A Russian man believed to be the oldest in the world has died at the age of 122.

Magomed Labazanov, who was born in 1890, died in his home in the Russian village of Caucasus from an unspecified illness today.

He had 18 grandchildren, more than 20 great-great grandsons, and outlived three of his four sons.

Labazanov once said his recipe for life was "abstaining from alcohol, tobacco - and women,'' the Daily Mail reported.

But he didn't follow his own advice as he married twice.

The former sawmill worker, who never learned to read or write, also said that a "proper diet" of fruit, dairy, corn, whey, fruits, vegetables and wild garlic was behind his longevity.

Relatives failed to enter him in the Guinness Book of World Records because he had no birth certificate or papers to prove his age, the Daily Mail reported.

Friends told the newspaper this was due to the chaos in Soviet times when old church and mosque records were destroyed.

Labazanov lived through three centuries of Russia's greatest ordeals - the October Revolution of 1917, the Russian Civil War that lasted until 1922, the birth and death of the Soviet Union, and the two world wars.

He was deported from Russia during World War II, but returned to his home country in the 1950s.