Driving in Russia

[Emmanouil]

Hi to everyone and kindly accept my apologies for writing in English.

I am a new member in this site and I am planning a trip in Baltic countries and St. Petersburg in May. The part of the trip that I am a bit worried is driving in Russia. Watching related videos on youtube, it discourages me, but I think that this kind of videos show the extreme cases and not the regular driving habits in Russia. My plan is to  stay overnight in Tallinn and next day drive to St. Petersburg, where I will spend a couple of days there. Is anyone having driving experience in Russia? Any potential issues that may arise in the borders? I will not be driving long distance in Russia, as St. Petersburg is 160km from the border line with Estonia.

Any advice or sharing your own driving experiences in Russia (especially the route Tallinn to St. Petersburg) will be appreciated.

Wishing to everyone a happy, healthy and prosperous new year!

 

Cheers,

Emmanouil

[Filip Gustafson]

Hello and welcome to Overlanding.nu!

 

It's my understanding that many of the traffic accidents you see on Youtube takes place in rural areas, and ofcourse in Moscow.
They also have new regulations for winter tires, whichs seems to be a cause of many accidents.
I'm planning a trip throught russia in 2020, and I'm not that afraid about the drivning there. Just keep distance, and plan ahead

( https://www.continental-tires.com/transport/knowhow/european-winter-regulations )
 

[Pokerfjes]

I have never been to Russia, but I would not drive there without a dual channel dashcam.

[Eirik L. P.]

Den 31.12.2018 at 12.47, Emmanouil skrev:

Hi to everyone and kindly accept my apologies for writing in English.

I am a new member in this site and I am planning a trip in Baltic countries and St. Petersburg in May. The part of the trip that I am a bit worried is driving in Russia. Watching related videos on youtube, it discourages me, but I think that this kind of videos show the extreme cases and not the regular driving habits in Russia. My plan is to  stay overnight in Tallinn and next day drive to St. Petersburg, where I will spend a couple of days there. Is anyone having driving experience in Russia? Any potential issues that may arise in the borders? I will not be driving long distance in Russia, as St. Petersburg is 160km from the border line with Estonia.

Any advice or sharing your own driving experiences in Russia (especially the route Tallinn to St. Petersburg) will be appreciated.

Wishing to everyone a happy, healthy and prosperous new year!

 

Cheers,

Emmanouil

Hi Emmanoul! I bought myself a LC 2009  this past December and will start Overlanding this coming summer, but before then, I have been on 3 - 4 weeks car drivings in Central America, Western America,  Eastern Australia and finally in Russia on  July 13th. of 2016, so I have experience of driving and seeing places, but with expensive Hotels.... 

As I have put all trips into  Excel sheets, I have all expenses and doings to give to you if you want.

We payed kr. 1515,-  for turistvisum to "Visumservice" - you will get it for under half price by staying in line at the  Russian Embassy. When you enter Tallinn, you will find a nice European city with an old Town. Driving out of Tallinn is easy with EU's contribution to a new super 2-lane highway, but when you get to the city of Narva which is a city with mostly descendants from Russia (many expensive suvs  (except the super city mall), and a city with typical Russian design and quality, you know you are almost in Russia.  Its takes 1 hour to get through this border, but we did not know we had to have a sort of visum for our car, so we stood in line for almost 2 hours on a parking lot in the beginning of the city to apply for a car permit before the actual entering!  This irritating case was the only problem we had on our two week long drive in Russia!   The road for the next hour is terrible, but  once you are about 1 hour from beautiful St. Petersburg, you will be on a 2 lane high speed highway. PS! Watch out for cars passing at night on the Toll road  if you take that road, (approx kr.1,5 or 4,- ) - they might be going over 150kmh...  After 3 days in St. Petersburg we drove to Moscow for 3 days before we drove to Riga,  Tallin and  Stockholm (Kapellskärs Hamn ).

Bottom line: If you can bear with staying in line with grumpy border police going in and out of Russia, you will find out that Russia does accept  VISA all over, even at Shell gas stations.... They also have speed cameras near city.    Putin  wants to make his cities better than our european cities....

Good, luck, Eirik

 

[Wiberg]

Welcome to Overlanding.nu @Emmanouil!

My only experience of driving in Russia is from Salla in Finland to Kandalakja in Russia, and then spending 6 or 7 days driving great overlanding-roads on the Kola peninsula. 

During this trip we saw a lot of strange things but not anything alarming traffic wise.

We had brilliant help with visas etc by our guide Frank at Kola Travels.  

I guess the closer u get to the bigger cities, the more crazy traffic u will see.

[Eirik L. P.]

Yes, I forgot one more thing of interest - in Moscow they have å 4 lane road like our "Karl Johan"  where some big AMG Mercedes SUV's did get our bad attention when they gave full gass at a stopping light, in the middle of a big city as Moscow is. There was also a couple of similar small incidents, but we did feel  safe in our little Nissan Primera 2003 among mostly more expensive cars which we saw only in the city of St. Petersburg and Moscow.  I think I saw 4 Lada's from the 1980's, but that was between the two cities where the scenery is still more like the 1940's Russia.....

