The province of Khanti-Mansisk is Russia's Texas, and Surgut its Houston.

The hairs in my nostrils froze instantly, and snapped off if I blew my nose

Development began in the 70s, a few years after the first oil flowed. It was Surgut's good fortune, then, to be built when the era of wedding-cake public buildings and brooding, neo-classical aprtment blocks was over.

No sign, praise be, of the grey concrete and garish plastic panels that instantly tell you you're in a Soviet city.

Instead, it's a town of modern apartment buildings coloured with pastel paints that can stand up to Siberian winters. It was minus 26C the night I arrived, minus 34 the next day. At that temperature, the hairs in my nostrils froze instantly, and snapped off if I blew my nose.

Nodding donkeys

For nearly half a millennium, Surgut was nothing more than a logging and fishing outpost on the Ob, a mighty Siberian river that winds languidly through marsh and pine-forest taiga to the Arctic Ocean.

The source of Surgut's wealth

The taiga now is dotted with the nodding donkeys that squat over the earliest wells; and strewn with the massive derricks, gleaming pumping stations and sprawling pipelines that are the hallmark of modern oil and gas extraction.

The size of the operation is truly Texan: the oil and gas fields cover an area nearly 10 times the size of Britain.

The main producer - SurgutNeftegas - is the world's largest oil and gas company, and just a few days ago, it produced its billionth ton of oil.

Every third person in Surgut depends on it for a living, and it provides 80% of the town's municipal income; it funds housing developments, clinics and schools.

A visit to Surgut academic high school with Irina, my interpreter - who teaches English there - gave me a taste of just what oil money can do.

There are 1,200 pupils, who get in by competing in a very tough entrance exam. They learn English in Irina's splendid German-built language lab, with its piles of well-cared for textbooks. No dog ears here, and no shortages, either.

She took me to the IT department: 11 rooms, crammed with 190 of the latest computers; there's a TV studio and gallery that produce a twice-weekly news bulletin, three theatres, two swimming pools, marble stairways, and an assembly hall with padded, cinema-style seats.

It made my old school look distinctly seedy, even in its heyday. And in the evenings, the local businessmen move in to use the same facilities. Yes, many people have reason to be grateful to SurgutNeftegas.

'Nothing to criticise'

Including the local media - the oil company's tax roubles fund all but one of Surgut's four theoretically independent TV stations.

I spent a pleasant couple of hours in the company of the director of one of them, a gruff bearded man, who, it now occurs to me, never told me his name. No matter: here was another proud owner, who invited me to watch his evening news bulletin go out.

The city hall only pays a third of the costs of his news - the rest comes from advertising. So he can say what he likes.

On the other hand, he admitted, there is an understanding between himself and the mayor about what he will and won't say but it was no problem, because, as everyone knows, the local authority works so well, there's nothing to criticise. Quite so. It later came out that the mayor actually covers 90% of his total running costs.

Election bandwagon

Had I been one of the chosen few of Surgut's journalistic community, I would have walked across the square to the gleaming new business centre - another oil money creation - to a presidential press conference that night.

But I was not, so I noted the temperature on its huge rooftop display: it had risen from minus 20 to almost zero. I made for home through the slush to watch the TV reports.

Vladimir Putin's election bandwaggon had rolled into Surgut, though you would hardly have known it. There was no motorcade, no walk-about.

Not a great smiler

He met the local politicians, and then went to see the men he knows really matter - the board of SurgutNeftegas. The TV dutifully showed mute shots of him glad-handing the oilmen, and then there was the press conference - perfunctory and pretty pointless.

Mr Putin said little and smiled less. It is such a foregone conclusion that he will be the next president of Russia, that the real race is for who will come second, and thus get the chance to be prime minister.

Mr Putin vanished back to Moscow at dead of night, leaving most of Surgut none the wiser about him. But what they do know of this former KGB man seems to be enough: that he's young, tough and apparently uncorrupt.

In Surgut, above all, they want the calm and stability he promises, so that the good times can continue to roll, as the black oil rolls out of the ground, and the dark fish-laden waters of the Ob roll silently beneath the metre-thick ice, down to the Arctic Ocean.