How to get a Russian travel visa
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Everything you need to know from applying to registering a Russian Travel Visa
Getting a Visa for Russia is NOT a straightforward process.
1. Get an invitation
First, you must have an invitation (visa support letter) to visit Russia. This invitation must be from an authorised tourist agent (for travel visa) or a private individual. Private invitations take weeks and will require loads of paperwork for your friend. Messing with the government is something that we (people from erstwhile Socialist states) hesitate to do, so the best way to go is have a tourist agency invite you.
First whiff of corruption. The ‘invitation’ will be a fake document. It will basically say that “Priyank will be staying at hotel blah blah from this date until that date. He will travel to these places… Everything has been paid.” There are several websites that will send you an invitation, so will most hostels or hotels that you want to stay with. They will send you an invitation for a fee (upto $60) regardless of whether you are actually staying with them or not. I was baffled at the systematization of this underground market of issuing fake documents.
2. Make documents ready
Surprisingly, they don’t ask you for more than your passport, 3 photographs, the invitation letter and the Visa fee. No flights booking, no bank statement, etc. It is likely that rules at different embassies differ. I applied at the Russian embassy in Toronto.
3. Apply for the Visa
It cost me CAD 75 to process my visa. The website and instructions at the embassy says 10 days, but the guy at the counter told me to come back in 3 weeks. The actual visa application day was very funny actually which I will blog about next.
When I got my Visa, about four weeks before my departure, I heaved a sigh of relief. I my excitement knew no bounds. The Russian visa was a shiny pinkish orange card that said my name: “ПРИЙAНК ТАТТ”
I was going to Russia after all!
4. Register your Visa – once in Russia
This is an archaic law dating back to the Soviet times. It is designed to cause maximum discomfort to the foreigners and a way for the government to track their movements. Thankfully now the purpose is limited to notifying the authorities about the place of your stay in Russia.
1. Every foreigner who comes to Russia must have his/her visa registered within 72 hours upon arrival (excluding holidays and weekends).
2. If the foreign citizen changes the place of stay, s/he must register in the new place within the first 3 working days of arrival. What this means is, if you registered your visa in Moscow, and then traveled to St. Petersburg for over 3 working days, you must register over there too.
The interesting thing is that it is not the foreigner’s obligation to register – the accommodating party must do it. However, I stayed in people’s homes most of the time, and asking them to do this would have been a bureaucratic hassle. So I simply did not register until the last week.
Even nicer thing is that the police who randomly check your passport and migration card on the street are in no position to find if you have registered or not, because there is no stamp or a receipt. I was asked about the registration twice, and I lied both times saying it was done at hotel blah blah. 
What if you don’t register? Some people mentioned that acting the dumb foreigner “Я не понимаю порусский” (I don’t understand Russian, या नी पनीमायू पारुस्की) helps – and it helped me indeed. But potentially they could throw you out of the country, penalize you and/or black list you for few years.
Since I read many stories online about people taking a chance and not registering, I decided to go ahead and continue unregistered too. However, as my departure neared, I was getting restless and I even had a dream where I was put in a Russian prison. So in my last week in Russia, a hostel in St. Petersburg registered me for RUR 300 (~USD 15), for 21 days straight. I stayed there only for 1 night. Good deal! 
Links
Waytorussia.net
Thorn Tree forum (Lonely Planet)
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Wow sounds rather bureaucratic and hassle some and makes me afraid to enter Russia from Japan for the Mongolia trip I have been planning forever. However I just plan to transit through the country mostly unless I go to Tuva. Hmmmm. Well far off and a dream journey for now. I wonder if it will be more difficult to get a Russian Visa from the Delhi embassy considering it is a common route for illegal Indians who want to go to Europe. Interesting.
↵Oh Mongolia… how dearly I want to go there! 1 in 200 people have Mongol genes! hehehe… I’ve heard some stories of people having a tough time to get a visa from India, they’ll refuse if they smell even a tiny amount of suspicion. Maybe you’ll have to fly to Mongolia!
↵Again, and informative post. I find this information useful myself, given that I have a trip planned for Russia as well, although I don’t think it will happen in the near future.
↵Thanks Jeruen.
↵Lol, I hear ya, trying to get a China visa was just as hard, I had to write down exactly where I was going to be on an hourly basis. Lucky for me I had an invite, my tour company, still took 2 months to finally get it and they placed it in my passport, wow.
↵Oh nice! China is another difficult country to get into!
You must be excited to get that visa!! I am too!
↵I shall call you ПРИЙAНК ТАТТ now!
This is sooo complicated. Even China (which always have a bad reputation!) is very straightforward: apply for a visa, fill up the paperworks and don’t tick the box “journalist” even if you are, and that’s it. No invitation required, no registration etc.
Only during the Beijing Olympics you have to show you bought the plane ticket and booked accommodation, and it was exceptional.
Oh, and Western names are not translated obviously because there is no alphabet in Chinese!
