Credit…Tourists taking photos on the clean ice of Lake Baikal in Siberia, Russia. 

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By Anton Troianovski

Photographs by Sergey Ponomarev

Usually it’s foreigners who cavort at the world’s deepest lake in winter. But with many borders closed, Russians are arriving in droves to make TikTok videos and snap Instagram pictures.

ON LAKE BAIKAL, Russia — She drove 2,000 miles for this moment: Hanging out the sunroof of her white Lexus S.U.V. that glittered under the blinding sun, face to smartphone selfie camera, bass thumping, tires screeching, cutting doughnuts over the blue-black, white-veined ice.

“It’s for Instagram and TikTok,” said Gulnara Mikhailova, who drove two days and two nights to get to Lake Baikal with four friends from the remote Siberian city of Yakutsk.

It was about zero degrees Fahrenheit as Ms. Mikhailova, who works in real estate, put on a swimsuit, climbed up onto the roof of her car and, reclining, posed for pictures.

This is winter on the world’s deepest lake, 2021 Pandemic Edition.

The tour guides are calling it Russian Season. Usually, it is foreigners — many from nearby China — who flock to Siberia’s Lake Baikal this time of year to skate, bike, hike, run, drive, hover and ski over a stark expanse of ice and snow, while Russians escape the cold to Turkey or Thailand.

But Russia’s borders are still closed because of the pandemic, and to the surprise of locals, crowds of Russian tourists have traded tropical beaches for Baikal’s icicle-draped shores.

“This season is like no other — no one expected there to be such a crush, such a tourist boom,” said Yulia Mushinskaya, the director of the history museum on the popular Baikal island of Olkhon.

People who work with tourists, she said, “are just in shock.”

If you catch a moment of stillness on the crescent-shaped, 400-mile-long, mile-deep lake, the assault on the senses is otherworldly. You stand on three feet of ice so solid it is crossed safely by heavy trucks, but you feel fragile, fleeting and small.

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