That morning I met Ekaterina, a pretty old woman in a green headscarf. She talked about Peter the Great as the Old Believers have for centuries — as the Devil. "He brought tobacco and potatoes and heresy to Russia." He was the biblical snake. Everything that had gone wrong in Russia they traced back to him. Dangerous technologies and Western ideas, they were all his fault. "Peter cursed Russia."

Every home is wooden and every family has fierce hunting dogs and a cow. They treasure metalworked icons of the Virgin handed down over hundreds of years. These sit on little makeshift shelves watching over cramped bedrooms. They had come to Tuva with the Old Believers from the Urals and inner Siberia — or as they said, "from Russia". 

I ate at simple tables and talked through the afternoon. They asked about me. "Tell me...in London do the women also pick the berries?" I asked about them. The women all wore headscarves. The men all grew their beards long. They eat only from their own cutlery. Their children still walk three kilometres to school across the river. The road winds through the forest and they sometimes see bears there. The week I was there a wolf had been spotted. The mothers were worried. 

There are no jobs in the valley. There is no economy. But everybody is busy. The women are home keepers but they also milk the cows. Their husbands hunt. Every winter they go into the forests for three months to hunt squirrels, sables, bears and lynx. These furs they sell to the Russian and Chinese merchants who come to the village knocking on their doors. 

This is how Russian villages always used to be. But the valley of the Old Believers is no longer normal. Russia's countryside is no longer dying. It is already dead. Cottages with smashed windows half-sunk into the mud, abandoned but for the pensioners and the alcoholics. Drunks stammer on street corners. Needles and wild dogs lie everywhere. These are places where the forest animals are losing their fear of humans. 

In the valley of the Old Believers are the last living Russian villages. Never had I seen so many Russian children. Or new wooden cottages. Not once in the two weeks I spent in Erjei did I see a drunk. These are villages little touched by Russia's plagues of addiction. There were drinkers, of course. I smelt their breath. I met men with gnarled red noses and heard about a sick couple that lived by the Yenesei and spent all their money on beer. But alcohol was not a plague. 

The priestless once had strong prohibitions on all forms of vodka. These have since lapsed. Instead, they rigorously observe months of dry fasts throughout the year. Nor do the men drink seriously when hunting. They are more or less dry for three months of the year.