State Historical Museum

Occupying a red-brick, tower-studded building at the north end of Red Square, this is Russia's principal museum of national history, its collections spanning prehistoric artefacts to relics of the Romanov era. The late nineteenth-century structure was designed in a revivalist style meant to echo old Russian architecture, and its painted interior halls are exhibits in themselves. Millions of objects fill its galleries, from Scythian gold and birch-bark manuscripts to imperial thrones.