Obtaining a Russian certificate of no police record (under special circumstances)

[Manning810 0]

I have searched and read as much as possible on this subject (including a great deal here on VisaJourney) and have not found anyone with a problem quite like ours.

My wife is Vietnamese and studied in Russia for several years (I am American). Everything is going well with our visa application, but there is one document we are currently unable to obtain: A certificate of no police records (Справка о несудимости) for her time in Russia. We already have one for her time in Vietnam. However, we cannot find a viable way to get this from Russia yet.

The Russian embassy in Hanoi is not an option. We have tried on three separate occasions and waited outside in the heat with dozens of others each time, showing up three hours early to register only to be turned away with everyone else. The list resets each day, so some people come five, six, seven times before they even have a shot at going inside. One of those times, only eight names were called over the three hour timeframe that the embassy is open (which is only open three days a week for three hours a week, currently) out of the 50+ people waiting there outside. The list is thrown away and the next day it starts over. There is also no order to the list as a stack of passports are entered randomly into the book so showing up early again does very little.

We have contacted a Russian law firm that can get the document, and were quite relieved at first. All we had to do was delegate power of attorney and produce a document stating as much--but then, we were told we would have to go to the local Russian embassy to have it stamped and legalized. Of course, if we could do that, we wouldn't be going through them anyway, so that's been a bust thus far as well.

Our interview won't be too far off, and we're afraid everything will be held up waiting for this document. Does anyone have any advice or know of services in Russia that can obtain the document WITHOUT going through the local Russian embassy in any form?

Thank you very much for reading and for any help you may be able to give us!

[przyjaciel 5]

The Canadian Immigration Service mentions that foreigners living outside the Russian Federation can apply for this certificate directly through the Main Information and Analytical Centre.

The link to this centre is here:

http://mvd.ru/mvd/structure1/Centri/Glavnij_informacionno_analiticheskij_cen

The site that describes this is available here:

http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/information/security/police-cert/europe/russia.asp

I don't have first hand experience with this but hope it may help.