For me the highlight of the trip was a visit to St. Petersburg where we had a massive amount of history to view in just three days.   I became an avid Netflix user two months earlier, renting as many films as I could on Catherine the Great, Czar Nicholas II, Rasputin, and of course several volumes of documentaries roaming through the Hermitage Museum (still looking at those DVDs).  There is a plethora of information on St. Petersburg with a huge focus on the 18, 19, and 20th centuries history – actually too much to read/view before I left on the trip – but I did give it a valiant try!