Speaker 1: In the summer of nineteen seventy eight, in the heart
Speaker 1: of Siberia, a team of four young Soviet geologists made
Speaker 1: an astonishing discovery. Flying in a helicopter over a remote
Speaker 1: stretch of forest more than one hundred and fifty miles
Speaker 1: from the nearest human settlement.
Speaker 2: They spotted what looked like a clearing. Below.
Speaker 1: Inside that clearing was a large garden plot with rows
Speaker 1: of potatoes. Next To it was what looked like a shelter.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it must have been very much a surprise for
Speaker 3: these geologists when they crossed the Tiger in a helicopter
Speaker 3: in the nineteen seventies and suddenly saw the vegetable plot
Speaker 3: in the middle of the Tiger, in a place where
Speaker 3: this was basically unthinkable.
Speaker 1: Were people actually living out there, deep in the Siberian Woods,
Speaker 1: one of the most unforgiving landscapes on Earth. The geologists
Speaker 1: didn't see anyone, but they marked the mysterious location on
Speaker 1: their map and promised to return.
Speaker 2: A few weeks.
Speaker 1: After making camp at a nearby river, the geologists decided
Speaker 1: to investigate. It was a ten mile hike through thick
Speaker 1: strands of birch and Siberian pine, absolutely pristine undisturbed wilderness.
Speaker 3: Very slow walking because the forest floor is not very solid.
Speaker 3: It's covered with layers and layers of fallen trees, and
Speaker 3: basically you have to balance on trees all the time
Speaker 3: while you sink into the ground with your boots.
Speaker 4: And then there are stretches.
Speaker 3: Where you can't really walk. You're beastly walking along a
Speaker 3: river and you know them. If you fall, the river
Speaker 3: will carry you hundreds of meters downstream before you managed
Speaker 3: to reach the coast and cut out of the water.
Speaker 3: So kind of norse breaking that whole high.
Speaker 1: But as the geologists approached the spot marked on their map,
Speaker 1: they found signs of life. First a footpath well worn
Speaker 1: and straight, then a walking stick leaning against a tree.
Speaker 1: There were definitely people living out there, but who were they.
Speaker 1: In remote places like Siberia, running into another person could
Speaker 1: be more dangerous than running into a bear. The leader
Speaker 1: of the geologists was a woman named Galina Kismanskaya. In
Speaker 1: her backpack, she brought some gifts for their new friends,
Speaker 1: but on her hip she carried a revolver. The geologists
Speaker 1: arrived at the clearing, and sure enough there was the
Speaker 1: garden green with summer life, potatoes, onions, turnips, But where
Speaker 1: were the gardeners. They approached a ramshackle cabin blackened by
Speaker 1: years of rain and cooking fires. There was only one
Speaker 1: tiny window to let in the sunlight. Slowly, a low
Speaker 1: door swung open, and outstepped an old man. He had
Speaker 1: a wild head of graying hair, a thick beard, and
Speaker 1: bare feet. His rough hewn clothes were patched and repatched.
Speaker 1: He looked like a figure straight out of a fairy tale,
Speaker 1: a relic of a distant past. They all stared at
Speaker 1: each other, somewhat stunned. Galina Pismanskaya broke the silence. She said,
Speaker 1: greeting's grandfather, We've come to visit.
Speaker 2: In his younger days.
Speaker 1: The old man might have chased the geologists away or
Speaker 1: run off into the hills at the first sign of
Speaker 1: their arrival, But the wild haired hermit was tied now.
Speaker 1: He didn't have the energy to fight or flee. Instead,
Speaker 1: he spoke in a soft, raspy.
Speaker 5: Voice, Viil, since you have traveled this far, you might
Speaker 5: as well come in.
Speaker 1: It would take several more visits for the shocking reality
Speaker 1: to sink in. The four Soviet geologists were the first
Speaker 1: outsiders this family had seen in more than forty years.
Speaker 1: Welcome to very special episodes and iHeart original podcast. I'm
Speaker 1: your host Danish Schwartz, and this is Exit Strategy, the
Speaker 1: family who vanished into Siberia for over forty years.
Speaker 6: Hey, welcome back to very special episodes. I'm Jason English,
Speaker 6: joined as always by Danish Swartz and Zaren Burnett. Hi.
Speaker 6: You know, you know when we first started talking about
Speaker 6: this show, which is like twenty twenty three, that's two
Speaker 6: Olympics ago, that's seventy five plus episodes ago. But this
Speaker 6: story was one that's always been on the list of
Speaker 6: Oh we got to tell that that story in Siberia
Speaker 6: about the people who went uncontacted for forty years. So
Speaker 6: I'm really glad we're doing it today.
Speaker 1: I found this fascinating. There's a few stories in history
Speaker 1: that I've come across of like supposed people who lived
Speaker 1: in isolation, and spoiler alert, most of those are just hoaxes,
Speaker 1: Like most stories about people who live in complete isolation
Speaker 1: are not actually true. So this was genuinely fascinating because
Speaker 1: it's like, oh, no, this actually happens.
Speaker 5: I had never heard of this, but I was blown
Speaker 5: away by them just raw dogging humanity, like they did.
Speaker 1: When news made it to Moscow that there was a
Speaker 1: family living alone in Siberia, cut off from the world
Speaker 1: for four decades, it was like someone had discovered a
Speaker 1: walking wooly mammoth. Here were people living in the late
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies who didn't know anything about World War II,
Speaker 1: the moon landing, or television. They had more in common
Speaker 1: with nineteenth century peasants than modern Russians. The old man's
Speaker 1: name was Karp Laikhov. His daughters were Natalia and Agafia.
