More than 500,000 people visited Moscow museums during the "Night of Arts" program that offered free admission before midnight for two months at the end of last year, the Culture Ministry said.
Another program to promote museum-going, the "Intermusey" festival, saw the number of visitors increase six-fold from the previous year, reaching 30,000 people from 5,000 people in 2012, the ministry said in a report published on the government website Wednesday.
The festival offered tours of major art galleries around the country, as well as of government agencies' exhibition halls that are generally closed to the public.
The "Night of Arts" program, which opened on Nov. 3, included the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Darwin Museum of Natural History, and other galleries and concert halls in the capital, according to the program's website.
The program may be expanded to other Russian cities in 2014, Vechernyaya Moskva reported last fall.