"The Metro is the whole world now."
— Narration, Metro 2033 (2010)
The Metro
Where most of this Archive's settings take Russia's exterior — its climate, its ruins, its monuments — this one goes underground, into the Moscow Metro specifically, and treats its tunnels and platforms as a complete world unto themselves rather than a mode of transport. The setting recurs across genres precisely because the real Metro offers something almost no other piece of Russian infrastructure does: a genuinely vast, genuinely labyrinthine, and genuinely militarized underground network, built during the Soviet period with a dual civilian and defensive purpose from the outset, which makes it equally credible as a stealth infiltration route, a post-apocalyptic shelter, or both at once.
Metro 2033, Last Light, and Exodus — The Trope Namer
The Metro trilogy, developed by the Ukrainian studio 4A Games and based on Dmitry Glukhovsky's 2005 novel, is the setting's obvious trope namer and its most thorough treatment. Following a nuclear war in 2013, the survivors of Moscow retreat entirely into the Metro, where individual stations calcify over the following two decades into independent statelets — the neo-Stalinist Red Line, the mercantile Hansa ring-line confederation, the neutral Rangers of the Order, and a self-declared Fourth Reich among them — locked in a permanent low-grade war for territory, resources, and ammunition, which doubles as the setting's currency. The protagonist, Artyom, spends the first game navigating this world entirely underground before Metro: Last Light (2013) and Metro Exodus (2019) gradually widen the scope back toward the surface and beyond Moscow itself. The Metro here is not a location within Russia so much as the entirety of what remains of civilization — every other setting in this Archive assumes Russia still exists as a functioning state; this one assumes it collapsed entirely, and that the tunnels are what's left.
Hitman 2: Silent Assassin — St. Petersburg's Working Infrastructure
Hitman 2: Silent Assassin (2002) takes the opposite approach, using the real St. Petersburg metro and its adjoining sewer network as functioning, present-day infrastructure rather than an apocalyptic shelter. Of the game's three St. Petersburg missions — "St. Petersburg Stakeout," "Tubeway Torpedo," and "St. Petersburg Revisited" — all three route Agent 47 through the same metro station as his primary entry and extraction point, with a locker holding his equipment planted at the platform in each case, while the extensive sewer tunnels beneath the city serve as his main route for avoiding street-level patrols entirely. Unlike the Metro series, nothing has gone wrong here: the trains still run, the city above is intact, and the network is simply being used exactly as designed, just by an assassin rather than a commuter. Across three separate missions built around the same infrastructure, the game treats the St. Petersburg metro less as scenery than as a genuinely reusable piece of level geography, well-modeled enough to bear returning to across a fifth of the entire campaign.
What the Trope Inherits From Reality
The premise underlying both treatments is not an invention. The Moscow Metro is the busiest metro system outside Asia and, at over 200 stations across more than a dozen lines, one of the largest in the world, and it was genuinely built during the Stalin era with a dual purpose in mind: mass transit above ground, and functioning bomb shelter below it. Several of its deepest stations, including Park Pobedy at roughly 84 meters, are widely understood to have been engineered with exactly this kind of contingency in mind, giving the Metro series' premise — that the tunnels could plausibly outlast a catastrophe on the surface — a foundation in genuine Soviet civil engineering rather than pure invention. What the fiction adds is the apocalypse itself and the fractured factional politics that follow it; what it inherits, largely intact, is the scale and defensive logic of the actual network beneath Moscow.
Notable Appearances
| Title | Setting | Framing |
|---|---|---|
| Hitman 2: Silent Assassin (2002) | St. Petersburg metro and sewer network | Functioning infrastructure, present day |
| Metro 2033 (2010) | Moscow Metro, post-nuclear war | The entirety of surviving civilization |
| Metro: Last Light (2013) | Moscow Metro and surface | Factional war, gradual return to the surface |
| Metro Exodus (2019) | Moscow Metro and beyond | Departure from the Metro into the wider country |
Conclusion
The Metro earns its place in this catalogue for the same reason the Kremlin does: it is a real, specific piece of Russian infrastructure carrying enough built-in weight — scale, secrecy, a genuine dual civilian and defensive purpose — that fiction barely needs to embellish it to make the setting work. Where the Metro trilogy imagines the tunnels as the last redoubt of a civilization that has already ended, Hitman 2 uses the same kind of network at the opposite extreme, as ordinary, functioning transit that happens to double as the perfect corridor for an assassin who needs to disappear. Between them, the two treatments cover nearly the entire range this Archive tracks elsewhere in aboveground form: order collapsing into faction and warlordism on one hand, a functioning state going about its business, unaware of who is moving through its infrastructure, on the other.