Speaker 1: At first, the geologists had a hard time understanding what
Speaker 1: they were saying. They were definitely speaking Russian, but their
Speaker 1: words were strange, old like the way people talked in
Speaker 1: the Middle Ages, and their voices were strange too, more
Speaker 1: like singing than speaking. After some stilted conversation, Piecemenskaya finally
Speaker 1: asked the question that was on the geologist's mind from
Speaker 1: the moment they spotted the clearing in the forest, How
Speaker 1: did you come to live here so far away from
Speaker 1: other people without hesitation. Karp explained that he and his
Speaker 1: wife came out here because they were commanded by God.
Speaker 4: We're not allowed to live with the world.
Speaker 1: Karp's wife had died many years ago, but he and
Speaker 1: the family faithfully soldiered on. In addition to Natalia and Agafia,
Speaker 1: Karp had two grown sons, Saviine and Dimitri, who lived
Speaker 1: a few miles away in their own cabin.
Speaker 2: They would all meet soon.
Speaker 1: A few years after the geologists first made contact with
Speaker 1: the Lykov family, a journalist named Vassili Piskov flew out
Speaker 1: to Siberia.
Speaker 2: To meet them.
Speaker 1: He wrote about the Lycoves in a series of newspaper
Speaker 1: articles and a book that captured Russia's imagination.
Speaker 3: When I heard about that story, I found it fascinating,
Speaker 3: not only because it's a unique story.
Speaker 4: Sorry, there's probably I.
Speaker 3: Couldn't think of any other people who had this kind
Speaker 3: of experience, like being completely isolated in a remote forest
Speaker 3: area in Siberia for almost forty years, or more than
Speaker 3: forty years. But the story was also interesting because so
Speaker 3: many things in Russian history had to happen for Agafya
Speaker 3: to end up in the place where she is now.
Speaker 1: That Yen's Muling a German journalist who lived four years
Speaker 1: in Moscow and wrote a book about his travels called
Speaker 1: A Journey into Russia. The Lykovs were members of a
Speaker 1: long persecuted religious sect known as the Old Believers. Old
Speaker 1: Believers trace their origins to a contentious split with the
Speaker 1: Russian Orthodox Church centuries ago. In the sixteen hundreds, a
Speaker 1: priest named Nikan became the leader of the Russian Orthodox
Speaker 1: Church in Moscow. He caused an uproar by changing some
Speaker 1: religious practices to better align with the Greek Orthodox Church.
Speaker 1: Nikon's wildest move was to change the way that Russian
Speaker 1: Orthodox Christians made the sign of the Cross. Instead of
Speaker 1: holding up two fingers like they'd always done, Nikon wanted them.
Speaker 2: To use three fingers.
Speaker 1: Three fingers who did he think they were Greeks. There
Speaker 1: was huge outcry over these changes, and Nikon had a
Speaker 1: powerful ally in Russia's Tsar Alexey, who turned Nikon's new
Speaker 1: rules into law. People who refused to perform Nikon's three
Speaker 1: fingered salute became enemies.
Speaker 2: Of the state.
Speaker 1: The result was a schism, a rupture within the Russian
Speaker 1: Orthodox Church and.
Speaker 3: The people who came to enormous The Old Believers basically
Speaker 3: rebuilt against all of these changes, including the political changes
Speaker 3: that were going on and all of the things that
Speaker 3: suddenly entered Russia from the West.
Speaker 4: They were not happy about that.
Speaker 3: They thought it was against their traditions. They thought it
Speaker 3: was all the work of Satan, and that's where they
Speaker 3: decided not to follow the reforms of their patriarch and decided.
Speaker 4: To escally break away from the Church.
Speaker 3: And the Orthodox Church henceforth referred to them as the
Speaker 3: Old Believers because they stubbornly stuck to their old dogmas.
Speaker 4: They never caught themselves the old Believers.
Speaker 3: They caught themselves the true Believers because they put somewhere
Speaker 3: goselves the only like the tall spiers of traditional Orthodoxy.
Speaker 1: There's a famous Russian painting of a woman known as
Speaker 1: the Boyarina Morozova. She was one of the original Old Believers.
Speaker 1: The painting shows the Boyarina, a wealthy and dignified woman,
Speaker 1: being dragged through the muddy street of Moscow on a
Speaker 1: horse drawn sledge. As she's carted off to prison, the
Speaker 1: Boyarina holds two defiant fingers in the air.
Speaker 7: She basically spat in the Tsar's face, spat in the
Speaker 7: face of the church, and defiantly went to her death
Speaker 7: maintaining the faith.
Speaker 1: That's Peter de Simone, a historian of Russian Old Believers.
Speaker 1: He says, entire communities chose mass suicide rather than give
Speaker 1: in to Nikan and Czar Alexe, who they called the Antichrists.
Speaker 1: Other old believers tried to escape persecution by fleeing to
Speaker 1: remote corners of the Russian Empire, like Siberia.
Speaker 7: And so that had been this kind of approach for
Speaker 7: a lot of early communities was get out to the
Speaker 7: outskirts where they can't find us, because look what they
Speaker 7: are doing to us when they catch us in the
Speaker 7: late sixteen hundreds, very early seventeen hundreds. We don't want
Speaker 7: that to happen, and we don't necessarily want to have
Speaker 7: to kill ourselves either, And so maybe we can spread
Speaker 7: out and we'll be saved that way, and we can
Speaker 7: preserve our way of life.
Speaker 1: That's how the ancestor of the Laikov family originally came
Speaker 1: to live in Siberia. They were one of these old
Speaker 1: believer families that fled into the wilderness to practice their
Speaker 1: religion undisturbed. Any intrusion from the outside world would set
Speaker 1: them running deeper into the forest. Soon they became known
Speaker 1: as runners. Karp Laikov, the patriarch the geologists met, grew
Speaker 1: up in an old Believer family outside of the Siberian
Speaker 1: town of Aba Khan, but at some point the Soviets
Speaker 1: discovered their settlement.
