Ulan Ude (formerly Verkhneudinsk)

As the last Russian stop on the Moscow-Beijing train route before Mongolia—once it was a major hub on the tea route to China—this modest capital of the Buryatan region has long nurtured a mixture of Russian and Asiatic cultures far from the cosmopolitan fury of Moscow. Though it remains covered in the unmistakable, generic Soviet rust that persists in the apartment complexes and sober streets of most Russian cities, Ulan Ude still surprises with its time warped style, the occasional scenic decay of its still glorious wooden classical Russian and Mongolian architecture and the easygoing spirit of its people, half Buryat. Not far from a fantastically dilapidated opera house (decorated with hammers, sickles, and similar Buryatan cresents), a handful of dusty but formidable museums, an energetic market and main street of shops and street performers, and the Brehznev monstrosity of the Hotel Buryatia, sits the excessively large main square and the similarly enormous head that once made it all possible, and impossible. Lenin’s bust might be the world’s largest bust—a fact that means increasingly little and indeed may have never meant much. Especially to a city this far from Moscow, and so close, almost so close to the future. http://www.answers.com/ulan%20ude.