↵My Chinese visa even had my Name and Date of Birth wrong! I was nervous about entering the country with that but the Embassy people said it would not be a problem and surely it was not.
↵
that’s funny!
↵Oh that’s interesting. I wonder what my translated name will look like… any clue?? Will they ask me what my name means? It means “favorite son” btw. hehehe…
↵There are two way of translating western names:
One is with pinyin, the roman alphabet. For example, Mary could be “meili” because the pronunciation is somewhat similar. This is very tricky for longer western names though, and some syllables that don’t exist in Chinese. And by the way, Chinese names always have one or two syllables (characters) at most.
My name in Chinese is zhuli, because it sounds like “Juliette”.
The other one is to just make a name up!
↵Ah! That’s interesting! I’ll ask my Chinese friends to translate or make a name for me!
↵i also wat to visit russia, but please tell me if they here in russian embassy will ask for original invitation letter received by post or just emailed or fax copy is sufficient here to show in russian embassy in india sothat they may provide the russian visa ? please help me
↵Hi Paras, Rules differ from embassy to embassy so the only way to know is to call up the Russian embassy or consulate in Delhi. All the best. I’ve emailed you too.
↵[...] series of travelogues narrating my trip to Russia. Here are the other posts! « Previous post: How to get a Russian Travel Visa | Next post: Wow, I am in Moscow! [...]
↵[...] us. And I looked away, slightly worried of police (who are everywhere) intervention since I had not registered my travel visa. And she walked behind me. “Do you really want me to go? What kind of a guy are you?” I [...]
↵Hi Priyank,
↵i read your article ,i beleive you can really help me . i want to visit russia to meet one of my friend in vladivostok,we met in Dubai.Now i am in India. i would like to visit my friend on the month of april 2010.she agreed to send me a private invitation,but this is the first time i am going to a country like russia.so if its private invitation ,what all questions the embassy will ask me. As you told instead of all these chaos ,we can try from a travel agency in russia to send me an invitation,but in one site i read like if i take visa from them i should stay in that hotel since they will send invitation like i am going to stay in that hotel …since this friend offered i can stay in her home with her parents.can you suggest which one is best for me ? and one more thing if she send me a private invitiation how will i know whether it reached or not since embassy near to my place is in chennai.
hi Nishanth, well i have visited russia at this august month, but now i wanna go again in January 2010, so well in past i have arranged the tourist invitation letter own my own from india, but this time i wanna get home stay visa , well my friend is from russia itself, he is trying to make home stay visa for me there in russia, but there he is also confuse that how to make it, well i can help u in making tourist invitation letter. and u will not need to show any accommodation in any hotel in russia, i m 100% sure, but in home stay invitation letter neither i nor my friend from russia is sure about anything, plz help me ask ur friend in russia that how she prepared home stay invitation letter ? plz help me, if u need any help in making tourist invitation letter for russia then i can help u, no doubt, this is not so tough thing to do, but home stay visa, haha i m trying for this very first time, so i know nothing about it, if ur russia friend knows about it then plz help me, and how i will tell my russian friend to do so. thanks, u can contact me at pokahai18@yahoo.com bye take care
↵ok i will let you know ..give me some time ..thanks
↵Hello Nishanth and Paras,
Sorry for the delay in responding. I still think that its best to get an invitation from a travel agency for these reasons:
1. It’s easy, hassle free and does not involve your friend making trips to government offices in his/her city. The invitation letter from a tourist agency will specify a hotel booking and also a tour – but the bookings are FAKE. There is no way you could stay in a hotel in downtown Moscow for 3 weeks for a price of $50 – which is what I paid for my invitation letter. Nobody checks it, its a loophole in the system. You can stay anywhere you want.
2. Assuming your Russian friend still sends you an invitation letter, your friend’s job doesn’t end there. When you stay at his/her place, s/he will have to get your tourist visa ‘registered’ – which means making another trip to the government office with their house information, passport information, etc. Many Russians, especially in Moscow, live there unofficially (paying rent in cash – just like India) – and this is a hassle for registration. I am not comfortable putting someone else to do all this work for me.
I just went to a small hotel and got my visa registered there for a minimal fee.
So to reiterate, I suggest getting an invitation from a travel agent – simple, quick and not bothersome for your Russian friend.
↵ok priyank thanks for your reply,one more thing which flight is cheap to go russia if i book from india,as i need a connecting flight from moscow till vladivostok.and wat will be the total expense i will be bearing if i stay for one week.all including visa charges and all and could you please reply me which travel agency you approached for that tourist visa ..just send me the details to my mail.
↵thanks
Just look online yourself or contact a travel agent for flights and costs. I am not a travel agent. Typical accommodation cost at a cheap place is about $30-50 per night. Link to travel agent is given in my post above.
I hope you do some independent research about such basic information before going to a foreign country.
↵And ya one thing more, i would like to thanks PRIYANK, for making such cool website, this is really awesome, keep it up PRIYANk.
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