Moscow

Moscow Subway (Metro).   A virtual museum and an archive, an illustrated album and an encyclopedia, this dedicated site is a tribute to the myths and realities of the famous Moscow underground system. Though in Russian, the site has unique visual content and is worth visiting - where else would you find the scheme of the rumored Metro-2 (the second subway for political elite)? [ds]
www.metro.ru

Cathedral of Christ the Savior.  This an official site of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. It was and again is Russia's most popular national monument, an edifice with unusually dramatic history. Dedicated to victory in the 1812 war with Napoleon, the initial, abandoned plan for the monument was to create the world's largest church. Even though only a different, smaller project was completed, the first built Cathedral was one of Russia's largest churches, with its construction stretching through several decades (1831-1881). It was demolished by the Bolsheviks in 1931 to clear space for their own intended main monument, the giant 415-meter Palace of the Soviets. This structure never was completed, and the foundation pit later was filled with one of the world's largest open-air swimming pools (1960-1993). In recent years this pit became, arguably, Russia's most famous geographical symbol for the failed Communist endeavor. To symbolize beginning of a new , post-Soviet era, in the mid-1990s the Cathedral has been resurrected again in place of the pool. As before 1917, images of the Cathedral are arguably the most widely circulated landscape images in Russia. Though the site is in Russian, it is worth a visit by nor-Russian readers for its multimedia resources breathtaking photo images, unique archival video and audio files, virtual tour of the cathedral, and direct online broadcasts of services in the cathedral.  [ds]
www.xxc.ru

Russian Utopia, a Depository.  This bi-lingual (Russian/English) web-site is a virtual archive dedicated to Russian visionary architects. "The Russian Utopia is represented by a compact depository of 480 architectural projects from the last 300 years of the Russian history that have never been carried out. They constitute but a fraction of the pool of ideas with a claim on the architectural reorganization of engsia - a collective Russian dream." These projects to transform traditional Russian cities and the entire world were so bold and truly utopian ("out-of-place") that mostly remained just projects. This "paper architecture" nevertheless is a good example of imaginary geography of places, places as they could be, a geography of the Russian dream. The site's own architecture is difficult to navigate through, go directly to its animations of such curiosities as horizontal skyscaper, flying cities, and the monument to Christopher Columbus in Santo-Domingo. [ds]
www.utopia.ru