Fifty years ago, the village of Slyozi in western Russia was a bustling place full of men, women, children, cows and pigs. Just down the road was a busy collective farm. People kept bees and looked after chickens. In the late 1950s, it got its first combine harvester. 

However, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of communism, Slyozi has been slowly transformed - from a thriving agricultural community into a village of ghosts. After the second world war, and the departure of the invading Germans, it had a population of around 100. These days, though, the population is rather smaller - just four. There is Olga Feyodorovna, an 83-year-old widow who walks with a limp and has an over-excitable dog, Verney. She lives in a crumbling dacha alongside the main road. Olga is a bit deaf. Her husband, Boris, died in 2004.

Then there is Tamara Matveyeva - the village's youngest resident at a relatively sprightly 79. Tamara lives with her friend Alexandra, or Sasha, in a tidy cottage at the bottom of a snowy track. She has two chickens, two cats and a dog. Both women are also widows. Finally, there is another Olga. Olga number two is also 83, infirm, and unable to receive guests.

This is a community solely of old ladies. The village's last male inhabitant died in 2007. The scene is being repeated across Russia, the world's biggest country, where there are at least 34,000 villages inhabited by 10 people or fewer, almost all of them old women.

"Last winter our TV aerial blew off. There are no men left in the village to fix it. We are hoping one of the visiting gardeners will fix it over the summer," Tamara explains, standing outside her green-painted wooden dacha, dressed - like all the women here - in a colourful headscarf and felt boots. The village is just 40km from Latvia and the border with the European Union, and an hour's drive south from the historic town of Pskov, with its kremlin and riverside cathedral. It has 12 houses. Five of these are falling down; only three are inhabited; two are summer dachas. The outhouses, greenhouses and fields are abandoned and silent; the village has an air of ghostly decay.

The only regular visitor to Slyozi is the social worker - who cycles in every day to deliver the women water from a well. There is the occasional grandchild who drops in from town. A bus brings groceries weekly; Tamara invariably goes shopping for infirm Olga, who can't really walk. "There used to be a few more of us. But eight people have died over the past three years. Three men died last year. Now there are just women," say Tamara, clutching an apple bough snipped from her fruit garden. "I used to have bees," she says, pointing to a heap of abandoned hives. "I used to have cows, pigs and sheep. Now the men have died I don't have the ability to do it any more."

In fact, Slyozi's lack of men typifies the extraordinary demographic problem facing Russia, especially in the country's European north and west. The average male life expectancy in Russia is just 59. The figure is well below life expectancy in western Europe and in many developing countries as well. For women it is 70. The gap is exceptionally large.

Over the past eight years of Vladimir Putin's authoritarian rule, living standards for many across Russia have gone up. The country now has at least 53 billionaires. It is the world's largest exporter of gas, and the second largest producer of oil after Saudi Arabia. But this unprecedented boom in natural resources has made little dent on Russia's dismal demographic statistics.

Many of Russia's 30 million-plus pensioners live in poverty. The average pension is 3,000 roubles (£60) a month. At a time when their western European counterparts are enjoying the good life, Russian pensioners can be seen on the streets of Moscow or St Petersburg trying to scrape a living by selling gherkins, pullovers or woolly socks. Most of the gherkin sellers are women; in the cities, as in the countryside, there is a perplexing absence of old men.

In Slyozi, nobody is in any doubt as to why the men have disappeared. The problem is alcoholism - a ubiquitous rural phenomenon. Other social factors have certainly contributed: bad health care, smoking, unemployment, and the lingering health problems of many Russian pensioners who battled the Germans. But ultimately the men of Slyozi drank themselves to death.

"My husband used to drink throughout our marriage," Olga says. "All the men in the village were drunkards. My husband also had a leg wound from the war. In the end he got sick and died," she says. She lives on her husband's war pension - 5,000 roubles (£100) a month. "I'm so lonely," she adds. In an abandoned shed we find bottles with the word "vodka" written on them in flowing Cyrillic script.

In the neighbouring village of Velye, a short drive past Slyozi's derelict Soviet collective farm, residents paint the same picture. "Drink is a huge problem around here," says Zinaida Ivanovna, 79. "It's a terrible problem in this village. It's a nightmare. The men here drink their pensions as soon as they get them. They sell whatever they have to get more booze. They drink anything - moonshine and even window-cleaning fluids."

Velye has a church, a school and a village shop where the woman assistant tots up the bill using an abacus. There is a small museum documenting the village's agricultural history and a model of a vanished monastery. Pushkin lived 30km down the road; in summer, tourists from St Petersburg drive past on the way to his country estate, sometimes stopping to pick flowers. The men of Slyozi, meanwhile, all lie in the village graveyard. It is a picturesque spot, up a track to a birch forest and overlooking a frozen lake. Here I discover Tamara's husband, Alexander Stephanovich. He died in 2004.

