The Last Wildernis

The vastness of Siberia is difficult to understand. At least if you live in Europe where the only "greenfield" suburb (a new neighborhood built up on a virgin forested area) so far in the 21st Century was put up in Finland, i.e. the Vuores small town close to Tampere.

In 1978 a team of geologists found a family of six in the Siberian taiga. These forests are the last and greatest of Earth’s wildernesses. They stretch 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.

Being firm believers, the Lykov family had fled the Stalin purge of th 1930's and lived in gloomy forests around river Abakan since then. The life of the family was not far from the cavemens'. The rotten shoes were finally replaced by bark and the male members of the family developed the skill to hunt barefeet even in the Siberian winter. As the metal kettles finally were worn out and became obsolete, the settlers ate potatoes with wild rye. Famine was a constant guest in the rotten hut made of pieces of wood.

All family members understood spoken language, however, many of the modern concepts were alien. They had never head about the WW II, man on the moon sounded completely weird and  the biggest novelty seemed to be the polyethylen film to wrap the food rests: it looked like glass but was flexible!

The two daughters had developed a private language of their own: it sounded like a blurred cooing.

In the picture Agafia and Natalia with their father. The father died 27 years after his wife in pneumonia, obviuously got from the visitors. The rest of the family died on kidney failure due to the poor diet in the Siberian forests. Agafia, now in her 80's  - in the middle - still live in the taiga.

The destiny of the Lykov family gives an idea of the life the runaways had to endure in the vast deserts of Siberia. During the last quarter of the 19th century it was believed almost 50.000 past prisoners were at large on the tundra.