Buying train ticket in Russia - experience I

First case, go to central train ticket office of Sankt Petersburg where many guichets have different roles, in russian, and all have not moving queues of 10 people. There's the 'administrator' guichet with no one as you pay if you disturb her. Two machines to buy tickets and a couple more to check timetables. All in Russian. We give up.
Finally we went to the flying ticket office which was empty and for 120R (3E) more we got our ticket to Petrozavods.