Russia for Russians

New regulations have severely restricted travel options for foreigners visiting Russia. As of late January, travelers must specify in advance their entire itinerary while in Russia. Moreover, for each destination, tourists (as well as business travelers) must provide the address of their host organization or individual and then register with local migration authorities upon arrival.

ATOR, the Russian tour operator association, recently reported that inbound tourism from Europe, source of some 60 percent of Russian tourism, declined by 17 percent over 2014, mainly due to the political situation and the crisis over Ukraine.

The new regulations are sure to put off wanderlusting foreigners, yet it is unclear how Russia will enforce them. And it is hard to see how they can have anything but a negative effect upon independent tourism. (Cruise ship stopovers in St. Petersburg and tightly managed package tours will see less of an impact.)

This is a pity, because it comes just as a spate of press coverage touted sightseeing in Russia as a welcome bargain, given the decline in the ruble’s value against the euro and dollar.

In fact, the new rules resurrect restrictions from the Soviet (and tsarist) era, when a foreigner’s every move was tightly controlled, so as to maximize the segregation of foreigners from locals, to prevent any undue outside influence on Russian minds.

Communist Party Duma deputies are thinking along the same lines. In February they demanded that the foreign ministry stop allowing foreign diplomats to hold public events, such as speeches at Russian universities. After a recent talk by German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Communist legislators declared that Russian diplomacy must prevent “the unabashed force-feeding of anti-Russian views to Russian citizens.”

Foreigners living in Russia have sensed the winds of change. According to a report by RBK Daily, not including the large influx of Ukrainian refugees over the past year, there were 999,000 fewer foreigners living in Russia in January 2015 than in July 2014. Almost 40 percent of those leaving were citizens of Europe and North America. Certainly the politically- or economically-motivated closure of foreign companies and Western NGOs contributed significantly to this trend.

On top of all this, another packet of laws has made it increasingly impractical for migrant laborers to work in Russia. Tajik migrants interviewed by The Moscow Times as they boarded their train back to Dushanbe said that acquiring all the necessary permits now costs a prohibitive R20,000 (nearly $300) – about a month’s salary. Add to this newly required tests on Russian language and history and, most importantly, the fact that remittances sent home to Central Asia are in dollars, and it just doesn’t pay to be a migrant laborer in Moscow.

That sound you just heard? It was Russia shooting itself in the foot, with both barrels.