Speaker 3: What happened in the nineteen thirties is that Soviets planning
Speaker 3: teams came into these remote settlements and told people they
Speaker 3: could no longer live the way that they had been living.
Speaker 3: They told the old believers that they had to send
Speaker 3: their children to state schools, and they also told them
Speaker 3: that things that they were planting and the fish that
Speaker 3: they were catching no longer belonged to them, but to
Speaker 3: the state. And for the old believers, of course that
Speaker 3: was inacceptable.
Speaker 1: So the Lycoves and four other families ran, moving higher
Speaker 1: into the mountains, but in less than a decade they
Speaker 1: were discovered again. Stalin sent troops into the Siberian preserve
Speaker 1: to look for deserters. Carp Lyikov and his brother were
Speaker 1: out collecting wood when they were spotted by a soldier.
Speaker 1: According to Karp, his brother tried to run away and
Speaker 1: the soldiers shot him in the back, killing him. The
Speaker 1: Lykove's worst fears were realized. The Russian government was still
Speaker 1: persecuting and killing old believers. The Antichrist was still alive.
Speaker 1: And well in the form of Stalin. The only solution
Speaker 1: was to break away from society entirely and hide away
Speaker 1: with God in the mountains. By that time, carp Lyikov
Speaker 1: had married his wife Akalina and had two young children.
Speaker 1: Rather than risk living among the other old believers, they
Speaker 1: made the bold decision to strike out on their own.
Speaker 4: They thought they didn't have any alternative.
Speaker 3: Then they thought that they don't run away from everything,
Speaker 3: then eventually they would be found and they would be
Speaker 3: forced to give up their lives and the way they
Speaker 3: had been living their lives. So for them it was
Speaker 3: kind of the only way out was to hide deep
Speaker 3: in the forest and try to isolate themselves completely from
Speaker 3: a world which they thought had completely lost its way.
Speaker 1: The Lykovs chose to run one last time. They stopped
Speaker 1: running hundreds of miles from the nearest human being in
Speaker 1: a ramshackle cabin along the Aba Khan River.
Speaker 3: Basically, their family considered themselves to be the only true
Speaker 3: Christians left in the wood. At that time, the family
Speaker 3: consisted of Karblikov, the father, his wife, and two children.
Speaker 3: And then after they had left and established their little
Speaker 3: hut in the woods, they had two more children in
Speaker 3: this isolation, deep in the Tiger and therefore more than
Speaker 3: forty years without basically any contact with the outside world.
Speaker 1: The journalist Vasili Piskov was one of the very few
Speaker 1: people who got to know the Lakov family. Far from
Speaker 1: being backwater hillbillies, as it's easy to imagine them, each
Speaker 1: member of the Lakov family had a distinct personality and
Speaker 1: a particular role to play in the family's survival. Karp
Speaker 1: Lyakov Papa, was approaching eighty when the geologists met him,
Speaker 1: but still strong and healthy. Karp was the undisputed leader
Speaker 1: of the family's tiny forest kingdom. He even wore a
Speaker 1: special monks hat that was taller than the others. Karp
Speaker 1: was the prayer leader, choor giver, and chief protector of
Speaker 1: the family from the world.
Speaker 2: With the outsiders.
Speaker 1: Karp was good natured and friendly, but also quick to
Speaker 1: lay down the law when something wasn't allowed. According to
Speaker 1: Karp's old believer code, a lot of things weren't allowed,
Speaker 1: eating food with the geologists, accepting their medicine, or watching
Speaker 1: their small TV. The oldest Laikov's son was Savine, the
Speaker 1: rule keeper of the family. Savin knew the Bible and
Speaker 1: old believer rituals by heart, and would even correct his
Speaker 1: father if he misread a prayer or didn't bow low
Speaker 1: enough to the ground. Savin was also a master leather worker.
Speaker 1: He built his own tools for transforming elk and deer
Speaker 1: hides into handcrafted belts and slings. Natalia was the second oldest.
Speaker 1: When the children's mother died from starvation in nineteen sixty one,
Speaker 1: Natalia took on her mother's many difficult responsibilities, like making
Speaker 1: the family's clothing from scratch. They grew and harvested hemp
Speaker 1: whose rough fibers could be turned into thread. It's a
Speaker 1: super labor intensive process that's hard enough with the right
Speaker 1: tools and downright backbreaking with the improvised methods Natalia had
Speaker 1: to work with. The next Laikhov child was Agafia. Unlike
Speaker 1: her older siblings, Agafia was born after the Laikos entered
Speaker 1: their Siberian isolation, so the forest and her family were
Speaker 1: all that she knew. Filmmaker Rebecca E. Marshall recorded Agafia's
Speaker 1: birth story for her twenty twenty four film The Forest
Speaker 1: in Me.
Speaker 8: I was born here in the spring. I was christened
Speaker 8: in the Yerna River. I was christened by my father.
Speaker 8: My sister Natalia was my godmother.
Speaker 1: Agafia quickly became a favorite among the outsiders. She was
Speaker 1: childlike in her enthusiasm and curiosity about everything the geologists
Speaker 1: told her about their world. But Agafia was also deeply
Speaker 1: knowledgeable about her forest home and eager to show off
Speaker 1: her skills to the geologists. Agafia says her family used
Speaker 1: everything they could find from the forest, roots, hay grass,
Speaker 1: birch roots more.
Speaker 8: Really, that's how we lived. We used everything roots, hay grass,
Speaker 8: all kinds, and birch roots.
