The area has also produced 2 successful relay teams crossing the North Channel and world class ice swimmers.

The Russian immigrant professor Louis Sugarman of Little Falls, NY was the first American to become a famous ice swimmer in the 1890s.

Wearing only swimsuits, the ice swimmers brought along their swim club's mascot, a polar bear, to a polling station in Barnaul, where the temperature was 28 degrees F, RIA Novosti reported.

"We've voted like this four times already and plan to unite all Siberian ice swimmers for the next elections and vote simultaneously in our cities," Alexander Zelenetsky, leader of the Polar Bears ice swimming association said.

Up to 109 million registered voters were taking part in the election in the world's biggest country, including reindeer herders in the far north east near Alaska, ice swimmers in Siberia and troops at military bases in Moscow.

Indeed, Poborchiy seems self-consciously Putinesque, sporting a tracksuit with the Russian tricolor and leading a men's team of ice swimmers who converge on a lake for morning races every winter, when Murmansk descends into darkness for nearly two months.