Could Russia really collapse? To find out I had to get out of Moscow, to go to the borderlands that might break away. But where was farthest from the Kremlin? In Russia this is not geographical — the Caucasus crawls with military men and political police. Kamchatka on the Pacific is oil-subsidised and growing rich off oligarch tourism. The only towns in deepest Siberia are just there for oil or gas. I found a chart with every region of Russia coloured according to its poverty: in dark red was Tuva in southern Siberia. It was 3,700 kilometres east of Moscow on the Mongolian border.  

In Siberia the first thing you notice is the air. Colder and cleaner — no taste of exhaust, nor smell of diesel. It feels different on the skin. Tuva was not in the Russia I was used to but in a poor and tense frontier area, deep in the continent, still with the feel of the Russian empire or a Soviet republic. Back in Moscow, I kept hearing that Siberian psychics were regularly flown in to service cranky oligarchs or new-age billionaires. In Russian literature, this remote region is sometimes written about like a Soviet Shambhala: a half-mythical Buddhist federal republic known for its shamans and eerie-sounding throat singers. 

I realised almost immediately that Tuva was closer to the Russian equivalent of a Native American reservation. The capital, Kyzyl, is not a real city but a large wooden village hidden behind faintly utopian concrete boulevards. There is no railway. Most dwellings are clapboard cottages. The unpaved roads belong to wild dogs. The streets are filled with bedraggled beggars, thieving urchins and staggering drunks. 

Kyzyl is a city scared of the dark. The locals are too frightened to walk the streets at night. Native Siberians, like the Australian Aborigines, have been disfigured, left almost demented, by Slavic drinking patterns their genetic make-up cannot cope with. They live with chronic "white fever", the violent, semi-hallucinogenic state which vodka stirs up in Siberia's indigenous tribes. It sends them into a trance completely unlinked to reality. Normally frigid and unable to show their emotions, "white fever" makes Tuvan men suddenly undress in the -30˚C snowdrifts, and blinds them to who they are with. Men knife their lovers and kill their best friends in a trance, only to sober up and howl. This is why nobody goes out after dusk. 

This is a nation drinking itself insane. Tuva is blighted by the worst epidemic of alcoholism in Russia. At every corner lie collapsed men, sweating or talking to themselves. Alcoholics scream out insane demands — "Take me to California!" There are constant stabbings and anthrax outbreaks. This is not only the poorest but the most violent part of the country. Male life expectancy hovers around 55, about the same as central Africa. The dusty streets lack cars, there are no supermarkets, the liberal Moscow dailies are impossible to find, and one of the very few recent buildings is the prosecutor's office, an outpost of federal power, but built like a plastic Chinese Tiananmen gate. 

In Moscow, I loved getting dragged into arcane debates about whether Russia is still an empire. In Tuva it was suddenly obvious to me that in some corners it undoubtedly is. The population is almost entirely Asian, more than 80 per cent ethnic Tuvan, a Mongol people who speak a Turkic language. It felt as far from Moscow as Rangoon does from London.