40 years of isolation in Siberia?

[AC]

I was browsing through the internet and found this article.   

excerpt
Slowly, over several visits, the full story of the family emerged. The old man’s name was Karp Lykov, and he was an Old Believer–a member of a fundamentalist Russian Orthodox sect, worshiping in a style unchanged since the 17th century. 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.” But these centuries-old hatreds were conflated with more recent grievances; Karp was prone to complain in the same breath about a merchant who had refused to make a gift of 26 poods of potatoes to the Old Believers sometime around 1900.

Things had only got worse for the Lykov family when the atheist Bolsheviks took power. Under the Soviets, isolated Old Believer communities that had fled to Siberia to escape persecution began to retreat ever further from civilization. During the purges of the 1930s, with Christianity itself under assault, a Communist patrol had shot Lykov’s brother on the outskirts of their village while Lykov knelt working beside him. He had responded by scooping up his family and bolting into forest.



Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-russian-family-was-cut-off-from-all-human-contact-unaware-of-world-war-ii-7354256/#wZ8JLHRFppsEGacW.99
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[fathertime]

I was browsing through the internet and found this article.   

Now you see here old man...that is MY line!   


Fathertime! 

[AC]

Now you see here old man...that is MY line!   


Fathertime!

Okay, but did you find the article as fascinating as I did?  I am even wondering if it is really true, or a Siberian myth.

[fathertime]

Okay, but did you find the article as fascinating as I did?  I am even wondering if it is really true, or a Siberian myth.

Sounds true to me...loved the story...thanks for linking it during your 'browsing'


Fathertime!

[Slumba]

There was a film or documentary done about this family, in Russian.  Apparently RT aired one... the news story they did about her:  http://rt.com/news/188532-russia-agafia-siberian-forest/

[STaty]

Okay, but did you find the article as fascinating as I did?  I am even wondering if it is really true, or a Siberian myth.

[STaty]

It is really story! Agafia Lykova (Russian: Агафья Лыкова, born 1943) is a Russian Old Believer, part of the Lykov family, who survived alone in the Taiga for most of her life. Lykova became a national phenomenon in the early 1980s when Vasily Peskov published articles about her family and their extreme isolation from the rest of society. Lykova is the sole surviving member of the clan and has been mostly self-sufficient since 1988, when her father died.