Hermits: Taiga Deadlock

An extraordinary story of the Lykov family.

In the picture: Boyarynya Morozova, one of the symbols of the Orthodoxy split in the 1650s, painting by Vasily Surikov.

I think most Russians who lived throughout Soviet times remember the story of the Lykov family. Hermits, who fled from the world, have spent decades in complete isolation before being found by accident. Below is my freeform retelling of the Lykov family story based on many articles read over the years, and some relatively recent videos. You can find a plethora of materials telling their story in Russian and English. However, the most accurate to this date remain articles by Vasily Peskov, who was the first journalist to visit Lykov’s settlement and tell their story to the world. He also named the story of the Lykov family “Taiga Deadlock,” by which it is still known today. It is one of the most professional pieces of journalism I have ever seen. He passed away in 2013, but with the development of internet platforms, we can now find recent videos of Agafya and not only read, but see how she lives and hear her talking. Who are the Lykovs and who is Agafya? Let me tell you.

Roots of this story go back to the 1650s when Patriarch Nikon started Orthodox Church reforms, changing the order, mode, and rules by which the church had been living for centuries before. Those reforms stirred up a conflict between those who accepted the reforms and those who denied them, accusing Nikon of stepping from the true faith. The conflict resulted in the church splitting. One part remained an official, reformed Orthodox church, and another, smaller, was called Old Believers (староверы, starovery). To this day, both churches have been existing in parallel, although throughout history, up until Perestroika, starovery lived in exile and were oppressed by the Tsar government, followed by persecutions of the Soviet system. The idea of starovery was escaping from the sinful world, concealing in places where they could practice their faith and live a lifestyle of their ancestors. You’d find small settlements in remote areas of Russia, deep in the woods, where they lived in detachment from the bigger world, which did not accept their faith, while starovery never accepted the worldly way of living.

The Lykov family also lived in one of the small villages in the area we now know as the Republic of Khakassia. In the 1930s, followed by a series of devastating events that threatened their lives, Karp Osipovich Lykov and his wife Akulina Karpovna Lykova decided to run away from the world and hide as far as possible. They packed what they could, took their children Savin (11 y.o.) and Natalia (1 y.o.), and on foot walked deep into the mountain area of taiga.

Two more children were born during their years in hiding: Dmitry and Agafya.

For the next forty-something years, they lived in complete detachment from the world. They changed their location a couple of times, but still remained in locations out of reach by anyone. The family knew nothing about the events, developments, or figures, neither in the USSR nor anywhere else on Earth. They missed World War Two completely. They did not know anything about space exploration, but started to notice stars that moved quickly across the sky. They also saw airplanes flying over, but it was something their books predicted: the appearance of man-made steel birds.

Over the decades of active use, a small number of tools and household items they brought have deteriorated throughout time, and they made new, wooden ones. Everything they had to make themselves; there was no store nearby to buy stuff, and because of their faith, they denied money completely. The main source of food was their vegetable garden and the taiga, thanks to its fertile soil. Taiga is abundant with berries, mushrooms, and pine cones. Pine nuts played a substantial role in their diet; they collected and stored them for the winter abundance of pine cones. The primary food was potatoes; they grew hundreds of buckets of potatoes every year. In addition to potatoes, they grew some root vegetables, a little rye, and lots of hemp. Hemp was used as food and for making yarn for clothes and ropes. Health ailments were treated with herbs found in the taiga and by what we’d now call manual therapy. They had meat occasionally, when they managed to catch a deer using catching pits. The nearby river provided fish.

Despite their best efforts in sustaining their food supply, hunger was lurking around each year, because growing crops in the taiga was difficult and heavily dependent on the weather and other factors. The toughest was 1961, when unexpected snow killed all their crops of rye and overall the crops were less than previous years. In 1961, the mother, Akulina Lykova, passed away because of hunger. By chance, they discovered just one stem of rye, which they guarded day and night. It produced 8 seeds, which the following year they planted again. It took them four years before they could crop enough grain to have it as a meal. The younger generation of the family did not know bread. What they baked as bread had a very remote resemblance to it, as it was made of potatoes, with the addition of some rye and with no yeast. They did not have any salt.

