The Russians are coming!

When the passport control desk at Storskog closed on New Year’s Eve, the counter register showed 140,288. Never before have so many people crossed the Russian-Norwegian border over a one-year period.

The peak in border traffic does not end with last year’s crowds of people. Record numbers of Russian visitors fill the shops and cafès in Kirkenes this first week of January. The Russian Orthodox church celebrates its Christmas on January 7th, giving most people a mid-winter vacation period.

- We started to drive from Murmansk at 6 am. this morning says Alexei Filin, a Murmansker that frequently visits Kirkenes together with his wife Anja Filina.

The border checkpoint is a 2 ½ hour drive from Murmansk, but the early morning drive over the ice-cold Kola Peninsula didn’t help Alexei and Anja to avoid the long border queue.

- Russians are used to queues says Anja. The two young Murmanskers do however look forward to a easier border crossing regime, said to come with new border stations to be built in some few years time.

The couple do not principally go to Norway for shopping. – It is just a visit to look at the small cosy private houses in Kirkenes, go to a cafè, visits some shops and look around, says Anja. While most Murmansk residents live in appartment blocks, people on the Norwegian side of the border have a differnt life. - The streets and houses looks somewhat different in Norway than in Russia, although it is just some few hours drive away, emphasize Anja.

Read also: Murmansk people travel more abroad

After the Norwegian Consulate General in Murmansk last year started to issue so-called Pomor-visas, the number of border-crossers have increased month-by-month.

- The Pomor visas simplifies everything, says Anja Filina while she walks along the central walking street in Kirkenes together with her husband in freezing -22C. - It was colder in Finland, smiles Alexei noting the -30C outside the shops in Näätämö, a small shoping location just on the EU-side of the border, a 45-minutes drive west of Kirkenes.

- While the number of visa applications increased sharply in 2010, the proportion of Pomor-visas issued increased continuously, says Lars Georg Fordal, head of the visa-section at the Norwegian Consulate General in Murmansk.

The so-called Pomor-visa is a multi-entry visa to Norway that can be issued without a prior invitation from a person or organization in Norway.

- 60 percent of visa applications from Russians living in Murmansk and Arkhangelsk Oblast that we handled in December were for Pomor-visas, says Fordal.

Less queuing at the consulate
- Although the 13 percent increase in delivered applications in December 2010 compared with December 2009, we saw that the queues were far less than they were before, says Lars Georg Fordal. He says this is because more and more applicants see the advantages of registering their applications via the visa-portal at norvegia.ru. At the portal, the applicants can reserve time for when they want to deliver the passport and supporting documents.

The new technical solution has allowed the Consulate General to extend the opening hours for online applicants. The visa portal allows people to reserve time until 4 pm. Monday to Thursday.

Read also: Long border queue on Saturdays

The Consulate General in Murmask issued a total of 16,614 visas last year, an increase of some 2,000 compared with 2009. Also from Moscow, the Norwegian Embassy increased the numbers of visas issues, from 22,690 in 2009 to 25,250 visas in 2010. The Norwegian Consulate General in St. Petersburg issued some 6,000 visas to Norway last year.

Boom also to Finland
The Finnish consular offices in the Russian part of the Barents Region also experience a sharp increase in visa-applications. At the Petrozavodsk and Murmansk branch offices of the Consulate General of Finland in St. Petersburg; the figures were 59, 157 visa applications processed in Petrozavodsk up from 46,027 in 2009 and 29,451 in Murmansk, more than ten thousand more than in 2009 when 19,311 visas applications were handeled, according to the statistics posted at the portal of the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Also the northern borders from Russia to Finland the number of people crossing the chekpoints increase. For the first time, more than 100,000 people crossed the border at Salla over a one-year period reads the figures from the Finnish Border guard service.

Althrough that sharp increase in visas issued to Norway and Finland in the Barents Region and the increase in northern border crossers, to cross the border is an easy task compared with the challenges in the south.

For example, at the Russian Torfyanovka checkpoint across the border from Vaalimaa, the queue was seven kilometres long on Monday this week, while the queue at Nuijamaa was reaching five to six kilometres. On the Russian side, the waiting periods were several hours, but on the Finnish side of the border, the queues rapidly shortened, reports Helsingin Sanomat.

- The cool thing about living in Murmansk is that we can drive from home in the early morning, visit both Finland and Norway without any stress, do some shopping, visit friends and go to a café or two, before we drive home again in the very same day, explains Alexei Filin before he walks hand-in-hand with Anja towards the local shopping mall, where the Norwegian stores have their January winter sale period.