St. Petersburg has officially closed the book on its COVID era. As of October 1, 2026, the city’s Regulation No. 121, introduced on March 13, 2020, when the pandemic was just beginning, is no longer in effect.
For tourists, the news is unlikely to change much. Visitors have been able to come to St. Petersburg without masks, QR codes or other special COVID procedures for years. But some rules introduced during the pandemic somehow survived all the way to the fall of 2026.
The pandemic ended. The paperwork didn’t quite get the memo.
In 2022, St. Petersburg had already lifted its most noticeable restrictions. On March 4, the city scrapped QR codes that had been required to enter restaurants, museums, theaters, stores and fitness centers. At the end of May, the city also dropped its mandatory mask requirement.
But Regulation No. 121 remained in place.
The latest version of the regulation, which St. Petersburg extended in December 2025 through the end of 2026, still restricted public events with more than 300 people unless they had been approved by the city authorities and Rospotrebnadzor, Russia’s federal consumer protection and public health agency. That meant organizers of large concerts, festivals, sporting events and other gatherings still had to follow the corresponding approval procedure.
And that wasn’t all. The same regulation still included a ban on smoking hookahs in public places. People over 60 were also advised to use personal protective equipment. So while QR codes and mandatory masks had long since become history, the city’s COVID regulation was still dealing with hookahs.
The original 2020 version of the regulation was, of course, much more serious. At one point, for example, it restricted events with more than 1,000 people, while people arriving from countries with an unfavorable epidemiological situation were required to self-isolate for two weeks.
What changes for concerts and festivals?
Ending the regulation removes the basis for the special procedure for large public events that had been in place since the pandemic.
There is, however, a small caveat. Mikhail Shurygin, president of NCA, said the bureaucracy surrounding large public events is unlikely to disappear completely: the old rules could simply be replaced by other procedures. Evgeny Finkelstein, president of PMI, took a more practical view, saying that the approval process had largely been a formality anyway. For organizers, he suggested, it would simply mean “one less piece of paperwork.”
For tourists, the takeaway is fairly simple: concerts, festivals and other large events in St. Petersburg will no longer be subject to special approval requirements based specifically on the old COVID regulation. Other rules governing large public events may still apply.
Even one-person protests were part of the story
Regulation No. 121 was not limited to concerts and festivals. For six years, its provisions were also used in connection with public demonstrations and one-person pickets.
For example, in June 2023, more than 15 people were detained in St. Petersburg following one-person protests. They were later released with police reports for violating the heightened-alert regime.
With the regulation now gone, that part of the COVID-era restrictions has disappeared as well.
Six years from lockdowns to a forgotten regulation
When Regulation No. 121 was introduced in March 2020, it genuinely transformed everyday life in the city. Restaurants and cafes, movie theaters, fitness centers and many stores were closed, while schools switched to remote learning. Restrictions were also placed on visiting parks, playgrounds and even cemeteries.
By 2022, most of those rules had disappeared. On March 4, the city lifted its COVID QR-code requirements and removed restrictions on capacity at restaurants, stores, swimming pools and a number of other venues. At the end of May, St. Petersburg also abandoned its mandatory mask requirement.
But the disappearance of the most visible restrictions did not mean that Regulation No. 121 had itself been repealed.
In March 2025, the city administration was still explaining why the regulation remained in force even though the epidemiological situation had stabilized and Russia’s federal COVID task force had stopped publishing its weekly reports. City officials said they were waiting for an order from the chief state sanitary doctor.
In December 2025, St. Petersburg extended the regulation through the end of 2026. Then, in September 2026, city officials announced that it would finally be repealed on October 1, based on an order from the chief state sanitary doctor for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region.
The result is a rather unusual afterlife for the pandemic: the city returned to normal life years ago, but the legal legacy of 2020 continued to exist. The last remaining restrictions — including approval requirements for events with more than 300 people and the ban on smoking hookahs in public places — outlived QR codes and mandatory masks by more than four years.
So if you’re visiting St. Petersburg now, there are no COVID rules from this story that should affect an ordinary tourist trip. Museums, restaurants, theaters and other attractions have long operated without QR codes or mandatory masks.
St. Petersburg has simply finally repealed the regulation that kept reminding everyone of the pandemic long after everyday life had moved on.
Six years later. Better late than never.