Nobody knows the answer. And that is what makes the question so unbearable: it shows that nobody really knows for sure how close to a dictator (or a CEO) Putin really is. If you ask the question straight, the think-tankers waffle, the investors dodge it and the intellectuals agonise over it. Maybe this is why parts of the Russian elite are becoming ever more superstitious. The Putin years have seen a boom in quack healers and Tibetan cures. Ministers want to be seen kissing icons. Freudian, Lacanian and Jungian psychoanalysts thrive. And in 2007 to make sure the country secured the right to host the Winter Olympics at Putin's command, government officials are said to have flown out deep into the taiga to ask the most powerful shaman in all Siberia to invoke the spirits to sway the International Olympic Committee.  

Uncertain countries have a need for soothsayers. In Moscow, oil executives consult "trend forecasters", the expensive economist Nouriel Roubini or "risk analysts" to know what the world will look like in 2020. In ramshackle parts of Russia, the ethnic, imperial provinces where it is clear this "federation" is actually an empire, people still consult the shaman. Everyone in Kyzyl goes to see the shaman. 

The collapse of the Soviet Union was also the collapse of the welfare state. It meant the freezing of wages, the closing down of hospitals and a breakdown in medical supplies. In Tuva, the flight of the Russians also meant the flight of the colonial professionals: doctors, nurses and teachers. Kyzyl is so poor that people have turned back to a belief in magic. In shacks all over Kyzyl, coloured Buddhist rags hang from holy ropes outside the shamans' practices. In this sad place, they are both psychotherapists and soothsayers. Tuvans go to the shaman as we go to the doctor; there are shamans for baldness, fungal infections, weight loss, depression or communicating with dead ancestors.  

Even Russia's leaders have consulted the shamans. When Boris Yeltsin came to Tuva he was dressed in ceremonial purple robes and a conical hat and blessed by the shamans. He blew on holy embers with a powerful seer for the good of all Russia. Putin often comes to Tuva, in the company of his defence minister, Sergey Shoigu, who is half-Tuvan and lays on lavish trips into the taiga for the president to hunt lynx. It was in Tuva that the photographs of Putin swimming in a river, on horseback, and stalking through the woods with a gun were taken. The last time Putin came to Tuva, on the way to a summit in Beijing, local officials gathered dancers, throat singers and seers to perform for him in a forest encampment. Three female throat singers serenaded him, and I was told that as the music rose Putin jumped up and grabbed the shaman's magic drum. Laughing, he began to bang it himself.     

I pushed open the door to the witch's hut. She was the seer the locals were most frightened of. They waited outside in line and told me the same thing: this witch sees the future and she heals the sick. Even though she was a Russian Tatar she was seen as stronger, purer and more powerful than the shamans. Unlike them, she never asked for money. They swore by her visions, but were petrified of her curses too. 

In front of her hovel hung a stuffed black eagle to ward off evil spirits, while on the ground were traced the embers of a burnt offering. Inside it smelt of damp, cigarettes and teabags. In the gloom the witch told me how the visions had started when she was a girl, "at the time of Gorbachev the fool", and that she had become a practising witch "during Yeltsin's time of troubles". Her eyes had the cloudiness of cataracts. She stared at me. "What is it that you want to know?"  

There was only one question I wanted to ask: "Will Putin rule for the rest of his life?"