Well, Shed-on-a-Pole. Here in Finland LPP with its 60,000 inhabitants is not very small indeed. Do you know which city acts as a "residence of Santa Claus" accepting loads of tourists on scheduled and charter flights every year? That is Rovaniemi where live only 35,000 people, the tourists from around the world do not have big problems with their hotel bookings. Lappeenranta has also other cities in the vicinity and... not towns only. The length of Saimaa lake's coast-line is really hard to imagine, 14,850 km. Do you think these shores are empty? You can find many hotels, cottages and so on.
By the way, there are 13,710 islands on Saimaa alone.
Concerning Russia. They really should understand (for their own sake) that selling visas is much worse business then selling the tourist attractions. And they have them a lot there. For the time being they do just that, selling the visas, you should not have any troubles with obtaining them, e.g. in the UK it costs £30- for not less than 8 working days processing, handled by mail, or more ££'s for faster handling. Knowing Ryanair, they could even make some profit out of that as well.
