Carl Faberge's firm made the first of these ultimate Easter eggs in 1885 for the second-to-last tsar to give to his wife, the start of a family tradition that ended with the death of Nicholas II at the hands of the Bolsheviks.
The Faberges have fared better. Carl's only living grandson, Theo, is still designing eggs in his eighties and his daughter Sarah has also taken up the trade.
"It's a wonderful heritage but also a huge responsibility to create pieces that are worthy of the name," Sarah told Reuters by telephone from her home on the south coast of England.
The Grand Collection Gallery, a new venue a short stroll from Lenin's mausoleum, sells their pieces at prices from $200 for a little egg-shaped Christmas decoration up to $35,000 for a full-blown egg.
Theo's 30 cm-high (12 inch) crystal Tercentenary Egg is engraved with nine of the sumptuous palaces that were the tsars' country retreats outside the old imperial capital St Petersburg.
Open the egg up and you find Peter the Great, Russia's great moderniser and the founder of St Petersburg, astride a horse.
"Clearly you're not going to be in the business of creating one piece that's worth millions - and we obviously don't have an Imperial Family to design for," said Sarah, who is 47.
Nevertheless, galleries and museums, including the Hermitage in St Petersburg, are already collecting their work.
"I'm the same as anyone else, I do have a very romanticised view of Russia," said Sarah, who paid a first wintry visit to Russia with her father as a teenager. "When you go there you're not let down."
The intricate Imperial eggs now sell for millions of dollars. Last year oil and metals tycoon Viktor Vekselberg paid the Forbes family more than $90 million for a collection of original designs, to bring them home to Russia.
The collection's pinnacle is the diamond-studded Coronation Egg, set with eagles and containing a little replica coach.
A Faberge egg also starred in Octopussy, one of the James Bond adventures, where the British secret agent, dressed as a clown, foils a renegade Russian general's plot to explode a nuclear bomb in the heart of Europe.
"That film has probably done more for us than anything else," said Philip Birkenstein, chairman of St Petersburg Collection, the firm that groups together Theo and Sarah's work.
Since the name Faberge is a trademark belonging to consumer giant Unilever, Theo and Sarah operate under the new title.
"People who've seen it say it's their ambition to own a real Faberge. We have collectors from dustmen up to royal families," he told Reuters.
The company spent a long time hunting for the right spot in Moscow, with its flash shops and newly-minted millionaires.
"You only get one chance and we can throw a stone at St Basil's," Birkenstein said, referring to the basilica off Red Square whose multi-coloured onion domes are Moscow's most famous landmark.