Russian cross-border shopping tourists in the Finnish and Polish borderlands

ABSTRACT

Cross-border shopping and tourism are worldwide phenomena, appearing at any border with at least some degree of permeability. The authors investigate the range of cross-border shopping and tourism activities practised by Russians at two of the EU’s external borders, one between Finland and the Leningrad Oblast, and the other between Poland and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast. The study is based on research conducted in the Polish–Russian and Finnish–Russian border regions between 2013 and 2015, when the authors held interviews, administered survey questionnaires, and engaged in participant observation. The information was supplemented with data from the Finnish and Polish Border Guard services. Based on the results of the fieldwork, the authors argue that cross-border shopping and tourism are often combined during the same trip, and thus constitute a specific form of cross-border activity. Their study sheds light on how cross-border shopping tourism depends on and is interconnected with more than just the factor of the non-availability of goods and services. They conclude that cross-border shopping at the Polish–Russian border and the Finnish–Russian border has become more like a Western European practice, namely shopping for pleasure.

EDITORS:

• Gjermund Wollan
• Kerstin Potthoff
• Catriona Turner

KEYWORDS:

• cross-border shopping
• cross-border tourism
• Russian cross-border shopping tourists
• Finnish– Russian borderland
• Polish– Russian borderland

Acknowledgements

The research for this article was supported by funding from the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme (Grant Number 290775).

Notes

1 For information on the agreement made in 2012, see the section headed ‘Agreements with Russian Federation’ on granica.gov.pl’s web page at https://granica.gov.pl/przepisy.php?v=en (accessed March 2018). The subsection ‘Agreement on local border traffic rules’ provides a brief description of the Agreement (Journal of Laws of 2012, item 814) and a link to the full version of the Agreement in Polish.

2 With respect to the quotations from our participants, we coded our participants as follows: PR RUS 1 – Female, 30 years, with a PhD, Kaliningrad; PR RUS 2 – Male, 45 years, an expert from Kaliningrad Regional Economic Development Agency, Kaliningrad; FR RUS 1 Female, 27 years, hostess in a restaurant, St Petersburg; FR RUS 2 Female, 40 years, a judge in the City Court, St Petersburg; FR RUS 3 Female, 45 years, a bookkeeper in an NGO, St Petersburg.

3 All quotations from the study participants were translated from Russian into English by the authors.

4 City Hall of Gdansk, unpublished data accessed in 2015.

5 See, for example, a YouTube video on shopping in Poland at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRGD_L111dI (accessed 10 February 2016).

6 Department of Socio-Economic Research and Analysis, City Hall of Gdańsk, unpublished data accessed in 2014.