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26Â Things That Can Only Happen inÂ Russia

The most popular British newspaper The Daily Telegraph collected several facts about Russia, a country that is famous for its reckless people and unexplainable things. This country will impress you with its incredible cultural heritage and interesting history.

Bright Side invites you to get acquainted with some peculiar facts that you probably don’t know about Russia.

Roads in Moscow are so busy that wealthy Russians “hire” fake ambulances to scatter traffic jams.
There was a restaurant in Moscow staffed entirely by twins. Now it’s closed.
The Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg is home to more than 70 cats that protect the collection from rodents. Empress Elisabeth invented this tradition in 1745. By the way, the total length of the marble corridors of the Hermitage is almost 22 kilometers (13 miles).

Russians like cloakrooms. If you go to the theatre or a restaurant, it will be suggested that you hand in your coat to the cloakroom. As a rule, only babushkas work there.
In the 90s, PepsiCo owned USSR submarines for a short period of time. The company bought 17 submarines that were sold to a Swedish company for scrap recycling. The president of PepsiCo told the National Security Advisor of the USA: “We are disarming the USSR faster than you.”
Hotel Astoria in Saint Petersburg is the place where Hitler planned to hold a victory banquet after conquering the city.

Ter Sami language was traditionally spoken in the northeastern part of the Kola Peninsula. Nowadays, only 2 people speak this language.
There’s a cafe chain called anti-cafe where you only have to pay for your time spent there and all snacks and beverages come for free.
The street cleaning day is called Subbotnik (Subbota means Saturday in Russian). Russian citizens clean the streets picking up garbage and trash. It’s volunteer unpaid work on weekends following the October Revolution.

The average life expectancy among Russian men is 65 years. It’s lower than in North Korea and Iraq. And Russian women usually live to the age of 75.
Lake Karachay is a nuclear waste storage facility. If you spent an hour there, you would probably die. In 2015, it was decided to backfill it with concrete blocks.
The smaller a town is, the stranger women’s haircuts are.

There’s one of the scariest pedestrian suspension bridges in the world there. Skybridge is 439 m (1,440 ft) long. It’s located between the city of Adler and Krasnaya Polyana, an urban-type settlement.
Oymyakon is one of the coldest permanently inhabited locales on Earth. In 1933, a temperature of −67.7 °C (−89.9 °F) was recorded at Oymyakon’s weather station.
The Moscow Metro is probably the most beautiful subway in the world.

There’s a belief that there’s a secret underground metro system called Metro 2. It connects locations of national importance.
In the White Dining Room in the Hermitage Palace there’s a clock. It stopped at 2:10 AM on the night of October 25,1917 when Kerensky’s provisional government, that had held power since the February revolution, was arrested by the Bolsheviks. It is that very moment that Russia slipped into communism.
1,800 skiers and snowboarders wearing swimsuits descended a slope and set a Guinness world record in Sochi.

Russians pickle everything: cucumbers, tomatoes, and even former chiefs.
In the Museum of History of Saint Petersburg near the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad, the grim silence is interrupted only by the sound of a metronome. During the siege of Leningrad, the radio used to transmit this sound to let people know that the city was still alive.
Legend held that Ivan the Terrible blinded the architect who created the Cathedral of Vasily the Blessed so that he could not re-create the masterpiece anywhere else.

In Uglich (a town near Moscow), there’s a red and white church that marks a place where 8-year-old Tsarevich Dmitriy, the son of Ivan the Terrible and the last of the Rurik dynasty, was murdered by the order of Boris Godunov. To avoid a rebellion, investigators concluded that the boy fell and accidentally stabbed himself 7 times.
Russia is one of the countries with the most time zones worldwide. There are 11 time zones.
The Amber Room is one of the world’s greatest masterpieces decorated in amber panels backed with gold leaf and mirrors. It was located in the Catherine Palace of Tsarskoye Selo near Saint Petersburg. The room was looted by the Nazis and brought to Königsberg for reconstruction, but its whereabouts are now unknown.