Now that I live somewhere with a tendency to dry cold, I can say that the subjective difference in humid vs. arid is HUGE. In western Washington, I used to start shivering visibly at around 45-48 F. Here, with much lower average humidity, I often don't visibly shiver until several degrees below freezing. And, as I have a passing book-learnin' familiarity with the area around Lake Baikal, I can think of a couple of advantages to winter vacationing there.
1. No bears. In some parts of Russia and Siberia, brown bears have become so competitive for food resources that they've taken to emptying graveyards of anyone they can still smell, especially in rural areas where embalming is not a common practice.
2. No mosquitoes. They're not as bad as it gets on the tundra, but the taiga (that HUGE band of forest right through central Russia) supports a wealth of small life forms on which those horrid little flying vampiric nightmares feed just fine.
3. No spoiled rotten foreign tourists who want it to warm up, then complain when the temperature goes back up around freezing and the snow comes piling down. Snowflakes only form at two temperature ranges, one right around freezing and the other right around Antarctica in midwinter.
Besides, if you go to YouTube and look up "Russian dash camera", you'll see WAY scarier than bikini babes on ice skates.