Speaker 1: Agafia was also the family's official timekeeper. Without clocks or calendars,
Speaker 1: Agafia inherited as invented by Savin to keep track of
Speaker 1: the hours, days, months, lunar cycles, seasons, and years based
Speaker 1: on Biblical arithmetic. Every day started with a statement of
Speaker 1: the date and year. According to Agafia, the geologists arrived
Speaker 1: on June second, seven thousand, four hundred and eighty six.
Speaker 3: She was the one who was responsible for counting the days,
Speaker 3: making sure that they knew on what day they had
Speaker 3: to pray, which prayer, and what holiday of the Orthodox
Speaker 3: calendar it was, and was very important for them not
Speaker 3: to get confused and not to lose single days so
Speaker 3: that their lives would stay within the rhythms that had
Speaker 3: been defined. For the Orthodox leaders, it was very important
Speaker 3: for them to pray the correct prayer on each day
Speaker 3: and to celebrate the correct saints on each day.
Speaker 1: The youngestly likeo of child was Dmitri, another favorite the
Speaker 1: geologists and journalists. Before Dmitri, the Lykovs didn't eat meat
Speaker 1: because Karp wasn't a hunter, but as the youngest Lycove grew,
Speaker 1: it was like he became one with the taiga. Dmitri
Speaker 1: had incredible endurance. He could chase a Siberian deer for
Speaker 1: hours or even days on foot, until the animal collapsed
Speaker 1: from exhaustion and he killed it with nothing more than
Speaker 1: a sharpened stick. Dmitri would fish barefoot in the partially
Speaker 1: frozen Abacan River. To keep his feet from getting frostbitten,
Speaker 1: He'd stand on one leg like a flamingo.
Speaker 2: Then switch.
Speaker 1: Dmitri was also the family carpenter and craftsman. He could
Speaker 1: build anything, a cook stove, a laithe for planning, boards,
Speaker 1: a woven net for fishing. But his specialty was making tusa,
Speaker 1: traditional Siberian containers made entirely out of birch with Origami
Speaker 1: like skill, Dmitri could make tusa as large as a
Speaker 1: wash basin, or small enough to hold a handful of
Speaker 1: pine nuts. Dmitri was the most curious about the geologists'
Speaker 1: modern tools and gadgets. He was blown away by the
Speaker 1: speed of their saw as it cut and plane boards.
Speaker 1: Same with the chainsaw. Even a battery powered lantern was
Speaker 1: a thing of wonder.
Speaker 2: For the younger Lycoves.
Speaker 1: The sudden appearance of the geologists was like aliens arriving
Speaker 1: from another planet. They were fascinated by the newcomers, but
Speaker 1: also afraid for their entire lives. Karp Lycove had taught
Speaker 1: his family about the dangers of the world. The entire
Speaker 1: reason they lived this way in total isolation and separation
Speaker 1: was to avoid spiritual and physical contamination from the evils
Speaker 1: of the modern world. But now the modern world was
Speaker 1: at their doorstep. Would they have to run again? Where
Speaker 1: could they even go? The biggest question the Lycoves had
Speaker 1: to answer was were the outsiders harbingers of doom or
Speaker 1: their salvation? When the Soviet geologists discovered the Lycoves in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight, they had so many questions. They learned
Speaker 1: why the Lycoves had chosen this self isolation. For them,
Speaker 1: spiritual survival meant complete separation from the modern world. But
Speaker 1: how about the How how exactly did a family with
Speaker 1: four children survive for nearly four decades in one of
Speaker 1: the most extreme environments on Earth.
Speaker 9: You have to really be methodical, you have to really prioritize.
Speaker 9: So there's you know, there's a structure of needs. There's
Speaker 9: a hierarchy of needs, right keeping maintaining your body at
Speaker 9: ninety eight point six that's huge, especially somewhere like Siberia.
Speaker 9: So you have to have firewood, you have to have
Speaker 9: clothes in decent repair. You have to have a way
Speaker 9: to keep your toes from getting frostbite.
Speaker 2: That's when I a tebow.
Speaker 1: She was the first female champion on Alone, the History
Speaker 1: Channel's Wilderness Survival Challenge Whenaya also holds the record on
Speaker 1: Alone for total time spent out in the wild one
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty three days. Whenaya also competed on an
Speaker 1: extra challenging season of the show set in the Canadian Arctic.
Speaker 1: So she knows better than most people what it feels
Speaker 1: like to live completely off the grid, to be wholly
Speaker 1: reliant on nature and your own skills to survive.
Speaker 2: I would say that.
Speaker 9: A lot of the mundane and a lot of the
Speaker 9: petty concerns start to fall away because everything there's no
Speaker 9: room for abstractions. It's really just what is before you
Speaker 9: every day, and your whole focus is warmth, shelter, food, water,
Speaker 9: So it really brings you to the heart of what
Speaker 9: it is to be human, to be an animal. And
Speaker 9: that's the kind of clarity. It's very easy to see
Speaker 9: what's important and what's not important from a place like that,
Speaker 9: and I find a lot of beauty in it.
Speaker 1: The central preoccupation for the Lyves was, of course food,
Speaker 1: growing food, foraging for food, hunting and fishing for food,
Speaker 1: and then preserving and storing enough of that food to
Speaker 1: sustain them through the endless Siberian winter. Potatoes were essential
Speaker 1: to the Lycove family's diet. They kept a two year
Speaker 1: store at all times. Without potatoes, a single crop failure
Speaker 1: would mean certain death. To keep the stored potatoes from rotting,
Speaker 1: they cut them into disks and dried them in the
Speaker 1: sun on sheets of birch bark. The Lycoves ate boiled
Speaker 1: potatoes fresh or dried with every meal. Even their version
Speaker 1: of bread was mostly potatoes. They took dried potatoes, rieberries,
Speaker 1: and hemp seeds and grounded all up into a thick paste.
