Russia and Safety

I'm not even close to being an expert on Russia, but you didnt get any answers so i will throw out my expereince. We went to Moscow for a few days January before last. You know the year the terrorists blew up the airport in Moscow. Yup, January in Moscow. Well it was Orthodox Christmas and we wanted to experience it and besides Moscow is expensive ............ except in the winter. I'm going to be real honest, if not real informed, I never got a feeling of comfort in Moscow. I am very, very glad we had the tour guide we did (sort of half a day for a couple of days). Of course thats just me. But i didnt have the same problem in places like Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, etc...... If asked i would encourage anyone to go and see Moscow. It was absolutely facinating, but if asked i would suggest a good reliable tour guide as well. As for St. Pete, never been there. Too expensive right now and too many other places i need to see first. Happy Trails

I just spent 2 days in June on Alla Tours shore excursions in St Petersburg, thus we slept on the ship so can't speak to the safety at night issue. St. P. was the highlight of the trip, as expected.
I felt very safe in a small group of 16 both days, tho 2 people did experience pickpockets. One lost a wallet in the subway and one almost did; neither was using a moneybelt!

I just spent 9 days in St. Petersburg and 4 days in Moscow, traveling alone just this past April and May. I used the metro, public buses, trams and "marshrutkas" (private mini-buses). I felt totally safe in St. Petersburg, even returning alone in the evenings. In the evenings, I actually preferred the marshrutkas, where I could always get a seat. I had a 5 minutes walk from the metro/bus stop to my B&B. Only one night did I take a taxi after the ballet, because it was raining and cold. Moscow was very different. There are far more transients, drunks and unsavory characters about. During the day I had no worries, but I only used taxis that were called for me in the evenings. BTW, if people are stupid enough to not take precautions against pickpockets, be it in St. Petersburg, Rome, Paris or Barcelona (the latter three being worse than StP for this), then they only have themselves to blame...

Thanks.

I traveled both and really liked St. Petersburg. The town is designed with canals like Venice. At night I found a lot of drinking in the streets but nobody bothered me (I was traveling alone). In the morning I found syringes in the alleys and I was staying in a nice neighborhood. I felt safe in areas where people were but I didn't go where I would be alone at night. I didn't feel safe in Moscow although I didn't have any issues. Just don't talk about Putin in public. Rick suggests a tour guide - I forgot his name and he's a school teacher - was excellent. A tour guide is great to explain the details around the buildings. St. Petersburg is definately a great place to visit.

Thank you.

I got feeling that both cities are safer than big american cities. But of course I would not go to dark corners to pull devil's tail. If you don't speak (and read) Russian you would definitely need a guide. I haven't been to another big city where so few people spoke English.

I went across Russia last year and never felt threatened anywhere from St. P to Siberia.

One topic of VICTORIA KALAGINA will can be help you! We received a message with one question: is it safe to travel alone (solo) to Moscow? Popular tour guides tell that most Russians do not speak English and other languages at all. Street signs are written in Cyrillic and have no translation. Everything gets confused and navigation in the city is not logical. Well, that's only half-truth. Communication A lot of words and phrases can be explained by body language. Ironically, nodding means "yes", shaking the head means "no". Taxi is "taxi". Probably, in the railway stations most of staff does not speak English, but there is always someone who does. Your aim is to look so helpless to station employees, that they'll take you to someone who can help. Before going to Russia, we recommend to learn some useful phrases. It's is not as hard as it seems, but you will gain great benefits. The phrase "Ya ne govoru po russki, pomogite mne" (which means "I don't speak Russian, please help me") could help to start a conversation. Refuting the myth Russians are very loyal friendly to foreigners. The World Wide Web has a lot of tour guides, Moscow city maps, metro maps in English, so you don't have to buy it right on Red Square, check it on-line instead (and save for offline) using your IPhone or another phone with GPRS/EDGE, Wi-Fi, 3G or 4G support. There are a lot of free Wi-Fi spots in Moscow. City navigation may confuse you (Moscow has a radial-circle structure – roads spread out from the city centre to suburbs in a shape of a star and are linked by main circle roads, so the city centre and city regions can communic ---Post by Kent---
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We flew to Moscow and back home from St Petersburg. We prearranged a tour guide who I found through recommendations from Tripadvisor, and boy am I glad I did. The signs, 99.9% of which were in Russian, were totally unrecognizable by me. I had jotted down a few restaurants that I read about...but that did absolutely no good because they're not even remotely spelled the same as the ones I jotted down. Our first day we mainly just checked into the hotel, walked to Red Square and stood in amazement that we were actually there. It was a bit surreal, but the second day we met up at our hotel with our tour guide, Dan Petrov. What a great guy he turned out to be. He had suggestions for us, but we could stop and change our direction at any time. He was amazing. www.waytomoscow.com For St Petersburg we booked a guide, Elena Ulko, through the www.toursbylocals.com to take us to Catherine's Palace. Again it was just absolutely amazing. Our trip was only about 6 or 7 nights, and I think we would have wasted an awful lot of that time had we been relying on ourselves to do everything. I highly recommend a guide.