In 1978, Soviet geologists stumbled upon a family of five in the taiga. They had been cut off from almost all human contact since fleeing religious persecution in 1936.

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; thousands of miles of icy bogs. This forest is one of the last and greatest of Earth’s wildernesses. It stretches from Russia’s Arctic regions to as far south as Mongolia, and east from the Urals to the Pacific: millions of square miles of sparsely populated nothingness.

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 tree line 100 or so miles from the Mongolian border when it dropped into the thickly wooded valley of an unnamed tributary of the Abakan River , 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 little chance of finding a spot to set the aircraft down.

The Lykov family lived in remote regions of the Siberian taiga for more than 40 years—utterly isolated and more than 150 miles from the nearest human settlement - Amzanyta via Getty Images

However, 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 on 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 an area that had never been explored. The Soviet authorities had no records of anyone living in the district.

The four scientists sent into the district to prospect for iron ore were told about the pilots’ sighting, and it perplexed and worried them. “In the taiga, it’s less dangerous to run across a wild animal than a stranger,” as Russian journalist Vasily Peskov wrote in Lost in the Taiga: One Russian Family’s 50-Year Struggle for Survival and Religious Freedom in the Siberian Wilderness . Rather than wait at their own temporary base, ten miles away, the scientists decided to investigate. The group’s leader, a geologist named Galina Pismenskaya, said they “chose a fine day and put gifts in our packs for our potential friends”—though, just to be sure, she recalled, “I did check the pistol that hung at my side.”

Lost in the Taiga

A Russian journalist provides a haunting account of the Lykovs, a family of Old Believers, or members of a fundamentalist sect, who in 1932 went to live in the depths of the Siberian Taiga and survived for more than fifty years apart from the modern world.

As the intruders scrambled up the mountain, heading for the spot pinpointed by their pilots, they began to come across signs of human activity: a rough path, a staff, a log laid across a stream and finally a small shed filled with birch-bark containers of cut-up dried potatoes. Pismenskaya told Peskov:

Beside a stream there was a dwelling. Blackened by time and rain, the hut was piled up on all sides with taiga rubbish—bark, poles, planks. If it hadn’t been for a window the size of my backpack pocket, it would have been hard to believe that people lived there. But they did, no doubt about it. … Our arrival had been noticed, as we could see.

The low door creaked, and the figure of a very old man emerged into the light of day, straight out of a fairy tale. Barefoot. Wearing a patched and repatched shirt made of sacking. He wore trousers of the same material, also in patches, and had an uncombed beard. His hair was disheveled. He looked frightened and was very attentive. … We had to say something, so I began: “Greetings, grandfather! We’ve come to visit.”

The old man did not reply immediately. … Finally, we heard a soft, uncertain voice: “Well, since you have traveled this far, you might as well come in.”

The sight that greeted the geologists as they entered the cabin was like something from the Middle Ages. Jerry-built from whatever materials came to hand, the dwelling was not much more than a burrow—“a low, soot-blackened log kennel that was as cold as a cellar,” with a floor consisting of potato peel and pine-nut shells, wrote Peskov. 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. As Pismenskaya told the author:

[The] silence was suddenly broken by sobs and lamentations. Only then did we see the silhouettes of two women. One was in hysterics, praying: “This is for our sins, our sins.” The other, keeping behind a post … sank slowly to the floor. The light from the little window fell on her wide, terrified eyes, and we realized we had to get out of there as quickly as possible.

Led by Pismenskaya, the scientists backed hurriedly out of the hut and retreated to a spot a few yards away, where they took out some provisions and began to eat. After about half an hour, the door of the cabin creaked open, and the old man and his two daughters emerged—no longer panicked and, though still obviously frightened, “frankly curious.” Warily, the three strange figures approached and sat down with their visitors, rejecting everything that they were offered—jam, tea, bread—with a muttered, “We are not allowed that!” When Pismenskaya asked, “Have you ever eaten bread?” the old man answered: “I have. But they have not. They have never seen it.” At least he was intelligible. The daughters spoke a language distorted by a lifetime of isolation. “When the sisters talked to each other, it sounded like a slow, blurred cooing.”

Peter the Great’s attempts to modernize the Russia of the early 18th century found a focal point in a campaign to end the wearing of beards—which was anathema to Karp Lykov and the Old Believers - Universal History Archive / Getty Images

Slowly, over several visits, the full story of the family emerged. The old man’s name was Karp Osipovich 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 Antichrist in human form”—a point he insisted had been amply proved by the czar’s campaign to modernize Russia by forcibly “[chopping] off the beards of Christians.” 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 salt to the Old Believers sometime around 1900. As the geologists filled him in on what he’d missed, he used a similar lens to form opinions about current events:

The events that had excited the world were unknown here. The Lykovs did not know any famous names and had heard only vaguely about the past war. When in recalling the “first world war” with Karp Osipovich the geologists engaged him in conversation about the last one, he shook his head: “What is this, a second time, and always the Germans. A curse on Peter. He flirted with them. That is so.”

Things had only gotten 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 the forest .

The Lykovs' homestead seen from a Soviet reconnaissance plane, 1980

That was in 1936, and there were only four Lykovs then—Karp; his wife, Akulina; a son named Savin, who was around 9 years old; and Natalia, a daughter who was only 2. Taking their possessions and some seeds, they had retreated ever deeper into the taiga, building themselves a succession of crude dwelling places, until at last they had fetched up in this desolate spot. Two more children had been born in the wild—Dmitry in 1940 and Agafia in 1944—and their knowledge of the outside world came entirely from their parents’ stories. The family’s principal entertainment, Peskov noted, “was for everyone to recount their dreams.”

The Lykov children knew there were places called cities where humans lived crammed together in tall buildings. They had heard there were countries other than Russia. But such concepts were no more than abstractions to them. Their only reading matter was prayer books and an ancient family Bible. Akulina had taught her children to read and write using sharpened birch sticks dipped into honeysuckle juice as pen and ink. When Agafia was later shown a video of a horse on the geologists’ television set, she recognized it from her mother’s stories. “A steed!” she exclaimed. “Papa, a steed!”

But if the family’s isolation was hard to grasp, the unmitigated harshness of their lives was not. Traveling to the Lykov homestead on foot was astonishingly arduous, as Peskov would later learn firsthand. On his first visit to the Lykovs in the 1980s, the writer—who would appoint himself the family’s chief chronicler—noted that “we traversed 250 kilometers [155 miles] without seeing a single human dwelling!”

Isolation made survival in the wilderness close to impossible. Dependent solely on their own resources, the Lykovs struggled to replace the few things they had brought into the taiga with them. They fashioned birch-bark galoshes in place of shoes. Clothes were patched and repatched until they fell apart, then replaced with hemp cloth grown from seed.