Winston Churchill famously described Russia as a ‘riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’, and this remains an apt description of a place most outsiders known very little about. A composite of the extravagant glories of old Russia and the drab legacies of the Soviet era, Russia is a country that befuddles and beguiles but never bores.

May to October

Experiencing imperialist extravagance at the Hermitage in St Petersburg Sweating it out in a banya-the combination of dry sauna, steam bath and plunges into ice-cold water is a regular feature of Russian life Taking one of the world’s great train journeys across Siberia Learning to drink vodka the Russian way Paying your respects to Lenin’s mummified body in Red Square Gazing at the crystal-clear blue waters of Lake Baikal from an old wooden cottage in lovely Listvyanka

Read Tolstoy’s War and Peace, if you’re feeling brave; otherwise have a go at Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment

Listen to anything by Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff

Watch the Oscar-winning Burnt by the Sun, a poignant treatment of the Stalinist purges

Eat bliny (pancakes with savoury or sweet fillings) and, of course, caviar

Drink vodka-what else?

Za vasha zdarov’e! (to your health!)

Vodka; corrupt billionaires; Soviet-era architecture; babushkas in scarves; queues; dachas; shopping at GUM; matryoshka dolls; cabbage and cabbage

lt’s actually relatively easy to get a visa; St Petersburg is a beautiful city of canals, sometimes known as the ‘Venice of the North’

The world’s largest country encompasses all the pleasure and pain of the human condition, with the last decade’s social and economic revolutions giving a dynamic-and disastrous-spin to Russian lives… lt’s precisely the Russian people’s endearing combination of gloom and high spirits, rudeness and warmth, secrecy and openness that makes journeying through their country such a different experience.