This town on the Protva River carries the name of Georgy Zhukov, the Soviet marshal who commanded at Moscow, Stalingrad and Berlin and is probably the most famous Russian soldier of the twentieth century. He was born in a peasant house in the village of Strelkovka, a few kilometres away, and the area has made much of him: there is a museum dedicated to his life, a monument, and the town itself was renamed in his honour in the 1990s. It has around twelve thousand people and the quiet, practical air of a district centre.
The Protva valley is pleasant country, with the river winding between wooded banks, meadows and small villages. Just to the north lies Obninsk, the science city where the world's first nuclear power station for civilian grid use was switched on in the 1950s; it is now a museum, and the town is full of research institutes. Between these two places the landscape is surprisingly green, with pine forest and birch groves, and the river attracts fishermen and summer swimmers.
For riders, Zhukovo works as an early stop on a route heading south toward Kaluga and the Ugra River. The roads around here are typical of the Kaluga region, a mixture of decent main roads with trucks and narrower country lanes with patched surfaces, gentle curves and a few hills where the road dips to cross a stream. In autumn the colours along the Protva are lovely, and on a clear day in early summer the light is long and soft well into the evening.
The practical side is simple. Fuel stations, shops and cafes are easy to find in town, and Obninsk, about eleven kilometres north, has the full range of services, from supermarkets to workshops. If you want to see the Zhukov museum, it is small and well kept, with personal belongings and wartime material, and gives a sense of how far one peasant boy from these fields travelled. Afterwards, the riverbank is a good place for a quiet break before heading on toward Kaluga.