Museums near The Museum of Music

Art · since 1986

The New Tretyakov

world-class

The Russian avant-garde is the one Russian artistic system to enter the world canon on equal terms, and its largest collection is here. MoMA and the Pompidou show Malevich and Tatlin torn from their setting; here they hang beside what they rebelled against, which changes the reading.

Malevich’s Black Square, Petrov-Vodkin’s Bathing of a Red Horse, work by Kandinsky, Chagall, Goncharova and Larionov, the model of Tatlin’s Tower. Next door: the Muzeon park of dismantled Soviet monuments.

4.5 km from here · Krymsky Val 10 · ·

· No. 5

House museums · since 1921

Tolstoy in Khamovniki

outstanding

A house in which nothing was reconstructed: the furnishings are its own, the objects are the family’s, and their placing follows an inventory taken while the owners were alive. There is no electric light here and never was — Tolstoy refused it on principle, so the rooms are lit as they were in his time, which for a house museum is almost unheard of. Anyone who has been to Carlyle’s House in Chelsea knows the effect and will find it carried further here: there the gas fittings survive, here there is nothing but daylight and a lamp. The literary display on Prechistenka answers the question of what he wrote; here the question answered is how he lived — and in his case that is the subject.

The study with its low chair, cut down to the short sight of its owner, and the writing table. Sofya Andreyevna’s room. The hall with the piano at which Taneyev and Rachmaninoff played. The cobbler’s bench — Tolstoy made his own boots. The garden, which has outlived the century along with the house.

4.6 km from here · Lva Tolstogo Street 21 ·

· No. 62

Art · since 1969

The Tropinin Museum

significant

The Moscow portrait of the first half of the 19th century is nowhere else so densely gathered. The value is also in the origin: Vishnevsky’s private collection given to the city, a model of how Russian museums came to be.

Portraits by Vasily Tropinin and his Moscow contemporaries, work by serf artists, Russian Biedermeier. The quiet Zamoskvorechye lane and the house itself are half the pleasure.

4.8 km from here · Shchetininsky Lane 10, bldg 1 · ·

· No. 31

Art · since 1947

The Rublev Museum

outstanding

The third collection of Russian icons after the Tretyakov and the Russian Museum, and the only one built as a museum of one subject: here the icon does not stand in a row of Russian art but is explained in itself, from the board and the gesso to the iconography. The holding was formed from things brought out by the museum’s expeditions from closed and ruined churches, and its value is the completeness of the line rather than single stars: famous names are almost absent, but the sequence runs unbroken from the thirteenth century to the seventeenth. In Britain icons are met in ones and twos, in Byzantine rooms and in the trade; a museum where the subject has a building of its own does not exist there. The monastery’s Saviour Cathedral, in which all this stands, is the oldest surviving building in Moscow.

Icons of the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries, gathered by the museum’s own expeditions. Royal doors and whole iconostasis sets. Fragments of wall painting. The Saviour Cathedral of the 1420s — the oldest building in Moscow, with remains of ornamental painting associated with Rublev.

5.2 km from here · Andronyevskaya Square 10 · ·

· No. 61

Unusual · since 1894

The Bakhrushin Museum

outstanding

A collection begun in 1894 by one private man and grown into the largest theatre collection in the world — so the museum reckons it, and it is hard to dispute: a million and a half items. Its value is completeness: Russian theatre can be followed here in sequence, from the serf stage to the present, rather than by isolated stars. The V&A holds the national theatre archive of Britain and shows it magnificently; the difference is that there the Russian line is a guest and here it is the whole subject. The designs by Golovin, Bakst, Korovin and Exter are, incidentally, first-rate painting — they merely happen to be filed under theatre. The main building reopened after a long restoration in 2024, and the make-up of the permanent display is worth checking before setting out.

Designs for sets and costumes by Golovin, Bakst, Korovin, Exter and Tatlin. Costumes and possessions of the great actors. Stage models. The archives of theatres and directors. Bakhrushin’s own house, built for the collection.

5.4 km from here · Bakhrushina Street 31/12

· No. 66

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.

5.6 km from here · 1st Ostankinskaya Street 5 ·

· No. 68

History · since 1991

The Museum of Patrons

for enthusiasts

The only museum about where the Tretyakov Gallery, the Bakhrushin, the Shchukin and Morozov collections came from: about the people who paid for them. The subject runs through our whole list and is gathered nowhere else. What the Courtauld is to Britain — a private eye and a private purse turned into a public institution — the Moscow merchants were to Russia, several times over and within one generation. The rating is honest and not high: this is a private educational centre in an old merchant house, the holding is documentary and small, and there is no free entry at all, only by appointment. Come here after the great museums, having asked yourself whose money they stand on.

Documents, portraits and belongings of the Moscow merchantry of the nineteenth century. Material on the Tretyakov, Morozov, Bakhrushin and Shchukin dynasties. The house of Ivan Prostyakov, in which the museum lives.

5.6 km from here · Donskaya Street 9 · ·

· No. 79

Architecture and estates · since 1524

Novodevichy Convent

outstanding

After Kolomenskoye the second building of Moscow on the World Heritage list, and for wholeness of ensemble the first: a convent of the late seventeenth century has come down almost without rebuilding — walls, towers, gate churches, refectory. The Smolensk Cathedral of 1524 keeps sixteenth-century frescoes in their places and an iconostasis of a kind of which Moscow has two or three. What is not here is a museum in the ordinary sense: this is a working convent with a museum display, and what is open changes from season to season.

The Smolensk Cathedral of 1524 with its sixteenth-century wall painting and iconostasis. The walls and towers of the late seventeenth century — Moscow Baroque entire. The burial ground: Denis Davydov, Sergei Solovyov, and Chekhov before he was moved.

6.1 km from here · Novodevichy Proyezd 1

· No. 75

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.

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

· No. 72

Science and nature · since 1993

The Water Museum

for enthusiasts

A departmental museum with working models of city infrastructure — an almost extinct genre. Worth seeing for anyone curious about how the city works underground; there is nowhere else in Moscow for that.

Working models of waterworks, from the Rostokino aqueduct to the present treatment plants; the history of the Moscow sewer in drawings and photographs.

6.2 km from here · Sarinsky Proyezd 13 · ·

· No. 39