How to Stop Worrying and Go to Russia: Our Listeners’ Guide
Added 2025-09-22 15:21:00 +0000 UTCI've invited three bazed Americans who either live in Russia or go back and forth. They shared their experience of getting a visa, overcoming logistical and bureaucratic hurdles, acing FSB interview/interrogation, transfering money, and getting a spouse.
A straightforward, no-nonsense guide honed through trial and error
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00:01:00 - Getting a 3 year Russian tourist visa in the US
00:16:40 - Next step: Flying to Russia. Airport stuff. FSB interview
00:27:00 - What not to do/bring
00:33:00 - Migration Card. Getting Rubles. Registration
00:55:09 - Russian sim-cards? Wrong! Bank accounts.
01:04:45 - Work visas. Crypto transfers. Buying apartments
01:20:00 - Citizenship and residence
01:26:00 - Taxi and metro navigation
01:34:25 - Getting a Russian spouse
01:40:00 - Story about FSB interrogation
01:45:00 - Why go to Russia?
Comments
Very interesting episode!
Aurora Johnson
2025-09-24 00:41:25 +0000 UTCNo, I believe it's a formality.
Russians With Attitude
2025-09-23 20:37:42 +0000 UTCyou have to have an invitation and someone to have your accomodation and take your visa when you arrive? how do you find these things? I am not single, we are a family.
Shara Bailie
2025-09-23 09:47:09 +0000 UTCLast time I was in Russia I was 20 years old. I am 45 now. lol I remember the first time I went, I think it was kind of hard to get a Visa. (I was a kid so I don't know all the details though.) We actually could not travel there during the Soviet period. But we could see some family in Turkiye and Czechoslovakia before we were able to go to Tatarstan.
Tatyana
2025-09-23 05:39:25 +0000 UTCI visited in May for Victory day and I was detained by FSB border police for 8 hours lol 10/10 would do it again
krisztian
2025-09-20 15:29:11 +0000 UTCI left in the 1990s when I was a child and have never been back. I remember nothing worked, the only way to get things done was to throw $50 at someone and there were lots of drunk homeless sleeping in the bushes.
spetsnaz
2025-09-20 13:47:56 +0000 UTCHow about corruption? I remember in 1990s you could buy a driving licence 🪪 without knowing how to drive. Are Russian police 👮 approachable or should one run if you see them ?
spetsnaz
2025-09-20 13:40:01 +0000 UTCIt's a 2005 song. Only men of culture would *get it*. It is ridiculous on the face of it, lol
Russians With Attitude
2025-09-20 08:57:41 +0000 UTCThe way I found to get RUB in the US was to buy them off ebay. I paid a 30% premium, not ideal but maybe not much worse than Istanbul
Justin
2025-09-20 03:11:18 +0000 UTC100% on it being depressing flying Turkish out of the US. It's not Turks, far fouler... Expect some shameless antisocial behavior and bad smells. The flights from Tsargrad into Russia/Belarus are fine tho, civilized people.
Justin
2025-09-20 02:15:53 +0000 UTCI wanted to visit Russia until i heard that intro song.
Chris
2025-09-20 01:51:33 +0000 UTCLook forward to reading your experiences, Amy.
Dave
2025-09-19 19:51:09 +0000 UTCMay I ask which country you're from? What a lovely vignette.
joancutesac
2025-09-19 19:41:12 +0000 UTCI haven't listened to this podcast yet, but look forward to it. I was in Moscow in summer 2024, for the first time since living in Moscow in the 1990s-2003 (I'd been in the USSR first in 1985, pre-Gorbachev, so there's that ...) So, enough time lapsed for a new generation to appear. I have wanted to write something about this Rip van Winkle experience because it was so interesting & illuminating. Bottom line: the profound contempt for the Public by the government that was palpable in Communist & early post-Communist times, is no longer in evidence in Russia, but has become the prevailing attitude of government towards the Publics in the US & UK. Incredibly fascinating times we live in.
Amy Boone
2025-09-19 18:19:54 +0000 UTCSo back in the day before SMO, you could order rubles at your bank. Bank of America had that option and I used it twice before 2022. Since then you can't do that anymore.
Klim Kazantsev
2025-09-19 18:15:18 +0000 UTCWe flew to Helsinki and took the Lux Express bus to St. Petersburg in November 2023. They closed the Finnish border while we were in Russia and we came back to Helsinki 3 weeks later via Narva and a ferry from Talinn. I don't think that bus company is in business anymore, sadly. Crossing the border into Russia was no problem at all even without speaking Russian. The officers were very nice and the other passengers helped us understand what the bus driver was telling us to do at the crossing. We tried to get Russian currency at the airport and in Helsinki but they just laughed at us and thought we were weird. We booked our hotels through a Russian website and the Four Seasons in St. Petersburg checked us in on the honor system because we had nothing but foreign currency, mostly US dollars and Euros. The concierge told us which currency exchange gave the best rates locally and we went the next morning. It's very true about the bills, we had a reject rate of a little under 5% of the US dollars. I guess our bank sucks. We tried to exchange some British pounds we had and they wouldn't take them at all anywhere we went. Everything went very well except when I made the travel plans I hadn't realized how far the hotel was from the bus station. We got in a cab and asked to be taken to a currency exchange which was closed, of course. Between the cab driver's broken English and my extremely limited Russian we managed to figure out a way to get some rubles to pay for the cab at least. I loved our time in Moscow and St. Petersburg. We hired an English guide and driver for an excursion to Peterhof and Catherine Palace. It's extremely easy to get around and usually there is someone who speaks English in those cities. One of my favorite memories was of two lovely young women riding horses down Nevsky Prospekt in the freezing cold and one of them stopping to pick up her horse's droppings with a giant poop bag similar to one you would have for your dog. I said to my husband "Wow, they even pick up the poop" and she smiled and said "Of course!" and climbed back into the saddle and rode off.
Someone Somewhere
2025-09-19 18:13:06 +0000 UTCGreat! Happy to help.
Russians With Attitude
2025-09-19 15:50:48 +0000 UTCThank you for putting this together. In ten days I'm visiting Kaliningrad for the first time and the timing of this episode couldn't be better.
joancutesac
2025-09-19 15:41:40 +0000 UTC
