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Outside interference has only been felt twice in the remote village of Varzuga, and it has always meant trouble.

“Ivan the Terrible sent his oprichniki [secret police] in 1568. They killed two thirds of the population” said Svyatislav Mikhailovich Kalouchin, pausing to let it sink in. Stroking his Walesa moustache thoughtfully he continued “then, after almost 400 years, Stalin sent his men too”. He caught my eyes and smiled. We two were both outsiders.

Svet is from Odessa, “the pearl of the Black Sea”. For the last four years he has been director of the two million acre “Rise Up Communism!” collective farm on the Kola Peninsula, in Russia. If you imagine Scandinavia to be the silhouette of a bad tempered mule’s head, then the Kola peninsula, straddling the Arctic Circle, is its flattened back ears.

Beneath the surface, the Kola is as rich in minerals as the Periodic Table, but the land itself is like a massive black beach at low tide. Undulations in the sodden, peaty soil create millions of small pools, and the only crop is forestry. The farm is so inaccessible it keeps its own herds of pig and cattle for milk and meat. The farm bakery produces fresh bread daily, from flour driven hundreds of miles over the rutted tracks called roads up here. The main farm income comes from deep-sea fishing and salmon-netting. But as subsidies in the state farming sector are cut, providing an income for the 1,200 inhabitants requires the kind of lateral thinking that Russian managers are not generally renowned for. Yet Svet, a mere babe at 36, appears to have what it takes.

“He really looks after the villagers, like a father,” enthused Valery, a native who has recently returned here to work.

As well as the recently built German frankfurter plant, Svet runs a factory making fur clothing, sells crab and lobster to the Germans, and fish where he can. But perhaps the most incongruous of the recent ventures, and the one that brought me here, is a series of partnerships with western travel companies, offering salmon fishing on the farm’s prolific arctic rivers.

Salmon stocks in many European rivers have been so depleted by netting that these days you might pay through the nose for a week’s fishing and return without so much as a story about the one that got away. The group I travelled with, eight of them, caught 79 salmon on one day. Such was the enthusiasm and the continuous polar daylight, that many of them fished on into the early hours of the morning. I’m not a fisherman, so you can take my word for it.

The arrival of foreigners in this introverted spot, a forbidden destination for seventy years, had its surreal moments. We flew first to a tented camp, 130kms from the nearest village, on a piece of blasted tundra with only an ancient belching tractor engine to generate electricity. Yet within the wind-buffeted kitchen tent, two microwave ovens, a magimix and a pair of brand-new filter coffee machines gleamed next to a corroded vintage refrigerator. Enough vegetables, cheese and wine to last the week had made the journey by plane and helicopter with us from Moscow. Some of the women working in the kitchens had barely seen a banana before, and vegetables are such a rare commodity in this wilderness that the discarded tops, tails and innards on the English cook’s chopping board were regularly added to the staff soup.

The locals found the fishermen hilarious. An assorted bunch of well-paid professionals, their kit was state of the art. Green Neoprene chest-waders made them look like Jeremy Fisher and his brothers, setting off with their willowy long rods, elaborate coloured flies and their nets. Watching them cast elegantly and continuously, the gillies grinned mischievously and described their own four foot spinning rods, crude lures and their landing technique which consists simply of walking backwards until the fish is lying on the bank. At the beginning of the season they were each given a landing net to use with the clients. On the first day they all dutifully took them out, but I noticed Volodya locate a peg for his on a tree near our pick-up spot. There it stayed all day long. After that, I never saw a landing net again.

Our second camp was a group of log cabins on a bend in the river, a couple of kilometres south of the village of Varzuga. As we flew in by helicopter, the pilot dipped right down to look at the Church of the Ascension, a seventeenth-century wooden structure towering heavenwards at the centre of the village. The cross-shaped building sat on raised wooden foundations and rose to its central, steep tent-roofed tower in a series of exaggerated ogee gables. At the top of the tower was a small, bulbous cupola, covered in wooden snakes’ scale tiles. Though built only with an axe, and without a single metal nail, there was in irrepressible arrogance about it, dominating such a hostile landscape.

Victor, a Ukrainian who lives next to the church and is building his own wooden house, told how the village was the oldest on the peninsula, dating from the 12th century. It had become immensely rich from fishing, the trade in furs and the abundant supply of freshwater pearls, used by the thousand to decorate church robes and crowns. The church’s upkeep had been paid for from the proceeds of all fish caught on church holidays. Today the village cannot afford to build a house for or pay a priest.

On our last, gloriously sunny night, we heard for ourselves that even without a church the musical traditions of the village had survived. Valentine the fish inspector arrived with his accordion. He left at one in the morning, setting off perilously upstream in a matchstick of a boat, standing every now and then to wave goodbye. Ringing in my ears to this day is his aching, melancholic song about an astronaut who dreams of his wife, his return to earth and the numbing romantic beauty of the Russian countryside.

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