In the immediate vicinity of the hotel, guests will find two of the most spectacular Soviet monuments in the city. The incredible titanium Space Obelisk, a soviet rocket blasting off into the sky on a 100 meter plume of glistening metallic smoke, was built in 1964 to celebrate Cosmonaut Yury Gagarin's first orbit of the earth. The monument houses an impressive museum detailing the history of Russian Cosmonautics and is guarded by a statue of a pensive Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of Russian rocketry.
Across the road from the hotel towers the impressive Worker and Collective Farm Girl statue, designed by Vera Mukhina for the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris Expo to embody the very spirit and energy of the Soviet State. Striding bravely forward, with hammer and sickle raised high, the enormous figures represented industrial progress and Soviet dynamism and are among the most famous images of the Soviet inter-war years.
Directly opposite the Cosmos stands the expansive All-Russian Exhibition Center (VVTs/VDNKh). Initially created in 1939 as the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, the center was intended to demonstrate the economic and industrial achievements of Socialism in Russia and provide a forum for monumental Stalinist architecture and design. The exhibition complex became a permanent fixture under Leonid Brezhnev but by the 1980s rather than celebrating the might of Soviet industry, the pavilions began to exhibit more and more Western-manufactured goods. Visitors can wander freely throughout the exhibition complex visiting pavilions dedicated to Atomic Energy, the Russian Coal Industry, Education and Science, Electro-technology, Agriculture and the Russian Space Program, featuring a genuine Vostok rocket similar to the one that sent Gagarin into orbit on his first successful mission.
Also located just a short walk from the Cosmos are the Russian Academy of Science's Botanical Gardens, covering 860 acres of parkland. Founded in 1945, the Gardens now house the largest collection of exotic plants and trees in the country.
