Kaliningrad: the amber-tinted gaze of an empire -- Kiev: the mother of all Russian cities or the threat to mother Russia? -- Arkhangelsk, Solovetsky Islands, Saint Petersburg, and Moscow: Kremlin time, or Russia's clock of clocks -- Ulyanovsk (Simbirsk) and Samara (Kuibyshev): cities of the mighty Volga -- Perm, Yekaterinburg, and Tyumen: the Urals' holy trinity -- Omsk: a mixed metaphor of Putin's empire -- Novosibirsk: a story of science and serendipity -- Ulan-ude, Irkutsk, and Lake Baikal: Asian abodes of the spirit -- Blagoveshchensk-Heihe and Yakutsk: roughing it -- Vladivostok: rule the East! -- Magadan and Butugychag: from the Gulag capital to the Valley of Death -- Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky: the very far East -- The past of the Russian future.