Speaker 2: They formed the paste into.
Speaker 1: Patties and cooked them on a wood fired griddle. The result,
Speaker 1: in Piaskov's words, looked like fat, black pancakes. When Carp
Speaker 1: first met the geologists, he refused all of their gifts
Speaker 1: from the outside world except for salt. That was the
Speaker 1: only thing that he missed in his nearly forty year isolation.
Speaker 1: Imagine all of those meals of oiled potatoes and black
Speaker 1: bread without a grain of salt. True torture is how
Speaker 1: Carp described it. Foraging was only possible during the few
Speaker 1: months when the Tiga wasn't blanketed in snow. There were
Speaker 1: wild onions and nettles in the spring, mushrooms, raspberries, huckleberries
Speaker 1: and currants in the summer, and finally, in late August,
Speaker 1: pine nuts. The lycoves could always be found with a
Speaker 1: pocket full of pine nuts. Agafia said they gnawed on
Speaker 1: them like squirrels all day long. Without pine nuts, the
Speaker 1: lycoves wouldn't have had enough protein in their diet.
Speaker 2: Even with Dimitri's.
Speaker 1: Hunting scale, elk meat was a rare luxury, and fish
Speaker 1: were only available in the summer and fall before the
Speaker 1: Abacan River froze over. The LYCoV family knew what would
Speaker 1: happen if they didn't have enough food.
Speaker 2: They spoke in hushed.
Speaker 1: Tones of the summer of nineteen sixty A late June
Speaker 1: snow and heavy rains killed everything in the garden. On
Speaker 1: top of that, the pine trees failed to produce their
Speaker 1: life saving seats. Over the long winter, the ly Coves
Speaker 1: finished the last of the dried potatoes from their stores,
Speaker 1: and the situation turned desperate. They ate straw, they ate bark,
Speaker 1: they ate their leather belts. They went weeks without real food.
Speaker 1: That's when their mother, Aqualina, died of starvation, the rest
Speaker 1: of the family barely surviving until the spring. What happened
Speaker 1: next was a small miracle. They had run out of
Speaker 1: rye seed because the last crop had failed, but when
Speaker 1: the snows melted, a single green blade of rye grass
Speaker 1: sprouted in the garden. It was their only hope for
Speaker 1: rebuilding the rye crop. Licoves built a special fence around
Speaker 1: that lone blade of rye grass and guarded it desperately
Speaker 1: against squirrels and mice. By the end of the season,
Speaker 1: the single sprig produced eighteen grains of rye. The Lycoves
Speaker 1: saved those eighteen seeds, planted them the next spring, and
Speaker 1: slowly crawled back from the brink. It was four years
Speaker 1: before the Lycoaves had enough rye to make their black bread.
Speaker 1: Whenaya says, most of us have never experienced true hunger,
Speaker 1: but the Lycoves would have understood what all wild animals
Speaker 1: know instinctively, that in nature there are times of plenty
Speaker 1: and times of scarcity, and like all animals, humans are
Speaker 1: built for survival.
Speaker 9: Hunger is uncomfortable, but it's also very natural. We evolved
Speaker 9: to go through deep periods of famine and abundance, and granted,
Speaker 9: the Siberian Tiga is a far more extreme environment than
Speaker 9: most of our ancestors did it in. There have been
Speaker 9: humans doing this from the entirety of human evolution, and
Speaker 9: the fact that you sometimes go without means that you
Speaker 9: are so incredibly appreciative of it when it is there,
Speaker 9: in a way that people who have not known that
Speaker 9: level of lack really can't understand. It's not intellectual, it's
Speaker 9: not easy to verbalize. It's deeply, deeply visceral.
Speaker 1: For the Lycoves, life in the Tiga wasn't all toil
Speaker 1: and trouble. The old believer calendar was filled with holidays
Speaker 1: and feast days dedicated to saints. On these days off,
Speaker 1: the Lycoves would read from the Bible, sing special prayers,
Speaker 1: and the family would sit down to a lavish meal
Speaker 1: of rye porous, a real treat, maybe with some strips
Speaker 1: of dried meat or fish. Without a TV or radio,
Speaker 1: the Lycofs entertained themselves by retelling and reliving their own
Speaker 1: family history. There was the Great Panic when Agafia temporarily
Speaker 1: lost track of time. There was the time that Karp
Speaker 1: fell out of a pine tree.
Speaker 2: He was fine.
Speaker 1: The year seven made everyone a pair of leather boots,
Speaker 1: and the time when a huge bear scared Agafia so
Speaker 1: badly that she stayed in bed for six months. Even
Speaker 1: the Lycove's dreams took on a life of their own.
Speaker 1: One of the family's favorite stories was the time Agafia
Speaker 1: dreamed that she found a massive pine cone as big
Speaker 1: as the cabin. Dimitri had to pick out the massive
Speaker 1: pine nuts with an axe. Each delicious seed was big
Speaker 1: as a boulder. But life in the wilderness its beauty
Speaker 1: and devastation was always lurking around the corner. In nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty one, just a few years after their first contact
Speaker 1: with the outside world, three of the LYCoV children died
Speaker 1: in rapid succession. The youngest, Dmitri, was the first to go.
Speaker 1: It was October, and he contracted pneumonia after setting fish
Speaker 1: traps in the nearly frozen river. The Lycoves rarely got sick.
Speaker 1: When they did, they healed themselves with nettlete, rhubarb root
Speaker 1: and lots of prayer, but that didn't work this time.
