"The state stole our money," said Roman, a 32-year-old Moscow marketing director, who has helplessly watched $30,000 drain out of his savings account as the rouble has more than halved in value over the past 10 days.

Roman, who held a 10-hour vigil yesterday outside a branch of SBSAgro, the second most popular savings bank, in a futile effort to retrieve his money, said his faith in Russian capitalism had been crushed.

"We believed in market reforms. We trusted the promises of our government and our central bank when they said, `Go to the commercial banks, they will give you higher returns than the state'," Roman said. "But this is a lesson I will never again put my money in a Russian bank."

But Roman and the 50 other aggrieved depositors patiently waiting for their money are the lucky ones. According to poll data, only one in four Russians claims to have savings at all. The sum of all household deposits is roughly 130 billion roubles, or 4 per cent of gross domestic product, meaning the average depositor holds only 3,500 roubles ($350).

Most Russians are too poor or too suspicious to have been affected by the crisis in the banking system. The best-off are those who hold some of the $35 billion in hard currency.

The millions of workers whose wages have been unpaid for months, or even years, have been scratching out a diet in garden plots and living on their parents' pensions. As the rouble dissolves, the prospect of a pay-off of accumulated wages is vanishing.

"All my workers have been treating the company as a sort of bank, and seeing their unpaid wages like a kind of savings," said Joseph Piradashvili, director of Zapolarneftegaz, a gas exploration company north of the Artic circle. "Now, in dollar terms, their savings have halved and soon the price of food, which must all be imported, will rise."

The rouble crisis has also been forcing provincial traders who normally swell Moscow every day, to stay at home. Until prices settle, it is better to hold on to goods, rather than buy and sell.

Vladimir Panov, one who did make the journey, looked at his pregnant wife and summoned the last dregs of optimism from his soul as he looked to an uncertain future yesterday. "If the climate continues to get warmer we will probably be able to make it through the winter," said Mr Panov, a shoe seller from Barnaul, not far from Russia's Chinese border.

But the chance of re-selling at a profit in Barnaul the shoes he bought in the capital are slim. As he waited for the flight home, frustration mounted.

"This is all in vain. Prices are rising so I have to raise my prices, but then no one will buy. I think I'll move into bread. People always need bread."

Living standards in the provinces are much lower than in Moscow and St Petersburg. Those who have survived the last 10 years of upheaval have had to improvise intensively cultivating their garden plots, bartering produce with family and friends, and if they have money, travelling to Moscow to bring back goods for sale.

As three men found to their dismay on Wednesday, even bank robbery is no longer a reliable escape from poverty. After breaking into Vimpel Bank in central Moscow on Tuesday night, they found only 13,000 roubles. By the time they could change the roubles into dollars, they had already lost half their value. With a currency in terminal decline, prospects for bank robbers do not look good.

But voluntary exile in the provinces is also an increasingly precarious option. This summer's large rainfall in several regions has devastated the private potato crops on which Russia's disenfranchised masses rely. Supplies will not last the winter.

In villages only 100 miles north of Moscow, where the factories and farms are closed, people show no interest in the country's deep political turmoil. Few television sets work, and there are more pressing concerns potatoes.

Russia's provincial poor have not yet suffered directly from devaluation because they have no savings and do not buy imported food products. And even those Russians who have cash are finding that there is less to buy. Some shops, and even traders in city bazaars, yesterday locked their doors to Moscow customers. The merchants are waiting for the currency to hit bottom before they resume trade.

Ironically, only the people who had already been reduced to penury by the market reforms are finding something to cheer about.

Liuda, a 47-year-old bureaucrat in Vladivostok, Russia's far eastern outpost where water is rationed and black-outs are routine, lives on her mother's meagre pension. She thought she would never see a pay cheque again, but now she has some hope. "Maybe now they will print some roubles and I will get my salary. You can't live without money and now maybe I will get a little bit."