Videos about life at minus 50, journeys across the frozen Lena and Yakut cuisine are drawing audiences of millions around the world – and turning the republic’s extreme climate from an obstacle into a tourist brand in its own right
The ‘coldest city in the world’ has unexpectedly become one of the most striking backdrops for social media. Foreign bloggers from the United States, Britain, the Netherlands and Turkey, Forbes reports, are travelling to Yakutia precisely for what the tourism industry usually tries to shield visitors from: extreme frost, long winters and the sensation of living on the edge. A video about Yakutsk by the American blogger Tayo Aina has racked up millions of views on social media. Last winter, the Dutchman Zoef drove here from Amsterdam in a Volkswagen Up, covering more than 25,000 km, and filmed a series of videos about the journey in temperatures as low as minus 50.
What until recently seemed more of a climatic hardship now works as a tourism asset. Instantly freezing noodles, boiling water thrown into the air to create ‘fireworks’, winter roads, the crossing of the Lena and Oymyakon — one of the world’s poles of cold — all make for compelling footage. Foreign audiences are offered not an adapted version of the North, but an almost extreme experience: a chance to see how daily life is organised where winter temperatures regularly hover around minus 40. The regional tourism development agency openly names bloggers as one of the key tools in shaping Yakutia’s modern image.
And the region’s most prominent ambassadors live in Yakutia itself. Vyacheslav Romanov, a PE teacher from the village of Noragana, known as Panda Sakha, has amassed 6.26 million subscribers on YouTube and 8.1 million on TikTok. He cooks outdoors and shows village life, snow and frost without any elaborate staging – individual videos attract up to 200 million views. In this way, local everyday life, until recently almost invisible to outside audiences, is being transformed into an international media product.
Online popularity is already translating into actual trips. Between January and July 2026, Yakutia welcomed around 213,000 visitors, compared with 170,000 a year earlier. According to Ozon Travel, flight tickets to Yakutsk were purchased 2.3 times more often from January to August than in the same period last year, while demand for hotels rose by a factor of 1.5. Sutochno.ru reports a 45% increase in accommodation bookings across the region.
Behind these figures lies an economic impact, too. In the first half of the year, the tourist tax brought 7.7 million roubles into Yakutsk’s budget — three times more than a year earlier. In July, a tourist information centre opened in the city, offering service in Yakut, Russian and English. According to forecasts from the regional tourism agency, total visitor numbers could reach 300,000 by the end of 2026, while by 2030 the republic has set its sights on 750,000 travellers.
In the case of Yakutia, social media has achieved what conventional tourism advertising does not always manage: rather than smoothing out the region’s peculiarities, it has turned them into the very reason to travel. The frost, the distances, the northern cuisine, the indigenous culture and the sense of being at the edge of the world combine to create the image of a territory that people are prepared to cross thousands of kilometres to reach.
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