The Садовое Кольцo circles Moscow. In tsarist times it was a ring of greens spaces and gardens (сады) on the rim of the city. Today its name is an oxymoron, as it is a common place for пробки, Moscow’s massive traffic jams. But in this video, it’s unusually empty, and the driver makes it all the way around the city in six minutes.

I’ve been in Moscow traffic jams at 2 am, so I don’t know when he managed to find the Sadovoye car free. Judging from the sky, it’s either late evening or early morning, which in the summer months could be around midnight or 3 am.

It’s a little hard to tell what he’s driving by because the camera jostles all over the place, but you can see a few of the Seven Sisters (big Stalinist skyscrapers) on either side. Most of the buildings are from the Brezhnev and Khrushchev years, but there’s a few pre-revolutionary ones too. I believe they start driving somewhere around Pushkin Square, and end just past Kievskaya, going around clockwise. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Just a few years ago a second ring road around Moscow was completed. It’s called the МКАД (em-kahd), and is one of the few Russian highways that looks like Western ones with soaring ramps and restricted access.