OUT OF EDEN WALK

We walk through high, cold mountain sunlight, my guide Rufat Gojayev and I. We drift through evening valleys fogged by smoke from 10,000 wood-burning stoves. We slog into teashops where burly men in black porkpie hats sit, solemn as icebergs. We poke big tin spoons into small bowls of lentil soup. Then we stumble—bewildered—back into 1989.

The time warp has a name: Ivanovka. A farming village in Azerbaijan.

Population: about 3,000. Settled in the 19th century by an austere Christian sect called the Molokans. They are the Mennonites of the Russian Orthodox world—devout, plain-living folk, united by their hatred of religious excess: gilded icons, candles, bejeweled priests, towering cathedrals. They pray in barren houses. The men’s long beards flutter like pennants in the wind. The women wear headscarves. Catherine the Great exiled them from Imperial Russia as heretics. They settled the Russian frontiers. And though Muslim Azerbaijan declared independence from the dying Soviet Union in 1991, the Molokans here still cling to their faith, to older Russian ways. They inhabit small, gabled Russian houses. They speak the antique Russian of Tolstoy. They practice the same socialized agriculture that the communists preached in the 1920sand 1930s. Ivanovka is the last kolkhoz, or Soviet-style collective farm, in the whole Caucasus.

“Our farmers work the same land together,” says Olga Jabina Timofeovna, a village administrator. “They don’t earn much in money. They are paid in farm products—wheat, milk, meat. We prefer to live communally. This system suits us.”

Jabina is a modern Molokan. Her desk in the mayor’s office, like all official desks in Azerbaijan, is watched over by two photographic portraits: one of Heydar Aliyev, founder of the young nation, and another of the current president, his son and successor, Ilham Aliyev. I ask Jabina how I might join the kolkhoz.

She looks startled. “We don’t get many applicants,” she says.

Life in a kolkhoz has never been easy. The work is hard, Jabina says. The rewards are spread thin. (Millions, in fact, died of starvation in Soviet Union during the forced collectivization of private farms.) Jabina says that younger Molokans have been tempted away from remote Ivanovka by jobs in the cities. Others went back to Russia. The village once housed 4,000 Russian colonists. Perhaps only 1,000 remain. (Most of the villagers are now Azeri.) “One of my daughters works in an office in Baku,” Jabina says. “What would she do here? Take care of cows?”

Gojayev and I wander Ivanovka. We see Jabina’s point.

Many farmhouses stand empty. (The “For Rent” signs are stenciled in Russian Cyrillic.) The streets are ghostly. Shops are closed. Yet odd surprises await us: I expected to see a rustic outpost of an impoverished empire. Instead, the village is studded with relics of past Soviet glory, wealth. The mayor’s office is colonnaded—a tall neo-classical structure that would be the pride of a medium-size city. The “community center” houses an opulent concert hall. Its red velvet seats accommodate 1,500 people: half the current village population. Parks, though now overgrown, sprawl across acres. There is the dried-up remnant of an artificial lake. Ivanovka is a small self-contained world tossed up on the Caspian Plain, a flotsam village stranded in time as the Soviet Union began to dissolve, along with the Berlin Wall, in 1989.

“We had a good life in the Soviet period,” recalls Jabin Mikhail Tsimofeyevich, 80, a Molokan farmer. He is a friendly old man in a rusty brown coat. His gigantic hands are stained dark with the juice of harvested walnuts. “In the 1980s we were the most productive farm in Azerbaijan! I was rewarded with 17 paid holidays all over the Soviet Union. Moldova. Ukraine. The Soviet republics were one big family back then.”

A downside of communist rule, Tsimofeyevich admits, was religious repression. More than 300 Molokan men from tiny Ivanovka—including the entire secondary school class of 1926—never returned from World War II. They were pressed into the Red Army despite being pacifists.

Today, the Molokan’s throwback kolkhoz exists only because of Azerbaijan government subsidies. It is a community of dwindling, grizzled Russians pensioners and a growing population of softer young Azeris. The global economy has arrived in the form of two new B&Bs.

“So, you are really an American?” Tsimofeyevich asks. I nod. And he arches his white eyebrows. “At last the real thing, then!”

I experience an odd frisson of excitement: I am his first former enemy. And now, it is as if I too am now marooned in time. Old Tsimofeyevich views me through Cold War eyes. Suddenly, I am living an encounter from my father’s generation. First contact through time.

Tsimofeyevich blesses my guide Gojavev. He blesses me. Gojavev and I set out once again for the trail. We are walking to the Caspian Sea.

Every place in the world exists at a coordinate in space: a precise elevation, a latitude, a longitude. This is the easy part of navigation. A more elusive map—one shifting or still—describes its location in the river of time. Countries, towns, individuals: It is much the same. We must not only ask each other, “Where are you from?” But when.