Why should you Visit Moscow during Christmas

Given the fraudulent political situation and the increasing difficulty involved in traveling to Russia, there aren't many Westerners wanting to visit Moscow nowadays. However, on this blog, I have a ton of you messaging me constantly, asking me about traveling here and asking for my help in coming to Russia. But I've noticed something: almost every message has been about visiting during the summer. In fact, the vast majority of tourists who come to Russia from abroad come between May and August, and that's no surprise. Summer is the time when people have school holidays, and of course, it can be extremely cold here in the winter. In Moscow, the temperatures can reach as low as -30° in the winter—that is bloody cold.

This year, 2025, we're having a particularly mild winter. It's currently -5, and it's unlikely to drop below -15 this month. But if you're sat in London, Miami, or Berlin, those kinds of temperatures don't exactly make you want to get on a plane to Moscow. But I'm here to tell you that you're wrong. While Moscow is incredibly fun in the summer, you should absolutely give this city a go in the winter. As long as you're well wrapped up, you'll see Moscow is a very magical place.

In this blog, I'm going to take you around some of the highlights of Moscow during the New Year period and hopefully convince you that it's the place to be, not only in the summer. In fact, there's so much to do here in Moscow over this period that I'm just going to focus on the very center of the city, as each little area has its own stuff to do as well.

Where to begin other than Red Square and its famous Christmas Market, situated between the Kremlin, St. Basil's Cathedral, and GUM department store? It's the perfect place to start your Moscow wintertime holiday. The main features of the market are the same every single year: an ice skating rink, the Christmas tree—or the New Year tree, as it's called in Russian—and stalls selling hot food and drinks for visitors. Of course, the market is also a really popular location for people having photo shoots, especially when it's snowing and everything looks so magical with the GUM department store all lit up in the background.

If you want to visit the Christmas Market, it is of course totally free. But you do need to pay to go ice skating. The prices vary depending on whether it's a weekday or weekend, as well as if it's daytime or nighttime. The most expensive ticket is around 1,500 rubles, which is about $15, and that's for 1 hour of skating at the weekend, including skate hire.

While we're on Red Square, let's take a look inside the GUM department store, which is always very well decorated over the festive period. As every year, each store decorates their own branded tree, along with some other companies like banks that sponsor the decorations here. If you saw my blog posts from before the war, you would have seen these trees were decorated by some of the world's biggest luxury brands, like Dior. But in 2025–2026, you're much more likely to see brands that are less familiar to a Western audience but are growing rapidly in Russia today, like this one here, which is from the Chinese car company Exeed.

Of course, the street right outside GUM, which is called Nikolskaya Street, is lit up the same as it is every year. A short walk from Red Square is Manezhnaya Square, which is also decorated every year. In 2025–2026, it’s decorated as an homage to the Soviet holiday variety television show Goluboy Ogonyok or "Little Blue Light." This show was a big part of the Soviet New Year tradition. Each year, the Little Blue Light came on after midnight, just after the speech by the head of the USSR. This year, there are pictures and videos from old episodes of the show, as well as classic New Year decorations in this square. This Soviet TV and movies theme is brand new this year.

Every year, this square has completely different decorations. On Revolution Square, which is basically attached to Manezhnaya Square, there is also a little market as well as an ice skating rink, where there are often shows. From Revolution Square, you can see a building I featured in many of my blogs. Like much of Moscow, it is very well decorated during the festive period, especially with these iconic lights around the back of GUM.

There is another city square, and as I stand here, it’s actually still in the process of being decorated, but it will look a lot like what you see now, with all these trees sponsored by various different premium expensive luxury Russian brands.

Of course, a trip to Moscow in the winter wouldn't be complete without ice skating. The most famous rink here in the capital is Gorky Park, which is totally transformed. Imagine Central Park in New York or Regent’s Park in London, but every single path has been turned into ice, and you need skates to get around the park. There are 16,380 square meters of ice and no set route—you can just skate around like you're on a walk in the park.

This year, unlike previous years, they've actually put up so much fencing and security that I can't get a good video from the rink up close. But from this distance, you can see that it's not just ice skating. Once you're on the ice, you can also visit bars and coffee shops. There's a food court just for people who are on the ice. If you're just walking around like I am today, you can't get to them—they're just for the people skating around the rink.

If you've been to Gorky Park and want to try a different rink, I have two recommendations: one is right by Moscow City, the main business district here in Russia, where you can skate with a view of skyscrapers. The other recommendation is VDNH in the north of the city, which is set up in a similar way to Gorky Park. Until recently, it was actually the biggest man-made ice skating rink in the whole world.

At the start of the blog, I said that I'd focus on the center of Moscow, but I also noted that each area of the city has its own little events, decorations, and celebrations. So before I finish, I want to show you one example: near my apartment is this park, Basmanny Garden, here in the Basmanny region. And just as you see throughout Moscow, this park has been decorated for the New Year. It has an ice rink, it has food trucks, and if you're in Moscow, it might be worth checking out what small parks are near where you're staying to see what's happening away from all the tourists in the center.