But this pricey tourist village, 320 kilometres northeast of Saint Petersburg on the forested shores of the historic Svir river, is proving increasingly popular among Russian tourists.

"There are more and more Russians coming, especially in winter," says Irina Shumikhina, a former psychologist who moved here in 1996 to help set up the local vodka museum.

A large new wooden sauna is being built along the Svir, once a mediaeval waterway now travelled by Russian river tours between Moscow and Saint Petersburg, as the old one proved so popular.

"They miss the expanse. They miss the Russian spirit. Sometimes you want to speak your own language, you want things that are familiar when youre on holiday," Shumikhina says.

While the number of foreign tourists visiting Russia fell by some 500 000 last year, the number of Russian tourists visiting resorts in their own country is growing fast, official figures show.

Russias federal tourism agency reported the number of Russian tourists in the country in 2005 more than doubled since 2004 to around 50 million people a year, with many preferring the country's northern reaches for winter fun to a Caucasus mountains region seen as dangerous.

Bureaucracy stifling growth

But many in the industry complain there are still major bureaucratic hurdles and that numbers still fall far short of levels before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Sergei Zaikov, who runs a tourism agency called Arctic Safari in the northern Russian city of Murmansk, 275 kilometres north of the Arctic circle, knows all about the problems.

"There isn't enough infrastructure," complains Zaikov, who says just two local hotels in the remote city can take tourists and accommodation in the wider region is virtually non-existent.

The Russian military also controls most of the region's Barents Sea coastline and because there is little policing in the tundra, poaching and stealing are rife, says the former oceanographer.

Ethno-tourism proving popular

Zaikovs company offers salmon fishing tours, trips to see the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) and winter expeditions by helicopter or snowmobile around the Arctic tundra ? an expanse of pine forests and lakes extending over 10 percent of Russia.

"Ethno-tourism" is also becoming popular, he says, with tourists from Moscow particularly interested in seeing places inhabited by the native Saami population.

But Murmansk only managed to attracted 22 500 tourists in 2005, compared to the 400 000 visiting Finland every year and close to one million travelling to nearby northern Norway, Zaikov says.

An exception is the local village of Kirovsk, a mining town where dynamite blasts shake the ground under the feet of a growing tribe of snowboarders that travel there every year.

Zhenya Didenko, a spiky-haired sports shop manager from Saint Petersburg who has been to a number of European resorts has visited the Arctic slopes every January for the past seven years.

"Kirovsk is fascinating." Most of the houses are falling apart, the ski-lifts dont work but the snow is good and its much cheaper than European resorts, says Didenko.

"It's not like Europe. Here theres real snowboarding, real avalanches, real snow."

For more info...

• Visit www.russia.com for more on visiting Russia.