and manuscripts of Russian composers. The State Collection of stringed instruments, when it is in the museum.

6.7 km from here · Fadeyeva Street 4

· No. 65

Art · since 1981

The Museum of Decorative Art

significant

Lacquer miniature of four schools and propaganda porcelain — the objects by which Russia is recognisable in world decorative art. The material is first-rate; the display is not up to it.

Lacquer miniature — Palekh, Fedoskino, Mstyora, Kholuy; Soviet propaganda porcelain; toys of the peoples of the world; embroidery and samovars.

7.2 km from here · Delegatskaya 3, bldg 1 · ·

· No. 32

Architecture and estates · since 2020

The Narkomfin Building

significant

The 1930 house by Ginzburg and Milinis is the transitional commune-house with which any conversation about twentieth-century housing begins: two-level units, a corridor every second floor, kitchen and laundry taken out of the flat. Le Corbusier knew this building and leaned on it in the Unité d’habitation at Marseille — the ribbon window, the pilotis and the interlocking sections are all here first. But expectations must be squared honestly: the restoration of 2017–2020 gave the house back to its residents, and the museum here is one restored unit, not a building. Looking is done from outside and in a single flat, by appointment.

A restored type F unit, furnished to Ginzburg’s drawings. The building itself: the residential block on columns, the communal block, the bridge between them.

7.2 km from here · Novinsky Boulevard 25, block 1 · ·

· No. 74

History · since 1917

The Museum of Contemporary History

for enthusiasts

The collection is large, but the display is built ideologically and is unreliable as a source of knowledge — we say so plainly. The value is the building: this is the Moscow English Club, the one from the novels, and some objects such as the propaganda porcelain.

The building of the Moscow English Club — the club of Eugene Onegin and War and Peace, with the lions on its gate; Soviet propaganda porcelain; the collection of gifts to Stalin.

7.4 km from here · Tverskaya 21 · ·

· No. 28

Architecture and estates · since 1965

The Ryabushinsky Mansion

outstanding

The best surviving interior of Moscow Art Nouveau: Shekhtel built the mansion in 1900–1903 and thought it out down to the door handle, and the wave staircase with its jellyfish lamp is the thing for which one comes here instead of any museum of decorative art. What Horta did at the Hôtel Tassel and Mackintosh at the Glasgow School of Art — one hand over the whole building, from plan to fittings — Shekhtel did here, and here it survives with the fittings in place. Upstairs is hidden an Old Believers’ chapel that could not be shown openly, and it has come through. The memorial part — Gorky lived here from 1931 — is markedly weaker than the architecture, and that should be known in advance: one comes for Shekhtel, not for Gorky.

The wave staircase with its jellyfish light. Stained glass and the mosaic frieze of orchids along the façade. The Old Believers’ chapel on the top floor. Gorky’s study and library.

7.8 km from here · Malaya Nikitskaya Street 6/2 ·

· No. 71