# Lifestyles & Discussion > Freedom Living >  For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact

## Suzanimal

What an amazing story.




> Siberian summers do not last long. The snows linger into May, and the cold weather returns again during September, freezing the taiga into a still life awesome in its desolation: endless miles of straggly pine and birch forests scattered with sleeping bears and hungry wolves; steep-sided mountains; white-water rivers that pour in torrents through the valleys; a hundred thousand icy bogs. This forest is the last and greatest of Earths wildernesses. It stretches from the furthest tip of Russias arctic regions as far south as Mongolia, and east from the Urals to the Pacific: five million square miles of nothingness, with a population, outside a handful of towns, that amounts to only a few thousand people.
> 
> When the warm days do arrive, though, the taiga blooms, and for a few short months it can seem almost welcoming. It is then that man can see most clearly into this hidden worldnot on land, for the taiga can swallow whole armies of explorers, but from the air. Siberia is the source of most of Russias oil and mineral resources, and, over the years, even its most distant parts have been overflown by oil prospectors and surveyors on their way to backwoods camps where the work of extracting wealth is carried on.
> 
> Thus it was in the remote south of the forest in the summer of 1978. A helicopter sent to find a safe spot to land a party of geologists was skimming the treeline a hundred or so miles from the Mongolian border when it dropped into the thickly wooded valley of an unnamed tributary of the Abakan, a seething ribbon of water rushing through dangerous terrain. The valley walls were narrow, with sides that were close to vertical in places, and the skinny pine and birch trees swaying in the rotors downdraft were so thickly clustered that there was no chance of finding a spot to set the aircraft down. But, peering intently through his windscreen in search of a landing place, the pilot saw something that should not have been there. It was a clearing, 6,000 feet up a mountainside, wedged between the pine and larch and scored with what looked like long, dark furrows. The baffled helicopter crew made several passes before reluctantly concluding that this was evidence of human habitationa garden that, from the size and shape of the clearing, must have been there for a long time.
> 
> It was an astounding discovery. The mountain was more than 150 miles from the nearest settlement, in a spot that had never been explored. The Soviet authorities had no records of anyone living in the district.
> 
> Keep Reading...
> ...

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## Working Poor

I read it it was very interesting. I have a Mongolian grandfather and it kind of reminded me of some of the stories he used to tell. Oh and I must spread some reputation around before I can endorse you again.

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## presence

> a low, soot-blackened log kennel that was  as cold as a cellar,” with a floor consisting of potato peel and  pine-nut shells. Looking around in the dim light, the visitors saw that  it consisted of a single room. It was cramped, musty and indescribably  filthy, propped up by sagging joists—and, astonishingly, home to a  family of five


In the US: Code enforcement, Horders: season 2 episode 6, forced pyche meds for DSM-IV Squalor Syndrome, father arrested for tax evasion and false imprisonment.

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## Suzanimal

> In the US: Code enforcement, Horders: season 2 episode 6, forced pyche meds for DSM-IV Squalor Syndrome, father arrested for tax evasion and false imprisonment.


I don't see how they kept that place warm.




> The Lykovs lived in this hand-built log cabin, lit by a single window “the size of a backpack pocket” and warmed by a smoky wood-fired stove.







> Old Believers had been persecuted since the days of Peter the Great, and Lykov talked about it as though it had happened only yesterday; for him, Peter was a personal enemy and “the anti-Christ in human form”—a point he insisted had been amply proved by Tsar’s campaign to modernize Russia by* forcibly “chopping off the beards of Christians.”*
> 
> Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/histor...FvQDKKkTTGB.99

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## Acala

Very interesting story.  Some highlights for me: 

1. The son discovered how to persistence hunt big game on his own, supporting the "Born to Run" thesis;    
2. Hemp is REALLY useful;
3. When they were first exposed to TV they were virtually hypnotized - and they were all dead within a few months;

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## Suzanimal

> Very interesting story.  Some highlights for me: 
> 
> 1. The son discovered how to persistence hunt big game on his own, supporting the "Born to Run" thesis;    
> 2. Hemp is REALLY useful;
> *3. When they were first exposed to TV they were virtually hypnotized - and they were all dead within a few months*;


Not all of them, the father lived 27 more years and I believe one of the daughters is still alive.

There's a documentary on them, it's in Russian but I enjoyed getting a good look at everything.

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## Acala

> Not all of them, the father lived 27 more years and I believe one of the daughters is still alive.
> 
> There's a documentary on them, it's in Russian but I enjoyed getting a good look at everything.


I will have to find the source of my info and get back to you.

Edit: Okay, only three out of four children died shortly after being exposed to television.  The father lived another ten years.  The remaining daughter went back into the woods.

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## Demigod

http://www.vice.com/far-out/agafias-...fe-full-length


Here is a video  from Vice.The thing that I find the most interesting is their ability to accept some technological advances like satellites.But to survive for 40 years in remote Siberia is a real achievement. Dimitry would probably be able to put most nature survivalist to shame with ease.

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## PaulConventionWV

> I don't see how they kept that place warm.


Haha, I can tell you would have hated Peter the Great.

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## Suzanimal

I hope she's okay.




> Woman Isolated for Decades in Siberia Emerges
> 
> (NEWSER) – In 2013, Smithsonian told a fascinating story: the tale of a family of six who lived deep in the Siberian wilderness for 40 years with zero contact from other humans—and no awareness of WWII—until geologists found them in 1978. Now, the last surviving member of that family has emerged from the wilderness using an emergency satellite phone to ask for help with leg pain. Agafia Lykova, 70, was airlifted to a hospital in Tashtagol, reports the Guardian. The youngest of four, Lykova was born in 1945 to parents who were Old Believers, a sect that broke from the Russian Orthodox church in the 17th century, reports RT.com. Her father, Karp, fled with his wife and then two children in 1936, and they built an existence that Radio Free Europe reports sat a two-week trek from the nearest hamlet, using what little was available—mushrooms, potatoes, a spinning wheel they'd lugged all the way there.
> 
> ...
> http://www.newser.com/story/219092/w...a-emerges.html

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## LibForestPaul

> In the US: Code enforcement, Horders: season 2 episode 6, forced pyche meds for DSM-IV Squalor Syndrome, father arrested for tax evasion and false imprisonment.


tax evasion. he's not paying for the roads and police and fireman, nothing but a parasite.

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