The family lived in a tiny hut, all five of them, which had a palm-sized window, a stove made of natural stones and clay. Inside the hut, there were few benches for sleeping. Some of the family slept on the floor, covered with a thick, soft layer comprised of cone nut shells, potato skins, and other trash. The Lykovs never bathed. The walls inside were all black because of soot. The hut had poor insulation, and it took a lot of chopped wood to keep it warm in the winter. Everything they used was made with bare hands, with almost no metal tools, so it looked primitive but practical. For storage, they used containers made of birch bark. For keeping their food supply, they used storage pits and special sheds raised high up in the trees to make it out of reach by bears and rodents.

Later, the two sons moved into a separate hut, six kilometers away. The reasons for this were lack of space and, never told openly but assumed, the risk of incest. When the first people from the outside world came to their settlement, one of them was a woman. The most amazing thing for the Lykov brothers was not to see strangers as such, but to see a woman, not one of their sisters.

Life in the wilderness of the taiga was extremely tough. The local climate is harsh, with boiling hot summers and cold winters with temperatures down to -40C and deep snow. The taiga is full of animals, including wolves and the most dangerous, bears. Cultivating a vegetable garden was a challenge of its own, because rodents such as chipmunks and mice were stealing a good deal of their crops. To develop the land, they had to cut down century-old trees on their own. Besides, their settlement was located on a steep side of a mountain, so their garden was like a terrace.

Two things comprised their daily life: prayer and hard labor. They strictly kept their prayer tradition, obeying the rules established hundreds of years ago.

They did not have a calendar and kept the timeline in their memory. The biggest tragedy that would happen to them would be losing track of days, as their prayer life, observation of church holidays was dependent on it. So they kept all the dates in their memory using an old year count, according to which our 2025 is the year 7534 from the creation of the world (in their words: Adam’s summer). It’s an ancient system, cancelled by Peter I. Decades later, Agafya remembers the day that had turned their life around: June 2, 7486, in the modern calendar: June 15, 1978.

In the summer of 1978, a team of geologists were flying in a helicopter, looking for a spot to land. There were not many, as the terrain in the Altai Mountains is rugged. Suddenly, they saw something that, by all means, shouldn’t be there: a vegetable garden on a slope of a mountain. The location was not marked on any maps, as it was deep in the taiga with the closest village 250 kilometers by river. The river and the air were the only two ways of reaching that location, as hundreds of kilometers of taiga that separate the Lykovs from the outside world is impassable.

The helicopter landed 15 kilometers away, and after establishing the camp, several days later, the team of geologists paid a visit to the site they discovered from the air.

Upon arrival, they met three barefoot people dressed in sackcloth, who lived in a small, darkened, from time and weather, hut. The first they met was Karp Lykov, who invited the geologists inside, where they met two of his daughters. They looked scared and, seeing strangers, fell on their knees, bursting into prayers, repeating: “It’s because of our sins!” The guests left the house and sat at some distance. Half an hour later, all three came out and approached; the daughters still with some fear in their eyes, but more with curiosity. The conversation started, often interrupted with prayers. They spoke Russian, but their language, in their way of pronunciation and the words used, was extremely difficult to understand. Visitors brought some gifts, received with gratitude: some fabric, needles, fishing hooks.

In later visits, geologists met their sons, who came from their hut. At the time of discovering the head of the family, Karp Osipovich Lykov was 83, Savin (stress in the last syllable) - 56, Natalya - 46, Dmitry - 40, the youngest, Agafya - 39. Natalya, Dmitry, and Agafya were never exposed to the outside world, and everything they knew they acquired either from their parents and Savin or from the little Taiga world that raised them and was their home. Agafya could read and write, which made her very proud. The language the family spoke was a mix of pre-revolution Russian and ancient Old Slavic language still used in church, but no one has been using it as a live language for centuries.

In his writing, Vasiliy Peskov depicted characters of all family members and their little stories, although in 1981, following sickness, Savin, Natalya, and Dmitry passed away one after another.

