By far the eastern BAM’s best place to stop, Komsomolsk-na-Amure (the ‘City of Youth’; a whopping 1500km east of Tynda) sports a carefully planned tree-lined, bricked pavement centre with long prospekts, European-style buildings and rattling trams. Built in a hey-ho fervour in 1932, Komsomolsk was a Soviet-dream transformation of a swamp into a planned city [...]
The Kola Peninsula is a 100, 000-sq-km knob of tundra, forest, lakes, bogs, rivers and low mountains between the White Sea and the Barents Sea, making up most of the Murmansk oblast (region).
An old pagan ritual site, Kizhi - one of at least 1600 islands in Lake Onega - made a natural ‘parish’ for 12th-century Russian colonists. None of the early churches remain, but the churches built in this remote spot in the 18th century make Kizhi a not-to-be-missed pilgrimage site for anyone touched by the magic [...]
Kislovodsk (Sour Waters), the most popular of the resorts, is hillier, greener, prettier but more expensive than Pyatigorsk. ‘Love affairs that begin at the foot of Mashuk reach happy endings here’, Lermontov wrote. If you’re not staying in Kislovodsk then come for a day trip.
Surrounded by the Khibiny mountains and with 2km-wide Lake Bolshoy Vudyavr spread at its feet, Kirovsk is almost an attractive town. If you throw back a couple of shots, squint and look in the right direction, you might just believe you’re in a Swiss alpine village. But Kirovsk was founded in 1929 for mining the [...]
The Kirillo-Belozersky Museum of History, Archi- tecture & Fine Arts (31735; Sobornaya pl 1; admission R50; 9am-5pm Tue-Sun), occupying a nonworking 14th-century monastery of the same name, is the reason to visit the small town of Kirillov, 130km northwest of Vologda. Legend has it that the monastery’s founder, Kirill, was living at Moscow’s Simonovsky monastery [...]
The Ireland-sized Khakassia Republic rises from lake-dotted taiga through a vast agricultural plain to meet richly forested mountains on the Tuvan border. Geographically, it is inextricably linked with Southern Krasnoyarsk Territory. For both areas, transport connections focus on on the city of Abakan.
After dozens of hours of taiga and the isolated Soviet towns of eastern Siberia, Khabarovsk can put a jolt in the most rail weary. A booming river town 25km from China, Khabarovsk gives off an air of a coastal, almost Mediterranean, resort with tree-lined streets, squares with fountains, 19th-century brick buildings, popular parks overlooking the [...]
Kem, 470km north of Petrozavodsk, has a picturesque setting where the Kem River empties into the Kemskaya Bay, but the only real reason to stop here is the daily boats to the Solovetsky Islands from Rabocheostrovsk, 10km northeast of Kem, from at least early June to late August.
Kazan is the capital of Tatarstan, home to the descendants of the nomadic Turkic tribe that wreaked particular havoc in ancient Rus. The atmosphere of this intriguing autonomous republic is redolent of Central Asia. The spires of many mosques dot the skyline - including the grand Kul Sharif Mosque inside the historic kremlin.