Here are the available villas for rental in Russia.

Across Russia with love and vodka

It is the greatest train ride in the world and one that conjures up images of Cold War suspense, bulbous-domed churches in the middle of nowhere, endless vodka and frozen, snowy wastes.

The Trans-Siberian railway runs for nearly 10,000km across the world's biggest nation. It winds through taiga forest and steppes of grassland as vast as seas, across rivers a mile wide, past villages clustering round it as if it were a lifeline, and through cities that in Soviet days were closed to foreigners and erased from official maps.
Riding the Trans-Siberian is hardly glamorous a la the Orient Express. Depending on your budget, you can elect to while away the hours in a cabin built for two, at a luxury price, a four-berth cabin, or a 52-bed sleeping carriage (which will certainly give you the full-on Russian Experience).
The Trans-Siberian Express does not exist in name. Rather, it's a collective term for the hundreds of services that make up the route from to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast, over 9,600km and seven days' ride away.
It starts from stations in the east of Moscow - trains heading down the Volga River to the Tatar capital Kazan leave from Kazansky station, while the trains that pass through Nizhny Novgorod leave from Yaroslavl.
The Trans-Siberian service we take is to Kazan, a 13-hour ride through the night, and our choice of cabin is kupe, the four-berth option. Our cabinmates glare at us unwelcomingly at first, but we later realise this is standard Russian hospitality.
Within half an hour, Farit and Boris are sharing their bottle of vodka, toasting to international friendship and soundly whipping us in chess as the train rattles through the Russian night.
They are the first cabinmates on a month-long journey which takes us from the Moscow suburbs to Russian Far East cities, which are closer to Tokyo - or even San Francisco - than they are Russia's capital. ... more

Not so silent nights in St Petersburg

For the Christmas Holidays I went to St. Petersburg, together with a friend.

We travelled with Saga holidays. We started out from Manchester Airport with a delay of about an hour, which in turn led us to miss our connection flight in Frankfurt. No matter, the ground staff in Frankfurt showed us into a very comfortable lounge and plied us with coffee, tea and other beverages until the time came for us to board our flight to .
We arrived very late, around 12.30 am local time. Nevertheless, the hotel restaurant staff served us a special prepared meal fit for a king. Our rooms were large, beautifully furnished and clean. I noticed all kind of goodies, laid out on a small table and every night when the staff came to turn down the bed, a chocolate sat on the bedside table. Such a lovely little gesture.
Our visit to the Hermitage (previously the Winter Palace) was a revelation, full of richness and beauty. Beautiful paintings adorned all the ceilings, doors and walls. Most floors had inlaid wood of many colours. I was mesmerised at the beauty and artwork of the Faberge eggs.
The amber room, too, is something to remember forever. Different colour amber pieces cover the walls from floor to ceiling.
Our visit to the St Peter and St Paul Cathedral is engraved into my memory.
The sun shone on Christmas day and a visit to Catherine's Palace and Park for a sleigh ride was on the agenda. Everywhere looked fresh and glistening in the sunshine. However, even with only a little wind, it was bitterly cold.
With three horses in front of every sleigh, we were soon on our way, through the woods. Just like in the film Dr Zhivago with all the trees covered in snow, it truly was a treat not to miss.
On our return, a large table set out baring a giant steaming urn with coffee, very hot pies, (delicious), and for every one a tot of the vodka. ... more

Journey into the great beyond

From the Mail on Sunday

The waitress in the dining car is as fiercely cheerless as a blizzard and just as lovely. She brusquely slaps the menu on the table. Outside, the landscape between our last stop, Vyatka, and our next, Balyezino, is radiant in the summer sunshine; in here, there is a pronounced chill.
'Salad?' I enquire, already suspecting that this may be a rhetorical question. Salad is off, apparently. 'Nyet salad.' Other diners are chomping on tomato and cucumber starters, but I let it pass. There's a long way to go, and it would be a bad idea to offend the caterers this early in the piece.
'How about the fish?' 'Nyet fish.' She is similarly, loftily - indeed, rather magnificently - dismissive of enquiries after beef, chicken or soup. Eventually, she jabs a pencil to indicate that she might, if pushed, be prepared to serve me omelette with sausage. When it arrives, it's as atrocious as might be expected - the thought of what Russians would consider bad food is a truly horrifying one - but my journey now has a purpose.
The train for the first leg of my journey to Beijing left Moscow's Yaroslavski station last night, and has almost three days to go to Irkutsk, its terminus and my first stopover. I have about 70 hours to get a smile out of Ms Nyet-Salad. I thank her profusely and leave an immense tip. She doesn't flinch.
You can fly from Moscow - an ostensibly capitalist city that is still taking to the free market like a goat to roller-blading - to Beijing - a Communist citadel being triumphally reinvented as a neon-spangled consumerist Babylon, the Great Mall of China - in eight or nine hours.
However, the distance between the two deserves better than being ignored from on high. The 4,887 miles of the Trans-Mongolian route contains forests and deserts, factories and farms, cities and villages, Nike super-stores and statues of Lenin, two border crossings involving searches, and hours of mysterious waiting, and one change of wheels (China's rails are narrower than those of Russia and Mongolia: at Erlyan, just inside the People's Republic, the train is jacked up while new bogies are attached).
The passengers are equally diverse - Russian soldiers, Mongolian bootleggers, Chinese diplomats, Uzbek and Kazakh traders, Australian and British backpackers, and platoons of German tourists (who have block-booked the restaurant car).
As the big blue train leaves Moscow, there is only one other person in my four-berth second-class compartment. Valentin is from Omsk, and while his negligible English and my non-existent Russian make conversation impossible, we find common ground with a timetable printed in English and Russian.
As I swap instant coffee for some of his excellent home-made biscuits, we review the name changes the towns ahead of us have undergone: Vyatka, previously named for Stalin-henchman-turned-Stalin-victim Sergei Kirov; Yekaterin-burg, the end of the line for Russia's royal family, for years called Sverdlovsk after Yacob Sverdlov, the Communist official who organised the Romanovs' murder; Perm, once known as Molotov.
The train, unlike almost everything else in Russia, is clean, comfortable, efficient and, Ms Nyet-Salad aside, run by cheerful and friendly people. The smartly uniformed female attendants vacuum and polish the carriage twice daily and perform heroics in keeping the lavatories bearable (sadly, standards slip dramatically when, after Irkutsk, the carriages are crewed by men). ... more