Speaker 1: When the geologists learned that Dmitri was burning up with
Speaker 1: fever and gasping for breath, they offered to call in
Speaker 1: a helicopter and send their doctor with antibiotics, but Dmitri refused,
Speaker 1: saying that wasn't allowed quote a man lives for however
Speaker 1: long God grants. Dmitri died that night. Seven was the
Speaker 1: next to go. After his brother's death, Seven complained of
Speaker 1: stomach pains and diarrhea, but refused to eat. Then, one
Speaker 1: bitter cold December day, he insisted on helping the family
Speaker 1: dig up the last of the potato harvest before the
Speaker 1: ground froze. He then collapsed in his bed, never to
Speaker 1: rise again. Natalia stayed by Seven's bedside as his condition worsened.
Speaker 1: When he passed away, Natalia was despondent. She said she
Speaker 1: would die next of grief, and she did. Ten days later.
Speaker 1: After helping bury Seven in the frozen earth, Natalia took
Speaker 1: to her bed and lost consciousness. Her final words to
Speaker 1: Agafia were, I pity you. You are left alone. Ten
Speaker 1: years later, Natalia's words came true. In nineteen eighty eight,
Speaker 1: Agafia's father died. Her whole family was gone now and
Speaker 1: Agafia was left to fend for herself in the Siberian wilderness.
Speaker 1: How could she possibly survive on her own? Agafia, the
Speaker 1: youngest Lako daughter, stayed in the family's remote Siberian encampment
Speaker 1: after the deaths of her mother, siblings, and finally her father,
Speaker 1: for thirty five years. She was completely alone.
Speaker 8: Sir of the well boodled during the storm. I covered
Speaker 8: my face with the cloth and lay face down on
Speaker 8: the other side, with my back to the wind, my
Speaker 8: face to the ground.
Speaker 1: That's Agafia Laiko remembering a severe storm. From the film
Speaker 1: The Forest in Me by British filmmaker Rebecca Marshall. Rebecca
Speaker 1: first read about Agafia in twenty thirteen and was instantly captivated.
Speaker 10: As a person who, like many of us now, feels
Speaker 10: quite surrounded by lots of images and busyness all the time,
Speaker 10: and pressure from a million things going on every single day.
Speaker 10: Reading a story about a family who had fled into
Speaker 10: the forest and when they were discovered in seventy eight,
Speaker 10: didn't even know really that the war was over, and
Speaker 10: then realizing that they have actually lived in total isolation
Speaker 10: with no technology, no modern technology. It was this kind
Speaker 10: of combination of a total nightmare, scary nightmare, as well
Speaker 10: as actually maybe a slice of heaven.
Speaker 1: Rebecca wanted to go and visit Agafia, but she quickly
Speaker 1: learned that you can't just go and visit Agafia. Agafia
Speaker 1: Laikhov has become something of a national treasure in Russia,
Speaker 1: a protected species.
Speaker 2: There's a whole bureaucracy.
Speaker 1: Rebecca sent application forms to the mayor of Abakan and
Speaker 1: the officials who ran the nature reserve where Agafia lived.
Speaker 1: After waiting a year for approval, Rebecca and her film
Speaker 1: crew began their journey into the wilderness. They flew from
Speaker 1: London to Moscow, then They took a seven hour flight
Speaker 1: from Moscow to Novosibirsk, a Russian city on the edge
Speaker 1: of Siberia, then another seven hour train ride to Tashtegel,
Speaker 1: a remote mining town outside of the Altai Nature Reserve.
Speaker 1: By that point, Rebecca felt like she had traveled to
Speaker 1: the ends of the Earth, but they weren't done yet.
Speaker 1: The last leg could only be made by helicopter, a
Speaker 1: rickety old Soviet mad It was noisy but offered an
Speaker 1: amazing view.
Speaker 10: Just the trees just spread out as far as the
Speaker 10: eye can see, just thousands and thousands and thousands of trees, greens, browns,
Speaker 10: a silver river that just kind of reflects the sun
Speaker 10: at tiny points.
Speaker 2: Just snow on all the trees. It just all looks pristine.
Speaker 10: You kind of think you're going to see signs of
Speaker 10: human life down there somewhere, but you just don't. We
Speaker 10: flew for two hours through the most incredible landscape, wearing
Speaker 10: these headphones to protect us from the noise of this
Speaker 10: just massive, old helicopter, and we finally landed and sunk
Speaker 10: down to a flat area near the river. And I
Speaker 10: was so nervous to see Agafia, because I'd obviously kind
Speaker 10: of read so much about her, and I didn't know
Speaker 10: how she, you know, want.
Speaker 2: To talk to us too much, or how she would be.
Speaker 10: And we were getting out of the helicopter and then
Speaker 10: she appeared through the trees, you know, from her homestead,
Speaker 10: with a great, big grin on her face.
Speaker 4: It was incredible.
Speaker 1: In twenty fifteen, Agafia was in her seventies, close to
Speaker 1: her father's age when the geologists first discovered the lycobs
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy eight. Like her father, Agafia was healthy
Speaker 1: and full of energy. The entire time Rebecca filmed her,
Speaker 1: Agafia chittered away in her sing song voice and never
Speaker 1: stopped working. In Rebecca's film, Agafia talks about her daily
Speaker 1: survival beginning always with prayer.
Speaker 8: Well, it's pray daily, get up and read the midnight
Speaker 8: prayer Palu nach Nitza. Then in the morning hours you
Speaker 8: pray on the move. There is so much to do.
Speaker 10: I realized the concept of leisure time and free time
Speaker 10: just doesn't really exist. Gafa was busy going, you know,
Speaker 10: all these activities that she had to do all the
Speaker 10: time to stay alive. It's like early September, there were fish,
Speaker 10: so she was catching fish in this kind of trap
Speaker 10: and then opening them up and smoking them to preserve them.
