Skip to content
Moscow museums: why we no longer write about them as attractions
Editorial Position
Updated:9 min1,844 words

Moscow museums: why we no longer write about them as attractions

The seven articles about Moscow museums at this address are no longer available. We have removed the texts about the Historical Museum, the Pushkin State Museum, the Kuskovo Estate, the Darwin Museum, the Zurab Tsereteli Gallery, and two large roundups: thirty-five museums of the capital and thirty museums for children.

To the reader who was looking for a museum program for the weekend, we answer in short: we do not dispute the value of the collections and we do not call for a boycott of them. We have walked away from the genre in which a state museum is described as a neutral attraction, because the leadership of Russia's largest state museums itself publicly described its work abroad in military language.

💡 At a glance:

  • which seven articles were removed and where the old links now lead
  • what state museum leadership said about its own work after the war began
  • what happened to the organization that worked on historical memory in the same country
  • which museum cities remain in our live sections
  • Last updated: 09/2026

Why we deleted these guides

The seven texts removed from the site were written according to a single template: collection, building, opening hours, ticket price, how to get there. The old addresses in all language versions now have permanent redirects to this page.

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, 2022. After that date, the museum listicle continued doing what it had done before: suggesting a trip and distributing the travel budget among ticket offices. We believe this is not neutral work, and that is why we removed the articles rather than rewriting them.

The decision was made not for individual texts but for the entire section at once: in September 2026, the editorial team removed from the site all materials about Russia, occupied Crimea, and Abkhazia in their entirety, across all language versions. The museum part of this section was the largest by page count and at the same time the hardest for us, because it is the easiest target for the objection that "art is outside politics." We address this objection below and do not consider it settled: it has a strong side, and we prefer to answer it directly rather than with silence.

We describe the connection between a tourist's money and the budget precisely, because the common version is incorrect. The share of oil and gas revenues in Russia's federal budget fell to roughly 22 percent in 2025 and 2026, down from 42 percent in 2022 (OSW Centre for Eastern Studies, 09.12.2025). This means the budget no longer rests primarily on oil and gas. Around 78 percent of revenues come from non-oil-and-gas sources, including taxes from the service sector. That is exactly where a visitor's money goes.

What museum leadership said about its own work

The State Hermitage, the country's largest museum and the pinnacle of the entire state museum hierarchy, is headed by Mikhail Piotrovsky. In June 2022, in an interview with the state publication of the Russian Federation, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, he called the museum's foreign exhibitions "a cultural special operation, a powerful cultural offensive" (reconstruction of the interview, Novaya Gazeta Europe, 20.10.2025; statement by the Ukrainian Institute). We quote this as text and without an active link to the publication itself: it is on the EU sanctions list, and we cannot link to it.

The reaction within the institution itself was no less telling. Hermitage curator Dmitry Ozerkov, who was considered a likely future director of the museum, left Russia after this interview and stated that he could not work in a museum whose director supports the war against Ukraine (The Moscow Times, 03.10.2022).

We do not project this quote onto the staff of Moscow museums, and we do not attribute it to any specific person among those who lead tours at the Historical Museum or Kuskovo. The point is different: if the top level of the state museum system itself calls its international work an offensive, then our text in the "best museums of the capital" genre ceases to be cultural navigation and becomes part of that offensive.

The museum as an institution of memory, and what happened to memory

A museum text rests on the silent assumption that the country has free engagement with the past. Here is what happened to that assumption in Russia.

In late December 2021, Russian courts liquidated both structures of Memorial: International Memorial by decision of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, and the Memorial Human Rights Centre by decision of the Moscow City Court. The Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights called these decisions a severe blow to the protection of human rights in Russia (Council of Europe, statement by the Commissioner for Human Rights). Both organizations were founded in the final years of the Soviet Union and documented mass political repression of the Soviet period (UN Human Rights Office, 14.12.2021). In 2022, Memorial received the Nobel Peace Prize together with the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties and Belarusian human rights defender Ales Bialiatski (Nobel Committee, 2022). In 2026, a Russian court designated Memorial as "extremist," effectively criminalizing its work; the Nobel Committee condemned this decision (Al Jazeera, 08.04.2026).

