Nobody knows exactly why Russia has such epidemic alcoholism. The writer Oliver Bullough believes the answer has to do with trust. Stalin's campaign to force the peasants into collective farms and break from the Orthodox Church cut Russians off from their land and their identity; the camps and the political police from each other. The USSR destroyed the village units of Russian society long before it destroyed itself. Cheap vodka filled the void. 

This is what the Old Believers had run away from. The first wave from the Urals in the 1920s joined the searchers for Belovode in independent Tuva. A second wave followed from inner Siberia in the 1960s, when Nikita Khrushchev renewed the war on God. 

The valley of the Old Believers was left untouched. They were never collectivised and only loosely controlled. They were decreed state hunters, which meant in practice the men were given a salary, free guns and bullets, in exchange for their pelts. They were told they were filling urgent orders for fur in England and left to their own devices in the Taiga-Russian for jungle-thick Siberian forests. 

Village life was ignored. This meant the Old Believers were never cut off from their way of life. It is unclear why the valley was spared — perhaps because the Soviet state had grown cynical and imperial by the 1950s. In annexed Tuva it suited them to have white people living along an impossibly remote but strategic valley leading to Mongolia.

Most probably it is because the Old Believers' villages were priestless. There was nobody to arrest. Centuries of home worship was a way of praying uniquely well suited to evading the KGB. More importantly, the villages and the homesteads up the Yenesei were so inaccessible that they were impossible to control without mass deportations. 

The Party could never quite locate the Old Believer monasteries and the hermits out in the Taiga whom the villagers would turn to. Families, even whole villages, of Old Believers that had been out of contact with other Russians since the revolution, were frequently found by Soviet geologists across Siberia until the 1980s, when such expeditions stopped. 

I felt trust and pride in Erjei. I spent long afternoons eating pancakes and drinking forest tea with the old women. The elders of the village still refused to use any technology at all — motors, lighting, mobiles — nothing. Their homes were decorated with plastic wall hangings of forests and framed knick-knack artwork of bright woodlands. They smiled: "We know where the Taiga families are. Those that have been hiding for a hundred years. But we won't tell you."