On 18 June 1937 three Soviet airmen took off from Moscow in a single-engine plane and landed in Washington State more than 63 hours later, having flown over the North Pole. It was the first non-stop flight from the Soviet Union to the United States.
The route follows the crew from the airfield near Shchyolkovo to the landing at Pearson Field, then to the general's table, the White House and the monument that still stands by the runway. The path over the Arctic is shown only as a symbolic pin.
The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games send scavengers called stalkers through the Zone, a radioactive wasteland built from the real Chernobyl exclusion zone. The developers copied bridges, railways and buildings from photographs and visits, then bent the geography for gameplay.
This route goes from the edge of the Zone to the reactor, setting each game location beside its real counterpart. The real zone is restricted and trespassers are prosecuted, so this is a map to read, not a trip to plan.
Twenty years after a nuclear war, the survivors of Moscow live in the Metro, and a young man named Artyom must carry a warning from his home station across the whole network. The novel and the game built on it use real station names, so you can follow Artyom's trip on an ordinary city map.
The route runs from VDNKh in the north through Kitay-gorod, Paveletskaya and Kievskaya to the Ostankino Tower. The book and the game differ in places; where they do, the text says so. The library stop is a likely match, not a named place.
Andrei Tarkovsky's Zone, a fenced-off wilderness where a guide takes a writer and a professor toward a Room said to grant wishes, was largely shot around Tallinn, Estonia, among abandoned hydropower plants, a power station and an old chemical works.
This route follows the film's story through those places: the factory and power plant seen before the Zone, the gate, the river plants where the journey was shot, a highway bridge and the power station that smokes behind the final homecoming. Exact spots are often unrecorded, so most pins are approximate.
Danila Bagrov comes home from the First Chechen War, goes to look for his older brother in Saint Petersburg and ends up a hitman by accident. In the sequel he is in Moscow and then Chicago, chasing the men who threaten a dead friend's twin brother.
The route follows Danila through Vitebsky Station, the Adamini House, a market and a cemetery in Petersburg, then Moscow and the American stops. Several stops are filming locations standing in for the story's places.
On 12 April 1961 a pilot climbed into a small capsule on top of a rocket and became the first person in space. The flight lasted less than two hours; the road to it took a year of training, and the days after it turned a pilot into a worldwide celebrity.
This route follows Yuri Gagarin from the training ground at Moscow's Khodynka Airfield to the launch pad at Baikonur, the field in the Saratov region where he came down, the Kremlin ceremony and the museum that keeps his capsule. The museum pin marks the Energia company site rather than the museum itself.
In October 1934 the Chinese Communists' main army, beaten by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists, broke out of its base in Jiangxi and fled west. A year and some 9,000 kilometres later, after river crossings under fire, snow passes and a high-altitude swamp, a few thousand survivors reached northern Shaanxi. On the way, Mao Zedong rose to lead the party, and the retreat became its founding legend.
The route follows the Central Red Army, the best-known of several Long March columns, in date order. Official histories have polished some episodes, and historians still argue about how much fighting there was at Luding Bridge; the texts note where accounts disagree. Most stops now have memorials and museums.
