Get a taste of the real Russia on a river cruise

Anna sighed as she watched my Russian doll slip through my fingers and splash headfirst into a paint pot.

“Be attentive,” she chided. A few minutes later someone else’s doll rolled unceremoniously across the floor.

Giggling at the mishaps, and kitted out in pinafores, we resembled a class of outsize kindergarten pupils, our nursery a colourful wooden building in Mandrogy, a rustic re-creation of a village on the banks of Russia’s Svir River.

When our patient teacher announced “You have 15 minutes left” there was a collective flurry as we started daubing on extra flowers and embellishments.

The one-hour workshop was part of an excursion on our cruise taking in Russia’s two most spectacular cities, St Petersburg and Moscow, 400 miles apart. Some of my fellow classmates created mini-masterpieces, one doll sitting prettily inside another, while the rest of us left with disconcertingly mismatched affairs.

Other attractions in Mandrogy included a vodka museum with 2,800 bottles lined up on the shelves, a pottery, horse-drawn carriage rides and an enchanting woodland walk dotted with carved characters from Russian fairy tales.

My own fairy tale came true visiting St Petersburg, the elegant former Russian capital with its grand boulevards and miles of waterways. We took a guided tour of the Hermitage, one of the world’s greatest museums.