And yet, the feared Western civilisation has crept its way into this closed, anachronistic world.
"We have a problem with young Russian village guys who are in the habit of getting drunk and driving their pick-up trucks at breakneck speed across the town," a tourism official in Homer confided in me. When I asked the ‘Batiushka’ about it, he pretended he didn't hear the question. In a challenge to the age-long traditions of male domination, several Nikolaevsk women found themselves jobs in Homer, whereas a couple of others chose to leave the community altogether and moved into the "real world", where, as one Nikolaevsk resident told me with horror, "they wear shorts and even use make-up". On the other hand, three American families came to live in Nikolaevsk and seem to be getting along well with the Russians.
Yet even the most conformist of the Old Believers cannot dismiss all the fruits of Western civilisation as harmful. The Batiushka himself was telling me with pride about the villagers' own small fleet of ultra-modern fishing vessels, with latest electronic equipment - fishing constitutes their main source of income. Nikolaevsk boasts an excellent secondary school, one of the best in Alaska, where all the subjects, except for Russian, are taught in English. No wonder the village teenagers prefer communicating in English, although most of them retain a reasonably good command of their melodious old-fashioned Russian language. As for smaller kids, they hardly speak any Russian at all.
"They don't want to learn Russian," complained Nina Fefelova, at whose house I was put up for the night. Nina, herself an Old Believer, came to Nikolaevsk from the Russian Far East seven years ago and married one of ‘Batiushka's’ sons, a deacon called Denis. She taught Russian at the village school.