A Family Spent 42 Years Hiding From the Soviet Union in Siberia. One of Them Is Still There.

In the summer of 1978, Soviet geologists stumbled upon a family of five deep in the Siberian taiga. They had been cut off from almost all human contact since fleeing religious persecution in 1936. World War II had happened without them. The moon landing, too.

The Lykov family belonged to the Old Believers, a sect that broke from the Russian Orthodox Church in the 17th century in protest of Patriarch Nikon's liturgical reforms. The persecution that followed was brutal: burning alive, imprisonment, torture. In 1936, a Communist patrol shot Karp Lykov's brother dead. With no hope for safety within Soviet society, Karp gathered his wife, their two children, a few household items and a handful of seeds, and disappeared into the Siberian taiga.

Two more children, Dmitry and Agafia, were born during the isolation. The family settled near the Yerinat River, 250 kilometers (155 miles) from any settlement. They farmed a small terraced plot of rye, potatoes, hemp and peas. Tools were wooden. Clothes were woven from hemp fiber. Birch bark served as footwear and container material. When their metal kettles rusted through, they replaced them with bark vessels that couldn't go near a fire. Akulina taught her children to read and write using sharpened sticks dipped in honeysuckle juice. Their only books were prayer texts and an old family Bible.

When the geologists made contact, Karp was mostly delighted by the innovations they brought up from camp, though he steadfastly refused to believe that man had walked on the moon. Contact carried its own cost: in 1981, three of the four Lykov children died. Dmitry from pneumonia; Savin and Natalia presumably from diseases brought inadvertently by visitors. The family's rule against outside medical assistance proved fatal. By 1988, only one member of the family remained: Agafia Lykova.

Today she is helped by a young believing nun and the staff of the natural park where she lives. Agafia is considered a national treasure: the last member of a disappearing world. The woman who lived without bread or wheels is now a recurring figure on YouTube.

Read the full story at The Guardian, January 22, 2026

Hot Take: Three of the four Lykov children who survived four decades of Siberian winters were ultimately killed by exposure to modern humans, not by the taiga itself. Medicine has a word for that kind of irony. Several of them, actually.