A once-sinister Soviet-era “closed city” where dissidents were held in exile is preparing to roll out the red carpet to greet thousands of England’s World Cup football fans .
Three Lions supporters are expected to arrive at Nizhny Novgorod — 250 miles and four hours’ train ride east of Moscow — over the coming days in the build-up to Sunday’s crunch Group G game against Panama.
A new 45,000-seat stadium will host five other matches during the World Cup, including Lionel Messi’s Argentina against Croatia tomorrow.
But for decades Nizhny Novgorod, Russia’s fifth biggest city, was closed off to foreigners and did not even appear on maps.
Under Soviet rule the ancient city was known as Gorky, after Russian writer Maxim Gorky, and was where dissident nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov was banished for six years.
It was also a secretive centre for building tanks and planes and a key chemical weapons development base until the 1960s. It opened up in the Nineties glasnost era when the governor was Boris Nemtsov, who counted Margaret Thatcher as a fan. He was assassinated in Moscow in 2015.