In the summer of 1978, a helicopter pilot was carrying a team of Soviet geologists into a stretch of southern Siberia that had never been surveyed. He was looking for somewhere to put the aircraft down. Several thousand feet up a mountainside in dense pine and larch, he saw a clearing. It was cultivated. Long furrows cut into the slope, planted.

 There was no settlement within 250 km. The nearest people were a four-day walk away through forest with no paths in it. Soviet records showed nobody living in that district because nobody did. He circled twice and went back to report it. A party of four went in on foot. They carried gifts and they carried a gun because they had no idea what was up there and no way of finding out except by walking up to it.

 The geologist who led them was a woman named Galina Pismenskaya. What she saw first was the dwelling, blackened by time and weather, piled over with bark and poles and planks, dug into the slope. She said afterwards that if it had not been for a window roughly the size of a pocket on her backpack, it would have been difficult to believe people lived in it.

 An old man came out, barefoot in a patched hemp shirt with a beard down his chest. He looked at four strangers standing in a clearing he had cut himself 42 years after he last saw a face he did not know. What he said was, “Well, since you have traveled this far, you might as well come in.” Inside, the floor was covered in potato peelings and pine nut shells.

Two women were pressed into the corner of the single room praying, repeating that this was for their sins. They were the man’s daughters. They were in their 30s. Neither of them had ever seen a human being who was not a member of their own family. Karp could be understood. His daughters were a different matter.

40 years of speaking only to four other people in a language nobody was correcting had done something to their speech. Pismenskaya described the sound they made as a slow, blurred cooing. They were speaking Russian. It had drifted. The Lykovs had walked into that forest in 1936 and had not come out. 42 years. They had missed the Second World War entirely.

Within 3 years of being found, three of the four children were dead. To understand Karp Lykov, you need one piece of Russian religious history, and it is older than the Soviet Union by three centuries. In the 1650s, the Patriarch Nikon of Moscow reformed the rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church, the spelling of Jesus’s name, the number of fingers used to make the sign of the cross, the direction of processions, small things.

A large part of the faithful refused. They held that the old forms were the correct ones and that the new church had fallen into error. They were called the Old Believers. They were excommunicated and then persecuted and then hunted by the state. What they did in response set the pattern for everything the Lykovs later did.

 Some accepted death rather than the new rites. In the late 17th century, thousands of Old Believers gathered in wooden churches and set fire to them with themselves inside in mass acts of self-immolation rather than accept a reformed sacrament. Others simply walked away east and then further east into forests and swamps and mountains where the Tsar’s officials could not be bothered to follow.

 Retreat was not an eccentric option for these people. It was the established and honored response, three centuries old, taught to children as the thing you do when the state comes for your faith. That was where the Lykovs were living in the 1930s, the village of Lykovo in Tyumen Oblast, a family that had been running from the government for nine generations before Karp was born.

Then the Bolsheviks arrived, and the pressure that had been intermittent for 300 years became systematic. Churches were closed, clergy were arrested, practicing Christianity became a punishable act. In 1936, Karp Lykov was working in a field alongside his brother when a communist patrol came past. They shot his brother where he stood.

Karp went home, collected his wife Akulina, their 9-year-old son Savin, and their 2-year-old daughter Natalia, and left. He took seeds, a spinning wheel, the parts of a loom, and a handful of tools. He did not intend to come back. They did not go straight to the place the geologists eventually found. They moved in stages over years, building one crude dwelling, and then abandoning it for somewhere further in whenever they felt exposed, a hunting party in the distance, a sound that might have been an axe, smoke on a

ridge. Each move meant starting again, clearing ground, breaking soil at altitude, building a shelter before the cold arrived. Each one took them further from the possibility of return, and closer to country that would not support people. The final site was near the Yerinat River in the Abakan Basin, high in the Western Sayan Mountains, about 160 miles from the nearest settlement, and roughly the same distance from the Mongolian border.

 Two more children were born there, Dmitry in 1940, Agafia 4 years later. They were delivered by their mother in a hut in the forest with no assistance and no medicine. They were wrapped in cloth she had woven and fitted with shoes made of birch bark. The four of them grew into distinct people, which is not what most accounts of this family convey.

 Savin, the eldest, had been nine when they left and remembered the village. He became the most rigid of them on matters of religion, and by the end he wanted the spiritual authority in the household for himself. Karp had doubts about his eldest son that he was still expressing to visitors half a century later. Natalia took over the running of the household when her mother died and did the cooking, the sewing and the weaving for the rest of her life.

Dmitry was the outdoorsman. He could stay out in the taiga overnight in temperatures approaching minus 40, barefoot, and he built and maintained most of what the family used. Agafia was the youngest, the most curious, and the one the visitors found easiest to talk to once she stopped hiding. Everything the two youngest Lykovs knew about the world outside came from their parents’ stories.

Their mother had been to a town. Their father remembered horses and a church and a market. Agafia and Dmitry had the descriptions and nothing else. No photograph, no map, no visitor, nothing arriving from outside for the entire span of their lives. Aculina had been raised to read. She taught all four children from a prayer book and a Bible using birch bark and sharpened sticks dipped in honeysuckle juice for ink.

