One of the great tricks of the Moscow Kremlin — architecture-wise — is that as you walk around it on the outside, you don’t really understand the bit about it being built on a high promontory surrounded by water. But when you are inside the Kremlin looking out, you see how high up you are above the city — even if there is only one river left of the three that once flowed by the walls.
If you have a hankering to visit, you can now see a great deal of the Kremlin, its museums and collections online. You can even catch some of those marvelous views.
On the main part of the site in Russian, you can stop to watch their Easter cycle of YouTube illustrated lectures or scroll down to click on some photo tours of the Armory, Cathedral Square, and ancient sites through archival materials and archeological finds.
Further down you might click on the online collection. That will send you down the magic rabbit hole to 7,114 exhibits in every one of the museums, including paintings, graphics, textiles, documents and those glorious Easter eggs.
You can also take a virtual tour or two, moving through the Armory Museum by clicking on little figures.
Or you can take another path. At the top of the page you can click on their linguistically interesting site staytuned.kreml.ru, which takes you five big sections: virtual tours of the Kremlin museums and churches, lectures, “a little bit about everything,” films, and children.
The “little bits” are not so little: illustrated lectures, films, and restoration videos in a variety of big subject areas, like Boris Godunov or Peter the Great, with lots of treasures. Short films like the one below will keep you occupied for a good week.
Films are on a variety of subjects. The children’s section has some fun master classes that kids should be able to follow even if they can’t understand the historical digressions about fans and Russian fashion.
If you are an English speaker, there is a page of virtual tours and information that will take you to tours and fairly detailed descriptions of the architecture, history and treasures.
