Places caitlinhug7 Wants to Go

Pictures tacked onto trees remember the more than 40,000 of Stalin's victims buried here in mass graves.

The composer did some of his finest work in this country home, including "The Nutcracker."

The largest Buddhist city in Europe is a haven for chess fanatics.

A magnificent, Disneyesque chateau built for 150 lucky kindergarteners.

You'll find rocket launchers, not rollercoasters, at Russia's “military Disneyland.”

Social outcasts and cannibalism in Stalin's Soviet Union.

Volcanic irregularity? Odd erosion? Alien eggs? Local legends compete to explain these strange orbs.

The laboratory where the Soviet secret police invented exotic poisons used to kill dissidents in hideous and (mostly) untraceable ways.

Russia's own leaning tower was built on a tragic historical fable.

A former military outpost of Ivan the Terrible, the 16th-century church contains some of the rarest examples of Eastern Orthodox mural paintings.

A monument to the defenders of the Arctic in Murmansk, Russia.

One of the last examples of Soviet architectural propaganda has a few technological tricks up its sleeve.

The mummified remains of Dashi-Dorzho Itigilov, Russia's most important Buddhist.

This massive glowering Lenin head gazes out over eastern Siberia.

This massive monument honors the first human in space.

Monastery complex at the location where bodies of the executed Romanov royal family were discovered.

The giant Siberian crater known locally as the "doorway to the underworld" is expanding every year.

Siberian whale bones stand as cairns marking location of an ancient butcher yard.

Monastery, army base, and infamous Soviet Gulag in the far Russian north.

This iconic Russian space museum sits on a landmark space production facility and houses the Vostok 1, the first manned spacecraft, that was also built here.

Former estate of Lenin, now home to his death mask.

The world's tallest statue of a woman wields the world's tallest sword and is at risk of toppling over.

This 15th-century cave complex is one of the very few monasteries to stay open throughout World War II and the Soviet regime.

A homemade anatomical collection of medical anomalies and accidental catastrophes.