In the village square we do eventually manage to find a male pensioner in a large black Russian hat. He tells us that he is 79 and Velye's oldest male inhabitant. How come he is still alive? "I drink only milk," he explains. "The others drink vodka. Look at me - I look the same age as him," he adds, pointing to another man in his 40s, who has just turned up at the shop. The grizzled second man does indeed look several decades older.

Sociologists agree that alcoholism is the main reason so many Russian men fail to reach their 60th birthday. During the late 1980s, life expectancy went up when Mikhail Gorbachev launched a successful campaign against excessive drinking. In the 1990s, under the less-than-teetotal Boris Yeltsin, the figure sank dramatically. Despite a tiny recent improvement, Russian men continue to die before old age.

On average, they consume a bottle of vodka a day, with some 30% of all male deaths in Russia alcohol related. "It's a really serious problem for our country," says Dr Tatyana Nefedova, a senior researcher at the Institute of Geography, at Russia's Academy of Sciences in Moscow. "Low prices for vodka make the death rate higher. In Sweden, the government has dealt with this by putting up prices. But here you can buy homemade vodka for 15 roubles (30p)."

Some Russian women are also alcoholics but the rate is two or three times lower than among men. "Women feel more responsible for their family and drink less," says Nefedova. The villagers of Slyozi agree. "I guess we live longer because we are working more and they [the men] are drinking more," Tamara says.

Other experts point to the fact that life in Russia is so much tougher than elsewhere. "Male life expectancy fell dramatically in the 1990s. Over the past 10 years it has been more or less stable," says Andrey Treyvish, a senior lecturer in geography at Moscow State University. "Many tropical islands have a higher life expectancy than Russia. On an island you have a good environment, plenty of fish and a quiet life."

The phenomenon of women-only villages is linked to the depopulation of the Russian countryside. The trend began during the late Soviet period and accelerated in the 1990s, when many collective farms went bust. In 1926 77 million Russians lived in rural areas; today the figure is 38 million. The young or ambitious flee to the towns, leaving behind the elderly, the incapable and the drunk. The country now has 13,000 villages that are not inhabited at all - since the last Olgas and Tamaras died off.

"In the village I came from, Valuchek, there was just one old man and three old ladies. They had no phone and no connection to the outside world. Now nobody lives there," Zinaida explains. Her husband died in 1996, aged 68. "Men are just weaker," she observes. Has life got better under Putin, who steps down in May as president but is likely to carry on in power as prime minister? "No," she replies. "Our pensions are very low. Everything is very expensive. The price of bread and butter has gone up and I can't buy the things I need."

The Kremlin has promised to spend £2bn over the next five years reviving rural Russia. Earlier this month, Dmitry Medvedev - Putin's official candidate to succeed him as president - hit the campaign trail promising subsidies for farmers. Medvedev is certain to win Russia's presidential election on March 2. But experts in human geography doubt that his subsidies will reverse migration to the cities, which is turning huge chunks of Russia into a wasteland.

Last week Putin also acknowledged the scale the country's life expectancy problem, promising to increase it to 75 by 2020. This was a big task, he conceded, given that, for the time being, "Russian citizens are becoming fewer by the year."

Surprisingly, the women of Slyozi seem content with their modest lives. They admit their pensions are small but say they are enough. Tamara and Alexandra both voted for Putin during last December's parliamentary elections. They add that they are grateful for his reforms - which include providing them with 1,000 roubles' worth (£20) of firewood a year. Olga, meanwhile, is not entirely sure who Russia's president is - a sign perhaps that the Kremlin's ubiquitous television propaganda doesn't penetrate everywhere. Had she heard of Putin? "I'm not sure," she replies.

The women remember the Soviet era as a golden age. "We had so many people here after the war. There were three or four kids in each household. The work was difficult. We had no machinery. We had to plant and harvest the fields manually. Things were bad. But gradually they got better," Tamara says. "The 70s and early 80s were best. We didn't have to pay for anything. There was free education and free hospitals. But after this things fell apart. At some point all the people left."

Tamara's most vivid memory is of hiding with her family in a bunker when the Germans retreated. It was 1944; the family concealed a Russian soldier under a sack. She says a platoon of Germans discovered their shelter and took away her father. But instead of shooting him they merely asked him to give them a bucket of water. "I can't say the Germans were bad to us. They didn't execute anybody," Tamara says. "The commandant lived over there. One day some Germans started taking away the young men but he went after them and got them back."

Tamara gives us some apples from her garden and shows us the outhouse where she keeps her chickens. She gestures across the wintry fields and broken greenhouses. "We are the only ones left. There is no way more people will come here, so this village is doomed. Now all we are doing is sitting here waiting to die."'

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