We are not claiming that the collections of Moscow museums became worse because of this. We are claiming something narrower: recommending a trip "for culture" to a country where an organization with a Nobel Prize for its work on historical memory has been declared extremist means recommending a very selective set of culture. We no longer issue that kind of recommendation.

What this means for you as an EU reader

Item

Status 09/2026

Source

Services related to tourism in Russia

Prohibited by Article 5n(2) of Regulation 833/2014 as amended by Regulation 2025/2033 of 23.10.2025

EUR-Lex

Transition period

For contracts concluded before 24.10.2025, ended on 01.01.2026

Skadden, 11.2025

What the ban covers

Travel agency and tour operator services, guide services, and advertising of such services

Skadden, 11.2025

German Foreign Office advisory

"Vor Reisen in die Russische Föderation wird gewarnt"

Auswärtiges Amt

Paying with an EU card

Not possible: Visa and Mastercard suspended operations in March 2022

The Moscow Times, 06.03.2022

A roundup like "thirty museums for kids with ticket prices" is exactly the format the list of covered services describes as advertising a tourism service. We are not going to test that boundary on ourselves.

Where to go instead

The question readers came to the deleted texts with was about large universal collections, palace estates in the open air, and museums you can visit with children. The live sections of the site answer that: Austria with Vienna, Italy with Florence and Venice, France with Paris, Germany with Berlin and Dresden. For natural history collections and children's programs, we have material in the Germany and Netherlands sections; for open-air estate ensembles, in the Austria and Czechia sections.

The overall explanation for the whole section is collected in the section hub. Related texts: our position on the Bolshoi and Mariinsky theaters and our position on Moscow routes.

Where we stand

We believe cultural exchange is only possible in both directions and only when both sides call things by the same names. In our assessment, after the leadership of the state museum system described its work abroad as an offensive, our museum guide stopped being a guide and became participation in someone else's program. That is why we decided to remove these seven pieces and explain the reason here, rather than keeping them with a note.

We write about the state and its policies, not about people based on their passport. There are people in Russia who spoke out against the war and received prison sentences for it. Our decision not to publish guides to Russia is about money, sanctions, and reader safety, not nationality.

Publication date: September 3, 2026. Last updated: September 3, 2026.

⁉️🤔 Frequently asked questions

Are you against Russian culture and Russian art?

No. We removed travel materials, meaning texts that suggest going somewhere and spending money. Collections, books, and music do not fall into that genre, and the EU ban in question concerns services related to tourism activity, not culture as such.

Why do you quote the director of the Hermitage in a text about Moscow museums?

Because it is a top-level statement from the state museum system about how that system works as a whole, not a private opinion from an employee of one building. We include the quote with a note that it appeared in a state publication of the Russian Federation, and without an active link to that publication.

Couldn't you have just added a warning to the old texts?

We could have, and part of the industry did exactly that. We consider that approach half-measured: material that is promotional by genre remains promotional even with a banner on top. We chose to remove the text and explain the decision at the same address.

Where do old links to these materials lead?

To this page, in all language versions. The reader gets an answer, a list of sources, and a list of destinations we continue to cover.

In short

Seven articles about state museums in Moscow have been removed, and old addresses redirect here. In June 2022, the leadership of the country's largest state museum called foreign exhibitions "a cultural special operation, a powerful cultural offensive," and a curator at the same museum left Russia afterward. In the same country, an organization that worked with the memory of political repression and received the Nobel Peace Prize was declared "extremist" in 2026. Since October 2025, Regulation 2025/2033 prohibits people from the EU from advertising services related to tourism in Russia. For contracts concluded before 24.10.2025, the transition period ended on 01.01.2026. The museum cities we continue to cover are listed above.

How you can help

We do not collect money and receive nothing from the links below. These are official websites of organizations working with the consequences of the war:

Sources

Link check date: 03.09.2026.

tourism.com.de Editorial Team
tourism.com.de Editorial TeamTravel editorial team: research, fact-checking, updates→ All publications

A small editorial team writing guides for independent travel. We travel ourselves, but we haven’t been everywhere, so we check prices, opening hours and how to get there against official sources.