A few hundred Cossacks, a Stroganov fortress on the Kama and a khan's capital on the Irtysh: in four years Yermak turned a raid into the Russian entry into Siberia.
The route follows the campaign from Orel-gorodok over the Urals to the battle at Chuvash Cape, the fall of Qashliq, Yermak's death at the Vagay and the founding of Tobolsk. Dates differ between chronicles and modern sources, and the sources mark the death site and the legends as uncertain; the notes at each stop say which.
In March 1917 Nicholas II came home from abdication to the palace where his family had lived as emperor and empress. Sixteen months later none of them was alive. In between lay exile: first under the Provisional Government, then under the Bolsheviks, ever farther east.
The route follows that road from the Alexander Palace through the governor's house in Tobolsk to Yekaterinburg and the forest sites nearby, where the story ended and where it was later argued over. It is told plainly, and the final stops are places of mourning for many visitors.
In 2035 Artyom leaves the Moscow Metro on a stolen train, the Aurora, and finds that Russia beyond the city is still alive. The sequel to Metro 2033 turns a Moscow underground story into a rail journey across the whole country.
The route follows the Volga, the Ark at Yamantau, the Caspian and Novosibirsk to Lake Baikal. The game's places are invented versions of real ones, so every pin is an area, not a level.
In 1973 Paul Theroux set out from London Victoria on a four-month railway loop through Europe, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, then came back on the Trans-Siberian Railway. His travelogue, published in 1975, became a classic of the genre.
This route follows episodes the book's reviewers single out, from the Direct-Orient Express to Istanbul, Calcutta, Burma, Vietnam and Tokyo. The book's own text could not be checked, so some pins mark a city's station rather than a scene, and some places are not safe to visit now.
In the spring of 2004 Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman set out from London on motorcycles, heading east for New York with cinematographer Claudio von Planta. The ride ran from 14 April to 29 July and crossed twelve countries and 18,887 miles.
The route follows the highlights: a church built of bones in the Czech Republic, a UNICEF project in Mongolia, the mud of the Zilov Gap, the Road of Bones to Magadan, Mount Rushmore and the ride into New York. Pins mark places and areas; the real line of travel ran between them.
In 1725 a Russian naval captain set out across a continent to answer one question: are Asia and America joined? Vitus Bering's two Kamchatka expeditions, the second of them part of the Great Northern Expedition, took years of hardship to answer it.
The route follows seven places from the Tsar's order in Saint Petersburg to Bering's death on an uninhabited island in 1741. The stops are not one continuous line, so they are shown as separate markers. Dates are Old Style (Julian), as Russian records of the time kept them; the modern calendar runs 11 days ahead.
Jules Verne sends a Czar's courier 3,400 miles across Russia: from a night fête in Moscow, through the Urals and the Tartar invasion, to besieged Irkutsk. Michael Strogoff carries one letter, a false name and a promise to the Czar.
The route follows the book from the Kremlin through Nizhny Novgorod, the Urals, Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk and Lake Baikal to Irkutsk. Verne names towns rather than buildings, so every pin is approximate.
Georgiy Daneliya's 1964 comedy follows one day in the life of Kolya, a night-shift metro builder who cannot stop helping people, and Volodya, a young writer just arrived from Siberia. From a dog bite on a boulevard to a farewell on a metro platform, the two zigzag across Moscow with a wedding, a record shop and a chase through a park on the way.
The route follows the film in order through seven places, from Chistoprudny Boulevard to Universitet station. Some scenes were shot in a different street from the one the story names, and the text says where.
Contains accounts of deaths in extreme cold.
In January 1959 a group of ten experienced hikers from the Ural Polytechnical Institute set out on a ski trek into the northern Urals. Nine never came back: they cut their way out of their tent on a mountain slope one February night and died in the snow, and the cause is still discussed.
This route follows the group from the institute in Sverdlovsk by train and lorry to the last village, then up to the mountain and the pass now named after them, and ends with the survivor's memorial. It sticks to the record; the explanations are left to the reader. The exact tent site is approximate.
In the spring of 1890 the playwright and doctor Anton Chekhov left Moscow, crossed Siberia and sailed to Sakhalin, a convict island north of Japan, to count its inhabitants one by one. He kept the plan secret until January, travelled 82 days across Siberia, and came home months later by sea.
The route follows his way from his Moscow house through Tomsk, Irkutsk and the Amur to the penal posts of Sakhalin and back to Vladivostok. Several pins mark whole towns, because Chekhov's lodgings are not recorded.
Puyi became emperor of China at the age of two, lost the throne at six, and spent the rest of his life being used by others: as a puppet emperor for Japan in Manchuria, then as a war criminal re-educated in a Communist prison, and finally as an ordinary citizen working in a Beijing garden. Bernardo Bertolucci's 1987 epic, which won all nine Oscars it was nominated for, was the first Western feature film allowed to shoot inside the Forbidden City.
The route visits the real places of Puyi's life, most of them museums today. The film compresses and softens his story, and some of its scenes were shot in Italy.
