Applying for a visa extension?

Just a couple of weeks after The Exile was reportedly run out of town, BP has withdrawn the last of its foreign staff. Overall, there’s a picture of an open season on expats in Russia.

Certainly, numbers are declining. The Exile’s problems had more to do with diminishing readership than censorship. So, is the expat in Russia an endangered species?

Leaving BP aside for a moment, there have been two significant developments in recent years. The first was Putin’s crackdown on foreign NGOs, which began in 2005. The British Council was shut down amid accusations of spying. Whatever, any number of NGO activities exceeded their remit - such as participating in coloured revolutions - and Putin called it curtains.

For individuals, the exodus has been largely triggered by the new business visa regulations, introduced October 2007. You can now only stay for half the duration of the visa: 90 days out of a 6 month visa or 180 days of a year visa. Moreover, renewing a visa now means going all the way back to your country of origin. A year ago, you could do a visa run to Tallinn or Vilnius and come back to Russia in a couple of days. These obstacles have pretty much wiped out freelancers, teachers and sundry self-employed.

Russia insists that bona-fide business people can always apply for a work permit. But here there’s a quota cap. In April, the American Chamber of Commerce informed its members that the quota had already been filled for this year. Then last week, it advised that, even with an increased quota, no new applications were being processed.

A discussion with Moscow expats added more perspective, notably the cost of apartments. Mercer has just published its own index which rates Moscow as the world’s most expensive capital for expatriates. ‘You can pay up to 10 dollars for a cup of coffee’, the report says. Yes you can but, maybe you do that once.

As expected, the BP story has been the subject of russophobic rants in the UK press. But here it has to be said it’s a very specific issue. And really, 50/50 partnerships never work anywhere. Neither side can initiate anything, only block. The Russian partners were being vetoed by BP and frustrated in their attempts to seek export markets. Naturally, BP did not want to compete outside Russia with its own company. The whole deal was a recipe for confrontation.

If there is an agenda in all of this, it’s that Russia would prefer to bring back its own, foreign educated or business elite nationals from abroad to fill key roles. For a start they’re cheaper. And the hope is that they’ll be more loyal than all the foreign ‘advisors’ that arrived in the Yeltsin years who promptly looted the place.

In the last couple of months, the Hungry Duck bar - Moscow’s former ‘icon of hedonism‘ - finally closed its doors. Though seedy and subdued in latter days, its demise, along with that of the Exile, symbolises the end of the expat era in Moscow.