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Time travel. I've done it. You just leave Moscow, the bustling capital of a former super-power, and head out into the countryside.

The motorway quickly diminishes into a double-tracked highway and out of the woods people emerge to squat on the roadside, offering the wild berries and mushrooms they have picked that day for sale. But this is not some pre-industrial idyll. Rather, it seems that you have been transported into a post-apocalyptic scene. There is little sign of organized agriculture. Vast tracts of land which were once painstakingly cleared of forestry roll on unploughed and not even grazed. The Russians seem to exist at nature's behest, alongside her, on her bounty. If you stop to buy you find a few reminders of industrial life - tracksuit bottoms, plastic bags - which are so ragged as to be only ghostly memories of the past. Faces too look haunted, by hunger and by the uncertainty of the future.

"Would you mind" asked Sergei, "if we went to visit my grandmother? She's never met Yulia or Nasya before". Yulia his wife sat beside me in the van, with baby Nasya bouncing happily on her lap. We left the highway and soon moved from tarmac onto hard-core track, then muddy lane. In the middle of the umpteenth uncultivated field the track became invisible, swallowed up by the spectacular profusion of wild grasses.

There was total silence once the engine halted, except the lazy buzzing of the bees. We walked on through the head-high grasses, and discovered a broken bridge up-ended in the streambed, no doubt the cause of the track's demise. Beyond, on the crest of the hill, stood a handful of wooden houses, their dim-remembered coats of paint clinging patchily to the exteriors.

A few neurotic hens took up a half-hearted chorus as we ambled past, and a cat jumped lazily from its sunny window-ledge and disappeared into the abundant greenery. No human voices, no peering from the windows at this unlikely anglophone intrusion. Here, a mere 100 miles from Moscow even curiosity, it seems, has died.

And hardship has massacred enthusiasm. I was expecting tears and long embraces at this reunion, but we were greeted as if we'd stumbled over from the next door village. A tiny woman emerged, a Mrs. Tiggywinkle, from beneath an apple tree, her bow-legs stuffed into a pair of winter boots with gaping holes in both their heels. Kisses were perfunctorily exchanged and we were led indoors for tea and jam.

The house was built round a massive brick stove for heat in winter, and subdivided like a dormitory with walls that stopped well short of the ceiling. Babies and mothers, their faces sleep-creased, tumbled through flimsy curtains and gave a muted welcome. It was mid-summer and much of the family had come here to reap what they could of summer's harvest, to pickle and preserve it for winter, the prospect of which is never absent.

We were shown the vegetables planted on every inch of soil, a garden full to bursting. And behind the house a hectare of the field was down to potatoes, a sight that silenced everyone. Preoccupied by the tasks ahead, the family seemed happy to see us go. We had been a distraction, and now they could get on with planning for the future.

Walking back to the van Sergei explained that this had once been a thriving collective farm. Why was so little happening now then. "Ten years ago everyone was excited by the idea of private farming. They leased land, grazed cows, grew corn and oats. Then they tried to sell their produce. No transport, mafia control at the markets, no way to borrow money at reasonable rates of interest. Energy just drained away".

And his grandmother? "When I was young she was chief dairyman" he said. "They had 150 milk cows." He pointed to the skeleton of a building on the hill, a few remaining joists and girders framing daylight. "That was the dairy" he murmured. It was recent history yet somehow so far away.

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