From the first visit, a friendship between the geologists and the Lykovs was born. Geologists were to settle for long to explore mineral resources in the area, and started building a larger camp with houses, making it like a small village. People from the outside world offered help, which was greatly appreciated. Yet, the Lykovs denied most of the food offered, except for salt and later, some grains. With geologists to Lykov’s site came cats, who exterminated all the mice and chipmunks, which was a huge help in protecting the crops. Also, the Lykovs received two goats and a chicken, which greatly enriched their diet and improved their health.

As a firm rule, they denied everything worldly, except for the basic stuff that can be used in the household. They also did not allow taking pictures of them, and all the photographs of that time available were made sneakily without their consent. Touching someone from the outside world was a sin, and they washed their hands each time coming into physical contact with a stranger.

In 1987, Karp Osipovich Lykov passed away, and Agafya was left alone in the taiga, in the middle of nowhere. Couple of years later, the exploration mission was wrapped up, and geologists, Agafya’s closest neighbors, left the area. Since then, for over three decades, she has lived all by herself. Several people had attempted to make her company, but none stayed for long: they could not keep up with Agafya’s lifestyle, doctrines and rules, demands, and hardships of living a hermit life. Agafya lives exactly the way she’s been living her entire life, before and ever after her family was discovered by people from the world. Two pillars of her days are: prayer and hard work. She still makes her own clothing, develops several pieces of land, looks after goats, scares off bears, and does her own net fishing, among a myriad of small and big things she has to deal with and which comprise her everyday life.

Nowadays, she receives occasional help from the outside world: groups of students and other concerned people, those able to reach her location, pay regular but infrequent visits. They bring essential supplies and help with hard jobs, which Agafya is no longer able to do on her own. Agafya relies on that help, without which, most probably, she would never be able to go on for much longer.

Nonetheless, at her 80 years of age, she is still active, takes care of herself and her household, demonstrates a brilliant mind, and a sharp memory. Her prayer life hasn't changed a bit and continues to be an important part of her day. As far as I understand, Agafya remembers most of her prayer books word for word, including all 150 psalms. She speaks in her own dialect and writes in the Old Slavic language. Watching videos in which Agafya speaks, for the inexperienced ear, her language can be hard to decipher.

The simple, down-to-earth lifestyle she lives changed little in decades. Nowadays, she partially relies on the help of others, but is still always ready for this help to be cut off abruptly. To sustain her living each year, she stores about 300 buckets of potatoes and other produce, along with the goodness the taiga provides. She still grows hemp, for the sake of having the seeds, just in case. She does her own fishing in the nearby river.

Still, certain things she would never accept from the outside world, because of the ancestor’s doctrine she strictly obeys. Anything with a barcode on it or comes in factory packaging is banned from use. Agafya doesn’t eat sugar, and doesn’t take almost any food except for some flour, grains, and some fruits and vegetables. All the produce not grown by her must be put in the spring first, for spiritual cleansing.

Her household is now equipped with all necessary, but still basic by modern standards, necessities. She has goats, which provide her with milk, a dog which warns about bears and other unwanted visitors, she has a gun for protection, and an army of cats, who keep rodents away from crops and multiply in geometric progression.

Agafya has some money donated to her, although money is a sin and she does not fully understand the meaning of it. There is no electricity, no internet, and virtually no connections with the bigger world. She lives in the middle of a wilderness full of bears, wolves, lynxes, snakes, ticks infected with encephalitis, yet none of it does any harm to her. If it’s not God’s hand in all this, then what? Everyone chooses what to believe.

This is a very condensed retelling of the whole story. Those interested in it in more details can read a book by Vasily Peskov (in Russian) titled "Taiga Deadlock," or find his articles published in Komsomolskaya Pravda in the 80s and 90s (available on the internet). In addition, there are newer reports on visits to Agafya and numerous videos available on YouTube, many with English subtitles.

To search images and videos of the Lykov family use following keyowords in Russian: таёжный тупик, Агафья Лыкова, Лыковы таежный тупик.