Housed in a private museum, this massive diorama is designed on a 1:87 scale and covers 800 square meters. It’s not meant to be a precise map, but more of a journey you’ve always wanted to take but didn’t feel like spending two week on a train.
Two cities, however, are impossible to miss: St. Petersburg with its Peter and Paul Fortress, the Spit of Vasilievsky Island and sailboats on the Neva, and Moscow with its spectacular Kremlin, the Bolshoi Theater and bustling city life.
As you move further East, you make your way across the Ural and Siberia all the way to the cable-stayed bridge to Russky Island. As you take your time exploring the diorama, you get a sense for everyday life in Russia: vacationers are getting ready to take a dive into the Black Sea, loggers are wrangling giant tree trunks, power plants are taming mighty rivers. Someone’s fixing their car. Someone’s looking for mushrooms. Someone’s kicking their husband out.
The entire country is connected by railroad tracks and highways filled with “smart” vehicles that stop at the red lights and even pass each other. With over 500 trains, it’s a paradise for model train enthusiasts.
Russia has 11 time zones, and visitors get to appreciate that as the light gradually fades from one time zone after another and gives way to a two-minute night before starting the cycle again.
One thing I particularly liked about this experience is that it balances generality with detail. On the one hand, it doesn’t depict any specific towns other than the capitals, but at the same time, you’ll find landmarks like Kizhi – a little island known for its breathtaking wooden architecture, or Pokrova na Nerli church, famous for towering over a lake.
Details make each scene come alive: chickens on the farm are clucking, pigeons are perched on a balcony. Thousands of individual sunflowers make for a beautiful field. There’s even a devil hopping across the cemetery.
Grand Maket Rossiya is a fun, immersive experience that might just broaden your perspective on Russia, or even inspire you to explore it by rail in real life.
Opening hours: daily from 10 am till 8 pm.