Speaker 2: And what I understand is.
Speaker 10: Each part of the season there's like really important jobs
Speaker 10: to do, as any farmer knows. I'm also not a farmer,
Speaker 10: but there's certain things have to be done, and if
Speaker 10: they are not later in the year, she would starve.
Speaker 10: Everything's very much waited.
Speaker 1: Rebecca and her team came dressed for the unpredictable Siberian
Speaker 1: weather with fleece and flannel and gortex peeled off layers
Speaker 1: as the frost melted in the afternoon sun, and bundle
Speaker 1: up again for the frigid nights.
Speaker 10: Agafia was so atgile, prompting around, and she seemed to
Speaker 10: wear similar clothes all the time, like these layers of
Speaker 10: kind of weighty looking dark colored fabrics, cotton old patched
Speaker 10: and headscarf wrapped round ahead inside a headscarf.
Speaker 1: When the Lycoves first visited the geologists' camp, the Soviets
Speaker 1: offered them use of their shower, hot water, soap, everything,
Speaker 1: but the Lycoves refused it wasn't allowed. Their ideas of
Speaker 1: cleanliness and sanitation were decidedly pre modern. Hand washing was
Speaker 1: a ritual performed after coming in contact with something from
Speaker 1: the world, like a miniature baptism to be washed free
Speaker 1: of sin, not to remove dirt.
Speaker 10: So Agafia had this kind of rare hardiness to her hands,
Speaker 10: to her face, to all her visible skin, to her teeth,
Speaker 10: her lips. There was a real it was an ingrained
Speaker 10: kind of soil. I don't even want to say dirt,
Speaker 10: because that kind of sounds like something dirty, but it wasn't.
Speaker 10: It was It's like, there's nothing kind of dirty out there.
Speaker 10: It's just natural stuff of the forest. And she was
Speaker 10: harvesting carrots, the biggest carrots you've ever seen. I mean,
Speaker 10: she did wear gloves sometimes, but then when she took
Speaker 10: the gloves off, her fingers were black. Her nails were
Speaker 10: black and hard with black cracks in the skin. But
Speaker 10: her face had this beautiful purity, and you know, like
Speaker 10: these amazing wrinkles that you just thought, oh, my goodness,
Speaker 10: we are ridiculous with all our potions and face creams
Speaker 10: and concerns about our ideas of beauty as well. You know,
Speaker 10: it was just refreshing to be in her presence.
Speaker 1: But the most striking thing about Agafia is that she's
Speaker 1: truly alone out there. Her family is dead, the geologists
Speaker 1: moved away decades ago. Every few months, a park ranger
Speaker 1: checks in on her and brings her a few supplies.
Speaker 1: She has animals now dogs, chickens, a family of goats,
Speaker 1: and way too many kittens. But isn't Agafia lonely? Doesn't
Speaker 1: she need human companionship and conversation like all of us.
Speaker 2: Of course she does.
Speaker 1: But the thing is, Agafia doesn't think of herself as alone.
Speaker 1: Her family is always with her, especially her father, with
Speaker 1: whom she lived for several years after her siblings died.
Speaker 1: Agafia says that her father still visits her in her dreams.
Speaker 8: All what some why in woolf he comes to me
Speaker 8: in dreams? I see him less so lately in the winter,
Speaker 8: I saw my father twice. One time I saw him,
Speaker 8: he hugged me and put me on his knee. The
Speaker 8: second time we were sitting somewhere.
Speaker 10: When she talks to me about her father visiting her
Speaker 10: in dreams, she talks about it as though it's a
Speaker 10: real thing. She says, the last time my father visited
Speaker 10: me is less these days. But he used to come
Speaker 10: very often. And he was sitting down on a branch,
Speaker 10: and the berries were glowing and it was he broke
Speaker 10: a branch off for me. Her dreams are very vivid
Speaker 10: to her, and I don't really know where the line
Speaker 10: between whether she thinks that those visits in her dreams
Speaker 10: are not real or real.
Speaker 1: Agafia also praise constantly. She prays day and night over
Speaker 1: her dusty old Bible. She writes down prayers and carries
Speaker 1: them in her pockets to recite while fishing or fetching wood.
Speaker 1: She's in constant conversation with God and also with the
Speaker 1: angels who watch over her and record her every thought
Speaker 1: and deed.
Speaker 10: She feels the presence of those angels so vividly. I
Speaker 10: believe that she has that faith that keeps her from
Speaker 10: feeling so lonely. And also what I sensed layered on
Speaker 10: top of that is this kind of intimate relationship with
Speaker 10: that landscape that she is so deeply rooted in that
Speaker 10: she would be talking to us and then she would
Speaker 10: turn away and kind of carry on talking, and she
Speaker 10: talks about the fish have eyes that see her. It's
Speaker 10: animistic kind of relationship that I think we can barely
Speaker 10: really conceive of.
Speaker 1: Rebecca filmed Agafia in twenty fifteen for a documentary called
Speaker 1: The Forest in me. All of the clips you've heard
Speaker 1: of Agafia talking are from Rebecca's film. She was very
Speaker 1: generous to let us use them. Ten years later. Agafia
Speaker 1: is still out there. As of this recording, She's eighty
Speaker 1: years old, the last surviving Laikhov since nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 1: Agafia had many offers to leave her Siberian outpost. In
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties, Agafia accepted an invitation to visit some
Speaker 1: long lost cousins in an old Believer community in Russia.
Speaker 1: Papa was against it, but in a rare show of disobedience,
Speaker 1: Agafia ignored him without hesitation. She boarded a helicopter. She
Speaker 1: rode in a train for the first time, then her
Speaker 1: first car. She spent a month with her newly discovered family.
