Russian Fire Safety Certificate

As I want this Blog to be more or less of a practical character, I plan once in a while to write some off-topic, but related, brief reference posts regarding doing business in the Russian Safety Equipment market. One of these is the current brief overview of the Russian Fire Safety Certificate.

As a guarantee of quality and fire safety products that are imported to Russia, the Government requires a Fire Safety Certificate. This Certificate is required for customs purposes and for sales in Russia. As it is usual for many foreign companies, it seems to be quite a task to plan and address this issue. Federal Agency for Technical Regulation and Metrology lists (as of this date) 1,639 official certification bodies and over 8,000 various laboratories. When you Google “Russian Fire Safety Certification” you get 2,150,000 hits. Quite naturally, you will be lost in this sea of information. Many companies with quasi-official fancy names claim to be the most transparent, honest and cost-effective in getting Fire Safety Certificate in a very short time. But the reality, all of them are going through the same process (maybe a couple of days plus-minus), so, I assume, for any foreign businessman the rule is universal for all countries of the world (Russia included) – get the right local partner and use official resources for information. 

 Since the times of the Soviet Union Russia had its own certification system for control of import and sales of goods and equipment “Государственный стандарт – ГОСТ” (National Standard – GOST), which was in present day Russia was GOST-R. However, fulfilling its obligations of accession to the World Trade Organization, Russia initiated in 2011 reform; over 30 new technical regulations were introduced and GOST-R was replaced with GOST-TR. (This Blog post “From Gost R Standard to Technical Regulations TR” in a nice way describes it).

So, currently, for Russia GOST-TR has the same meaning of ISO 9000 series certificates for the western companies. As mentioned earlier, there are 1,600+ certification bodies, but they all are strictly divided to provide certificates for the products that fall under their area of responsibility; all of them have specialized laboratories.  

Fire Safety Certificate is required for certain products and equipment; usually it is issued after checking their burning level. This document confirms compliance of imported products or services with “Technical Regulations on Fire Safety Requirements”. Certificate may be mandatory or voluntary. Information on mandatory certification may be found here.

Fire Safety Certificate covers the following products:

• Fire prevention equipment
• Substances and materials for flammable or fire extinguishing products
• Structured and building products
• Electrical devices and appliances
• Heat and other generation equipment

It is a very strenuous task to determine reality and credibility of the companies providing services in obtaining Fire Safety Certificate in Russia. Most of them look pretty much official. Below, I provide links to some of them (though in no way I may guarantee quality service, since I do not interact with them) – but they have good information on procedures and required documentation. Anyways, I would recommend reading Wikipedia’s articles (they are not excellent, but have good links to official Web-sites).

• Exporter And Importer Guidelines from Intertek – detailed description of certification in Russia
• Fire Safety Certificate from Wikipedia
• GOST from Wikipedia
• Fire Safety Certificate – Information from RosTest
• The Fire Safety Certification Services from
• Fire Safety Certification – Complete description (Russian)
• Fire Safety Certification – Complete description (Russian)
• Fire Safety Certificate for Electric Cable (Russian)