Registration

After you arrive in Russia (Hooray! You made it!), you must be registered with the OVIR (Russian Visa and Registration Department). You must be registered within 72hrs of arriving (excluding weekends and Russian holidays). You can be registered for 90 days maximum. If your visa remains valid for a longer period (eg. business visas), you will have to be re-registered after this time, for which you have to pay again. You are normally registered by the person or organisation that sent you your invitation (yes, you must be invited to Russia before you buy your plane ticket!) so usually your hotel or inviting party will register you when you check in. Many tourist agencies can also organise registration. The inviting party will photocopy your immigration card, passport and migration card and register your presence in Russia with OVIR.  Since Jan 15, 2007, the inviting party then issues you with a separate sheet of paper, known as a 'talon', which you keep with you. Instead of your registration stamp appearing on your migration card, the stamp now appears on this talon. When leaving the country, the immigration official should (technically speaking) not need to see it, just the migration card and passport.
If your migration card has not been registered in time, you can expect serious problems at departure, ranging from paying a fee to missing your flight while officials interrogate you as to where you stayed in Russia.
If you are staying in a private flat it is your choice whether or not to personally  register with the OVIR (Russian Visa and Registration Department). Unless you are desperately keen to undergo this very Russian experience, we advise you to go to a travel agency or hotel for registration. A visit to the OVIR office can take a couple of hours, and you will need a special letter from your landlord/lady stating that he or she agrees to have you registered temporarily in his or her apartment. It is probable the landlord/lady will not be happy to give you such a letter, because of fears of extra taxation and because of the time-consuming paperwork….) So, the best thing to do is to buy registration at a travel agency although costs for this vary greatly and can indeed by high, say 1500 - 3000 Rbl for instance. If you go to a hotel, they can only register you for the period that you are staying with them, but you need to be registered for the whole period that you are in Russia. 

There is one more option regarding registration. If you know a Russian person living in St. Petersburg and who has what is known as a 'propiska', they can register you at any Post Office for a minimal sum (around 150Rbl.) It requires a lot of patience and even involves buying each copy of the registration form. Post offices run out quickly of their supply of forms from the OVIR and so they will charge you the 9Rbl it costs them to photocopy the double sided form. Then, once the form is completed and accepted, you have to supply your own envelope and find the address of your local OVIR office in the telephone book. They then give you the form which proves you have been registered and then despatch your precious forms into the Russian postal system. With some travel agencies around St. Petersburg charging up to 6000Rbl to register someone for six months, it can definitely be worth your while spending an hour or two trying to get registered in the Post Office.