Speaker 1: She ate real bread, fruit and chocolate. She slept in
Speaker 1: a real bed. She held a newborn baby. It was
Speaker 1: forty years ago, and she still remembers what it felt
Speaker 1: like when the baby fell asleep in her arms.
Speaker 8: O Zil, I took her in my arms. I sat
Speaker 8: here on my lap, and she just fell asleep right there.
Speaker 1: Agafia's cousins begged her to stay with them. They offered
Speaker 1: to build her her own cabin in the woods outside
Speaker 1: of town. She could come and go as she pleased.
Speaker 1: Agafia thanked them, but kindly refused. It was not her home.
Speaker 1: She was born in the Siberian Tiger and felt one
Speaker 1: with the forest in ways that none of us can understand, unless,
Speaker 1: of course, your name is Wheniya Tebow in season six
Speaker 1: of a LI when I I was one of only
Speaker 1: two contestants left when the producers pulled her out after
Speaker 1: seventy three days. She had lost a dangerous amount of weight.
Speaker 1: But if when Iya had her way, she wouldn't have quit.
Speaker 1: She wouldn't have left, and she thinks she understands why Agafia,
Speaker 1: at eighty years old, would still rather live alone in
Speaker 1: Siberia than anywhere else.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I really wanted to stay. Had I not already
Speaker 9: signed a contract and understood that I would be extracted
Speaker 9: once it got really dire, I really felt like I
Speaker 9: would have chosen to stay. And yeah, I think that
Speaker 9: a lot of people in her place would choose that,
Speaker 9: because while there's a lot of deprivation, there's also incredible
Speaker 9: freedom in that life. There's something so beautiful and so
Speaker 9: pure and so deep about it, and.
Speaker 2: It is really hard.
Speaker 9: I'm going to say, impossible to find that when embedded
Speaker 9: in modern culture and just all of the kinds of
Speaker 9: stresses that we encounter in modern life, they're not what
Speaker 9: our evolution prepared us for.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 9: There's a reason why there's.
Speaker 11: So much depression and stress disorders and such a slew
Speaker 11: of health issues that our ancestors never dealt with, because
Speaker 11: we're not made to live the lives we do.
Speaker 9: We're made to live that life that they were living,
Speaker 9: our living that she is still living.
Speaker 1: To agafiel Ikove, the forest is family, the angels are watching,
Speaker 1: and the world as she knows it still goes on.
Speaker 6: Okay, to start, I want to just call out one
Speaker 6: sentence that I really loved. Even Their version of bread
Speaker 6: was mostly potatoes and brought me back to when we
Speaker 6: used to pull out band names from Retten Praises in
Speaker 6: the episodes. I think mostly potatoes is going to go
Speaker 6: on there for me. I love that.
Speaker 5: I didn't realize people could eat so many potatoes.
Speaker 6: Forty years just potatoes, and I like potatoes and keeping
Speaker 6: a two year stockpile too.
Speaker 5: I mean, they're been in deep in potatoes.
Speaker 6: We had a bear incident here in New Jersey not
Speaker 6: too long ago where the schools they didn't dismiss the kids,
Speaker 6: and we didn't know why, and this era like that's
Speaker 6: a little scary. Then we found out like, well it
Speaker 6: is scary, but for another reason, there's a giant bear
Speaker 6: roaming the school. And finally, you know, forty five minutes later,
Speaker 6: they do release the kids. There's no real announcement that
Speaker 6: things are safe. But we come home. We live about
Speaker 6: a mile from the school, and I look out my
Speaker 6: window and I see the bear and it is just
Speaker 6: going to town on my garbage.
Speaker 2: Jason, what did you do?
Speaker 6: Yeah? I call the police, And I mean the police
Speaker 6: could not have been less interested in if you want
Speaker 6: us to send someone or like what do you do?
Speaker 6: You closed down the whole school because of this, and
Speaker 6: now like I have to get to my car, and
Speaker 6: so we waited them out. And that's what they did
Speaker 6: in the story too. They waited him out six months. Yeah,
Speaker 6: it was probably an hour for me.
Speaker 5: But they didn't send out the dog catcher.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I think animal control was not going to control this animal,
Speaker 6: and my garbage was they were ready to sacrifice that.
Speaker 6: We're sitting people saren I think this would be too
Speaker 6: tough to cast.
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, it's a very specific ethnic group.
Speaker 6: Yes, and she's still alive.
Speaker 5: I don't know enough Russian actors to be quite honest.
Speaker 5: And yes, she's still alive. Like, let's let her play
Speaker 5: herself in the movie. I did have a very special
Speaker 5: moment though. I absolutely loved them sitting around retelling their
Speaker 5: family history over and over and over again, and then
Speaker 5: also including the retelling of dreams. I thought that was
Speaker 5: just fantastic.
Speaker 6: Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people.
Speaker 6: This show is hosted by Danish Schwartz, Sarah Burnett, and
Speaker 6: Jason English. Our senior producer is Josh Fisher. Today's episode
Speaker 6: was written by Dave Russ, editing and sound designed by
Speaker 6: Chris Childs. Mixing and mastering by Chris Childs. Thanks to
Speaker 6: our voice actors Katie Maddie and Chris Childs. Original music
Speaker 6: by Alise McCoy, Show logo by Lucy Kintonia. Our executive
Speaker 6: producer is Jason English. I also want to give a
Speaker 6: very special thanks to the filmmaker Rebecca E. Marshall for
Speaker 6: letting us use some audio from her documentary The Forest
Speaker 6: in Me. We will put a link to that in
Speaker 6: the show note so you can go and.
Speaker 4: Check it out.
Speaker 6: Very Special Episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.