Museums

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Most museums are open in the day time from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm and are shut on Sundays and Mondays. It is obviously impossible to name them all. For history lovers, the Museum of Moscow, the Revolution Museum, the KGB Museum and especially the Historic Museum on Red Square are worth a look.
As far as fine arts museums are concerned, we recommend the Tretiakov Gallery before any other. Pavel Tretiakov, a wealthy textile maker and trader, started to buy the works of some Russian artists in 1856. His collection grew so much that he decided to extend his private mansion and transform it into a museum. In 1892, he donated his museum to the city of Moscow. It is to this day the world's largest collection of Russian art. You can admire the ancient icons as well as some canvases of the romantic painters and of itinerant Russian painters. An extra wing added to the gallery in 1930 displays the socialist realistic art of the 1930s to the 1960s.
Pushkin Museum is another one that you should not miss. Located in a beautiful private mansion, it was founded by Ivan Tsvetaiev in 1898. It displays an impressive series of Egyptian and Greco-Roman antiques, paintings by the great Italian and Dutch masters (Murillo, Botticelli, Veronese, Rembrandt, Rubens) and some beautiful collections of the 20th century European art (Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky, Leger, Braque, Chagall). Among the literary museums, Leon Tolstoy State Museum is set in the wooden house where the writer lived from 1895 to 1901. It impressively recreates the atmosphere of a literary salon at the end of the 19th century.