On the edge of Red Square we line up reverently to enter the tomb of the father of the Great Socialist Revolution of October 1917. “Ladies and gentlemen,” announces Svetlana, our guide, fastidiously enunciating her words, “now we are going to visit the left-overs of Lenin.” In silence we file pass the waxen-faced “body” which would not look out of place in Madame Tussauds. “Is it for real?” the sixth-form students from Wokingham want to know, as we emerge into daylight. “That,” says Svetlana, 32, with an enigmatic smile, “is one of the great mysteries of Communism - the Russians don’t visit him. ”

Flying into Moscow on an early January afternoon, the land is covered in snow, the trees are black stalks and the roads and runways are grey ice and slush. The first colour you see is the red tape stuck to the arrivals floor, which the guard will not let you cross until the woman at the visa checkpoint has stopped chatting to a colleague. The officials everywhere seem miscast as stony-faced relics of the Soviet era. It’s like landing in a black-and-white B-movie where the characters don’t quite fit the new post-Communist script.

For the 41 sixth-formers of St Crispin’s, a Berkshire comprehensive, this was not too surprising. Their expectations of Russia had been shaped by Cold War news bulletins and coverage of the bombing of Chechnya. The point of their trip, said tour leader John Peet, St Crispin’s head of chemistry, was “to see how other societies are run and to get them to live with each other”. By the end of a week split between Moscow and St Petersburg they discovered that though many Russians are struggling to adapt to the switch from central planning to Western-style free market economy, this is a country rich in culture, history and tragedy on a scale that few can match.

Of the two cities Moscow is certainly the best place to start. The contrast with Britain is stark and interesting but by comparison with St Petersburg it would only be a let down to travel the other way around. The tour, organised through ETS Travel, a firm specialising in school visits, included a full daily programme of sightseeing and some evening excursions, mainly by coach.

The coach journeys themselves are an eye-opener. Moscow’s streets are wide - up to 16 lanes each - and the faceless offices and rectangular appartment blocks, many of them built in the Stalin era, are enormous. The buildings have been constructed on the scale of a superpower with the occasional orthodox church, crowned with colourful onion-domed towers, left squashed in between like an abandoned fairy castle.

The first day took in Lenin’s tomb, Red Square, a trip to the old Arbat street to buy souvenirs and a glimpse of Moscow in the dark from the viewpoint at the state university, one of seven buildings in the city nicknamed “Stalin’s wedding cakes” which look like a stack of New York office blocks with Victorian spires on top.

We also visited the beautiful Convent of the New Maidens - some of whom were anything but, since this is where the Tsars used to imprison their old wives when they fancied a new one - and the Kremlin grounds, where the Russian parliament sits, for a tour of the lavish collection of church robes, Tsars’ thrones and the Faberge egg collection in the Armoury. One throne is decorated with 900 diamonds.

But even in the Kremlin, where the guards in their military great coats and fur hats blow their whistles like football referees every time a tourist steps into the road, the overwhelming sense, as elsewhere in present-day Moscow, is of power without style.

The same could not be said of St Petersburg. The eight-hour journey by train from Moscow - an adventure made exciting by stern warnings from the teachers and tour guides to double-lock your four-bed cabins against thieves in the night - ends on a high note as you realise you have arrived in one of the world’s most beautiful cities. Situated on the banks of the River Neva and split up by hundreds of rivers and canals, the old city is a delight to tour, whether by coach or on foot.

A relatively young city, founded by Peter the Great in 1703, it was built to provide a capital that symbolised Russia’s coming of age as a world power bridging Asia and Europe. Its opulent, baroque-style palaces with moulded alabaster and gilt-edged interiors are an artistic monument to the inequality of wealth and power that prompted a succession of revolutions, culminating in Lenin’s seizure of power.

We spent a whole day on a drive that took in St Isaac’s Cathedral; a walk on the frozen Neva; a visit to the St Peter and Paul hexagonal fortress to see the burial place of most of the imperial Tsars; and a tour of the Battleship Aurora and its gun that fired the shot that gave the signal to the Red Guards to storm the Winter Palace and secure the Bolshevik revolution.

But no amount of planning could guarantee the spontaneous moments that the students enjoyed so much - the sudden appearance of Russian brides in full dresses and furs at every monument to have their picture taken, because Friday is the day for getting married, or, best of all, when a bather who had cut a hole in the ice asked us for $5 to watch his moment of agony as he lowered himself into the water. It was worth every cent.

