If there were awards for featuring in clichés, Moscow would win every year. Nerve-centre of the “Evil Empire”; bastion of the Cold War; a convenient short-hand for overblown Soviet and Russian bombast… grim concrete soviet-suprematist architecture which said more as the backdrop than the newsreader sitting in front of it. And you thought this was the whole story?

Behind those clichés is an ancient city built around the spectacular medieval walled citadel of the Kremlin – the third-largest city in Europe, and the fastest-growing. If St Petersburg is San Francisco, then Moscow is NYC – brash, loud, high-rise, shameless… and dedicated to having fun. The cream of the cultural crop is the city’s soviet legacy – the Tretyakov Gallery and Pushkin Fine Arts Museum, and not only the Bolshoi, but at least five other award-winning venues to enjoy ballet, opera, and classical music. The Kremlin’s medieval cathedrals, towers and bastions are only the start of sightseeing which can take in several ancient monasteries, the grand mansions the C19th merchants built whilst the nobility were off in St P, and of course, all that soviet-legacy stuff too – the Metro, the “Seven Sisters” Stalin-skyscrapers, Gorky Park, and lots more.

The tempo rises when night falls… Moscow’s restaurant-scene has catapulted forwards, with theme-restaurants, trad restaurants and places serving juicy stuff from the former Soviet Empire (Russians love Georgian food like the Dutch love Indonesian) jockeying for your business with names you already know like TGI-Fridays and The Hard Rock Café. Russians go wild when they party, and it’s no-holds-barred… even more so in the wild hip nightclubs on the new-chic drag of Kuznetsky Most. And if £1.50 per bottle Stoli was too much of a temptation last night, fix your pokhmelie (“hangover”) with a java-jolt at any of the hordes of new Seattle-style coffee-bars around the capital.