The Rough Guide to Moscow 4 (Rough Guide Travel Guides)

This book gives ou a nice overview of the region, and incredible specific tips for visiting Moscow.

As a las vegas lawyer, i traveled to moscow many times, and I purchased this book. This book is so out of date, it is not worth the room in your luggage.

I used the latest edition of this guidebook on my recent trip to Moscow (after having a great experience with the St. Petersburg version) and was shocked at how out of date the book was. Most of the restaurants that we tried from the book were closed or not at all what was described, and the prices (both for food and admission to various places) were wildly divergent from those listed in the book. While I understand that there is a lot of turnover and change among these things in Russia, this was simply unacceptable from a new edition that was released a month before my trip. Other guides that we had that were older were more accurate, so it's obvious that the authors did not really try to update this new edition before releasing it.

A second criticism: this book is extremely hard to use for actually navigating the city. The book is organized by the different districts within Moscow, with maps of each area only at the beginning of each section. This means that a great deal of time is wasted trying to find the correct map to look at. It would be much easier if all of the maps were at the back of the book. More importantly, the metro map in the book is absolutely useless. In Moscow, where 2 or more metro lines meet, each line will come into a different station with its own name that will then be connected by walkways to the other station. The map in this book does not make clear which station is on which line, which can make travel a lot more confusing than it needs to be. For a more useful metro map, check out the Eyewitness travel guide, which one of my travel companions used and found to be much better.

The postives: While I would not recommend that anyone use this book as their sole guide for the reasons listed above, the descriptions of the sites to see around Moscow were extremely informative. The recommendations for tour companies, including who has exclusive access to certain areas, were correct. I would rely whole-heartedly on the book's listings of what bus numbers to take to get around, as they were always accurate. Also, we did find 3 restaurants in the book that were still around, had good food, and reasonably priced: Dioskuriya (Georgian food: Nikitskiy bul. 5, str. 1 near the Arbatskaya metro, through the post office arch); Genatsvale (Georgian food: Ostozhenka ul. 12/1, near the Kropotkinskaya metro); and Karetniy Dvor (Azerbajani food: Povarskaya ul. 52, near the Barrikadnaya metro).

Unfortunately, despite the slow rise of tourists coming to Moscow, there is still no good guidebook. Taking that into consideration, I chose this over the Lonely Planet because it has more day trip information and more background.

This book is truly chock full of information. However, it is arranged in a way that is terribly useless. Neighborhoods are listed, followed by page after page of historical detail and buildings to notice -- guaranteed to get you lost if you actually try to read as you go. My method settled into choosing a neighborhood, reading the book, going there, getting lost, coming home, then reading the book again to try to discern where I'd been.

A bizarre cross section of details pepper the book: things like information on $100/month gyms for New Russians, but no useful notes on where average people can go work out. This sort of thing doesn't matter much to the tourist, but can be frustrating as someone living in Moscow.

I still think this is one of the better guides out there. It does have remarkable historical coverage in a small amount of space, as well as practical details that should satisfy any shoestring or economising traveller. One can hope that further issues of the Guide are able to arrange information more helpfully.

Rough Guide's book on Moscow is by far one of the best tour books I have seen for that city. Recently we had the chance to live in Moscow for two months. This book, along with the Rough Guides Russian phrase book, were our constant companions. The Moscow book was essential for giving us really indepth information about most of the sites we went to see. Also, the history section was invaluable to us as we found it necessary to do a little homeschooling of our children while there. I still refer to the history section of the Moscow book to refresh my memory on the complicated story of Russian history.

We also had Fodor's along with us but found that we relied much more on Rough Guides as a source of important and reliable information. Rough Guides is a must if you visit Moscow.