Lenin moved the capital to Moscow in 1918, but St Petersburg’s role in Soviet history did not end there. The shadow of the Second World War hangs over the city. For 900 days, when it was known as Leningrad, it was beseiged by Nazi forces, during which time 650,000 inhabitants died and a third of all homes were bombed.

The scale of the destruction wreaked is made most apparent through the pictures in every room of the grand palaces which show how they looked after the Nazis retreated. Now painstakingly restored, the palaces are ideal places to learn about the history of the Tsars. Those at Puskin and Pavlovsk, an hour’s drive south of the city, are worth the extra journey because of the picturesque setting in the country snow (at least five layers of clothes required, it was around minus 15 degrees in early January) and the chance of a ride on a horse-driven sleigh.

But most impressive of all is the Winter Palace in the Hermitage, which boasts 12 miles of galleries and 3 million exhibits, from furniture and porcelain to a massive collection of works of some of the world’s finest artists, especially the Impressionists. In the White Dining Room the French-made clock still stands at eleven minutes past two, the time when Red Guards burst in to arrest the Kerensky’s ministers in the early hours of October 26, 1917.

In Moscow our evenings were taken up with a tour of the metro, decorated with chandeliers and mosaics but built by Stalin’s victims; a performance of Don Quixote at the Bolshoi; and the Moscow State Circus, whose use of performing animals caused many St Crispins pupils to wince, particularly when a brown bear began Russian dancing across the stage. In St Petersburg we were amused by the poor standard of music in the once-illegal Jazz Philharmonic but enormously enjoyed the sight of Russian dancers leaping into the air and twirling around the stage in a folk evening set in a 19th-century palace.

A tour with such a busy schedule is good value for money but there is a danger of spending too much time cocooned in a coach. When it failed to arrive one morning in Moscow, the St Crispin’s teachers improvised by taking a group of students on to the streets with two guides to ask ordinary Russians about their own lives. This was a real eye-opener and a refreshing break from the inpenetrable patriotism of Svetlana, our guide.

Savva, 21, had escaped the draft because he was a student. He liked country and rock music and thought if the members of the government had children fighting in Chechnya they would take a different policy. Some 19-year-old waitresses told headboy Tom Morgan, 17, that Communism was all in the past and they thought English people were “cool” - before their boss shouted at us for taking photographs.

A 65-year-old woman pensioner on Pounds 130,000 roubles (Pounds 25) a month, with a gold front tooth but wearing a shabby coat, said: “I liked the Communist regime better. Under them I had a pension of only 32 roubles and that was enough for everything.” She railed against the private entrepreneurs in the rows of kiosks that have sprung up in the past two years, lining the streets and park perimeters. “The young people sitting in kiosks,” she said, pounding her blanched fists together, “are those who don’t want to work.”

The notion that buying goods in one place and selling them in another could be called work was something that even Llena, 25, our tour representative, found hard to accept. Though the days of queues for goods are long gone, there is still a supply economy mentality. The exhibition centres in Moscow’s Space Park are now stacked with audio-visual goods presented about as attractively as a tray of own-brand baked beans in this country.

Had the trip changed the students’ view of Russia? Alexis Whittaker, 18, said: “I was stunned how backward they were. It made me appreciate how much I have got, but I wasn’t expecting everything to be so big.” Claudine Fontana, 16, said: “Everyone said it would be very poor but it wasn’t like that at all. ” And Tom Morgan was most surprised by Svetlana’s unshakable conviction that all journalists in the UK are employed by the state.

St Crispin’s has 14 years’ experience of travelling to Russia and John Peet had been twice before, once on a leaders’ inspection tour organised by ETS Travel. “I would encourage anyone to go, but it does take some serious preparation and you must go to one of the companies like ETS and take their advice,” he said.

But nothing will prepare schoolchildren for the Russian food. A typical dinner - even in a four-star Moscow hotel - consisted of a starter of shredded cabbage in stale tasting oil followed by shredded cabbage soup, then a main course of often half-cooked chicken, rice and up to 20 peas, washed down with musty tasting fruit juice. When the plane home lifted off into the Baltic snows the cry went up: “Hooray, no more cabbage!” o St Crispin school’s eight-day tour plus optional excursions, staying in 3 and 4- star hotels, cost Pounds 580 each. For more details contact ETS Travel, 0763 262464.