Museums near Ostankino

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.

1.2 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.

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

· No. 47

Unusual · since 2009

The Chocolate Museum

niche

An industrial tour rather than a museum: the value is the walk into the working shop and the history of Einem. As a collection it is next to nothing, and we do not hide that.

A walk into the working shop where sweets are wrapped in front of you; the history of Einem and Krasny Oktyabr in original wrappers and advertising.

5.1 km from here · Malaya Krasnoselskaya 7 (entrance from Lobachika 1, bldg 1) · ·

· No. 41

Science and nature · since 1706

The Apothecary Garden

outstanding

A garden in the middle of the city: five hundred metres to the Garden Ring, and the ground is not large. Founded by Peter I in 1706. Moscow had several such physic gardens, and every one of them except this vanished without trace, while the larch here, planted by tradition by Peter himself (an increment borer confirms an age of only two hundred years — our note), is alive still, though since a lightning strike early in the twentieth century it has hardly grown. The Palm House of 1891 is the centre of a tropical collection gathered over more than two hundred years.

Peter's larch, as the garden has always called it, stands in the middle of the arboretum. Beside it a pedunculate oak more than two hundred years old, limes past a hundred, and a rare weeping form of the Dahurian larch. The Palm House of 1891: palms, figs and pandanus at their full height. The Succulent House on the upper floor of the glasshouse block holds cacti, euphorbias, agaves and aloes, some of them among the rarest anywhere. The old pond with its water plants, the shade garden, the heather slope where the rockery used to be; the conifer slopes took a gold diploma of the landscape architecture prize in 2013.

5.4 km from here · Prospekt Mira 26, building 1 · ·

checked 20 August 2026 · No. 102

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.

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

· No. 32

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.

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

· No. 51

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.

5.7 km from here · Fadeyeva Street 4

· No. 65

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.

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

· No. 73

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.

6.6 km from here · Tverskaya 21 · ·

· No. 28

Science and nature · since 2011

Experimentanium

for enthusiasts

A Western-style science centre, not a museum: no originals, only apparatus. Excellent for a first acquaintance with physics; it gives nothing at all for the history of science.

Halls of mechanics, optics, acoustics and electricity; a mirror maze; science shows to a timetable.

6.7 km from here · Leningradsky Prospekt 80, bldg 11 · ·

· No. 49