 

Mvh, Eirik

 

[Emmanouil]

Hi guys,

Thank you all of you for your responses. I have now a more clear view on driving into Russia. My major concern is/was driving in the rural areas as I don't intend to drive within the cities. It looks like that I will need to prepare all the paperwork in advance, as it can become challenging.

@ Eirik, your response was what I was exactly looking for. Spot on! I agree with you about the hotels. This is one of my "lessons learnt" and I think it applies in most Eastern European countries.

 

Best regards,

Emmanouil

[Jonas Andersson]

On 31.12.2018 at 12.47, Emmanouil sade:

Hi to everyone and kindly accept my apologies for writing in English.

I am a new member in this site and I am planning a trip in Baltic countries and St. Petersburg in May. The part of the trip that I am a bit worried is driving in Russia. Watching related videos on youtube, it discourages me, but I think that this kind of videos show the extreme cases and not the regular driving habits in Russia. My plan is to  stay overnight in Tallinn and next day drive to St. Petersburg, where I will spend a couple of days there. Is anyone having driving experience in Russia? Any potential issues that may arise in the borders? I will not be driving long distance in Russia, as St. Petersburg is 160km from the border line with Estonia.

Any advice or sharing your own driving experiences in Russia (especially the route Tallinn to St. Petersburg) will be appreciated.

Wishing to everyone a happy, healthy and prosperous new year!

 

Cheers,

Emmanouil

Hi

Youtube only shows the bad parts, that actually are the same in most countries. The traffic in Russia are smoother then for example in Sweden. We drive much harder and do not show courtesy very well. The Russian are much better at that. But of course there are a lot of traffic in the major cities and they do tend to keep shorter distances, so of course there are some what smaller margins. I was there for nearly three weeks and I only saw one accident. And that was a minor crash where all the cars anyway more or less was standing still in a cue. I will not be worried at all for the traffic security when I'll go back to Russia. Common sense and you'll do fine.

The Russian are more or less obligited to have dash cams. And that's the reason why you see so much accidents and funny things from there at Youtube. They use the dash cams to prevent corruption, and showing what happened in case of accident, for the insurance companies. Otherwise you will have a hard time to prove anything. Before I went there I downloaded the GPS-app Sygic, where you can run an automatic dash cam in the background. It records about the last minute or so incase of accident. It can also run 99% of the functions offline. If you just download the countries you'll be passing thru in advance you should be able do do the entire trip without accessing the internet concerning car navigation.

 

This is how it was when I entered from Finland, by the route between Helsinki and Sankt Petersburg:

When I was approaching the border there was a queue many kilometers before the border station. But was only Russian citizens that need to queue up there. A Finn told me to overtake them, all the way to the border station. At the station it self I needed to wait close up for my turn. First I had to stop between the road barriers. I later learned to take care if they wanted me to stop after the first one, under the roof where you enter, or infront of the second one that will let you in to the country. They can be a little ticklish about if stop at the correct spot. There are room for about three cars after each other between the road barriers under the roof.

I needed two documents to present for the authorities.

I'll write more about hem later. Have to go and buy a RTT now. ?

Edited January 14, 2019 by Jonas Andersson
Spelling and other corrections

[Jonas Andersson]

You have to present a Migration Card and a Passenger Customs Declaration to the border officials. It seemed to me that everyone else already hade their papers with them. Since I hadn't thought about it and turned up without, they after some grunting got hold of them for me to fill in.

I needed one Migration Card and two copies of the Passenger Custom Declaration, which I should keep with me during my entire trip. Since I saw where the good looking!  lady got hold of them - in some kind of waiting rooms - I headed for these rooms, when I was going to leave the country, to get a new set of the papers. Just in case... So I at least learned that it was possible to get them at the border station. Here under you can see copies of my old documents. 

Migration Card:

Passenger Customs Declaration:

Front- 

Rear-

 

If you are going to wild camp you have to register with the authorities at latest after three working days. If your first stay is at a hotel or other organization rendering accommodation services it's should be done within 1 day. You'll receive a receipt which you shall be able to present to the authorities if some one asks. If you move around you should do a new registration at least once a week, or if you have travelled a "big distance". To register just visit a hotel or a camping and tell then that you want to register. They solve it for you in a couple of minutes for a minor fee.

Front -  

Rear -  

When you apply for your visa, do add some days before and especially after your intended stay. Just incase you need to move the trip a day or two. It's also good to have some spare days in the visa if something should not work your way. If you overstay your visa by a minute and get caught, there is a severe risk you'll be taken into custody. There you have to apply for a new visa covering the now estimated time for you prolonged stay in a cozy Russian prison. That usually takes about two weeks.

[Emmanouil]

7 hours ago, Jonas Andersson said:

Thanks a lot Jonas! Really useful information for the process. Much appreciated.