In many rural areas of the former Soviet Union, poverty and unemployment are forcing people to leave. But in Armenia it is men who are going, leaving whole villages almost entirely populated by women.

Here in the Armenian village of Dzoragyugh, it is often only women and children you will see working in the fields.

That is because the only way for men to earn enough money to support their families is to go to Russia.

One of those left behind is Milena Kazaryan, a mother-of-two in her twenties.

As she tills the land behind her house, she tells me that her husband is working in Moscow - as are her father, her grandfather and all her brothers. In fact, all the men in her family have left.

Ms Kazaryan smiles a lot. But she says what worries her and her friends, is that their husbands will set up second families in Russia. Something which happens a lot, she says.

All we want is jobs in Armenia so that our families can stay together and so that fathers can see their children grow up”

"All of the women are really scared. We phone every morning and every evening, to find out what our husbands are up to.

"It's always really stressful wondering whether he'll come back or not. A lot of the women here worry because they think that in Russia all the girls are beautiful. And the problem is that the men work very hard so of course they also want to relax. That's why they're scared."

Ms Kazaryan says the husbands of many of her friends now have second families in Russia.

"Even if they have little children, men leave their wives and get Russian girlfriends but when they are old and they can't work anymore, they come back here," she says.

Ms Kazaryan and her husband married five years ago. Since then he has spent most of the year working in Russia. Like many Armenians there, he comes back for Christmas, and leaves again in March.

So it is hard to keep the family together.

Women here say that almost all of the men from this village have gone to work in Russia. Leaving women to do everything - including the heavy labour, usually seen as men's work.

And certainly when you walk round the villages in this region, it is women you see herding cattle, on their way to the fields with tools in their hands or carrying bales of hay on their backs - there are very few men.

But the burden is also psychological, says Ilona Ter-Minasyan, the head of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Armenia's capital Yerevan. Women have to also now make all the decisions - a source of conflict in this rural, patriarchal society.

"Eventually it leads to shifted gender roles because, while he's out for eight or nine months, she's head of the household."

There are also other more fatal issues, says Ms Ter-Minasyan.

"Armenia has a very small population of people who are HIV-positive. But recent surveys show that very often, large percentages of them are labour migrants who go to the Russian Federation, become HIV-positive, come back, and then transfer the disease to their wives. This is the worst-case scenario."

Human rights groups accuse the government of not doing enough to tackle the problem of emigration.

But Gagik Yeganyan, head of the Armenian government's department for migration, says the only solution is to increase the number of jobs, rather than set up any specific programme. And that this is something not just the government, but the whole of society, including the media, should work towards.

Officially unemployment is around 7% but the IOM says benefits are so low that most people do not register as unemployed. So the real figure is estimated to be around 30%.