The four of them grew up literate in Old Church Slavonic in a forest. The taiga will not feed a family. That is the first thing to understand about the 42 years. Their diet was potatoes, rye, hemp seed, pine nuts, and whatever they could gather or trap. They had no gun. Dmitry, who could stay out in the cold barefoot in temperatures approaching minus 40, hunted by running animals down over days until the animals gave out.

They planted on a slope at altitude in a climate with about three frost-free months. Crop failures were not unusual. They were expected. In bad years, they ate bark and rowan leaves and boiled leather. Their possessions wore out and could not be replaced. When their clothes disintegrated, they wove hemp cloth on the loom they had carried in and made new ones.

When their shoes went, they made galoshes from birch bark. When the kettles rusted through, they made containers from birch bark as well, which cannot be put on a fire, so cooking became more difficult and stayed more difficult permanently. They had two of everything and then one and then none.

 And each time something went, there was no possibility of getting another. The thing Karp spoke about most when the geologists finally arrived was salt. They had run out of it early and lived without it for four decades. He called going without salt true torture, and he came back to it repeatedly. Not the isolation, not the cold, not the hunger.

Salt then came 1961. Snow fell in June that year. It buried the garden and killed the crop outright, and the potatoes froze in the ground before they could be lifted. There was nothing to carry them through to the following autumn. The family ate shoes, they ate bark, they ate anything in the forest that could be swallowed.

 Karp later said they survived that winter on nothing they would have recognized as food. Akulina Lykova stopped eating so that her children could. She died of starvation in the autumn of 1961. Her four children survived. What saved them the following year was a single seed of rye that came up in the pea patch. They put a fence around it, guarded it against mice and squirrels day and night, and harvested 18 grains from it.

They spent several seasons rebuilding a crop out of that one plant. So, when four geologists walked up that slope in 1978, they were meeting people who had been alone with each other since before the war, and who had not seen new face in more than four decades. Karp was 79 and had been born in the reign of Asaf.

The geologists offered them food at that first meeting. The family refused it. Their religion prohibited eating what outsiders had prepared and they had held to that rule through the winter of 1961 with nobody to test it on. And they held to it now with four strangers standing in their yard holding provisions they badly needed.

The initial contact was frightening for both sides. The two younger women were hysterical. Karp was wary. But he had spent 42 years without conversation with anyone outside his household. And the geologists kept coming back and gradually the family let them in. The reactions of the four Lykov children to 20th century objects have been recorded in detail because the geologists wrote them down as they happened.

Cellophane baffled them. Karp examined it, worked it in his fingers, and concluded it was glass that had been made soft. They had never seen bread. When they were offered it, they said they had heard of it from their parents but had never eaten any. The geologists had a small portable television at their camp.

The Lykovs came to watch it and what happened is one of the clearest pictures anyone has of that family. Karp sat down directly in front of the screen and stayed there. Agafia would not come into the room. She watched from behind a door putting her head round the frame. Each time she looked, she pulled back and tried to pray the transgression away immediately whispering, crossing herself, and then put her head round the door again.

Karp did his praying afterwards in one go when the program had finished. They knew it was a sin. They came anyway. And then they settled the account each in their own way. Karp accepted the existence of satellites without much difficulty. He had, he said, noticed stars moving across the sky in a way stars did not, starting in the late 1950s, and he had wondered what they were.

He was not surprised to be told people had put them there. He absolutely refused to believe that men had walked on the moon. They had missed the Second World War. 27 million Soviet citizens died in it, and the Lykovs learned of it from geologists in 1978 over tea, 33 years after it ended. The geologists behaved decently.

They brought salt, which the family had gone without for four decades, and which Karp described as true torture to live without. They brought tools, cloth, grain. They offered medical help, which was refused on religious grounds by everyone except, occasionally, Dmitri. Three years later, in the autumn of 1981, three of the four Lykov children died within days of one another.

Savin and Natalia died of kidney failure. Vasily Peskov, the journalist who spent years with the family and wrote the definitive account of them, established that this was not caused by contact with outsiders. It was the diet, decades of malnutrition, and a punishing food supply had wrecked their organs long before anyone found them.

Dmitri died of pneumonia. That one may well have come from the geologists. He was 41, the strongest of them, the one who could run down game barefoot in the snow, and an ordinary respiratory infection took him in a matter of days. The geologists tried everything. They offered to call in a helicopter and fly him to a hospital.

It was within their power to do it, and they pressed him hard. He refused. He would not leave his family, and he would not leave his religion. And what he said to them was this, “A man lives for howsoever God grants.” He died in the hut. Karp, the old man, was left with one child. The geologists and later Soviet officials tried repeatedly to move him and Agafia out.

There were relatives still alive in the villages who would have taken them. By the end of the 1980s, the state that had shot his brother was collapsing, and the religious persecution that had driven the family into the forest was ending. Karp Lykov refused every time. He died in his sleep on the 16th of February, 1988, 52 years after he walked into the taiga.

He was buried on the slope beside his wife and three of his children. Agafia buried him herself with help from the geologists who came, and then she was alone. She was in her 40s. She had never seen a town. Agafia, she has now lived alone in that place for more than 35 years. In roughly 70 years, she has left that settlement six times.

The first was in the 1980s after Peskov’s newspaper articles turned the family into a national story. The Soviet government paid for her to tour the country for a month. She was in her 40s, and on that trip she saw airplanes, horses, cars, and money for the first time in her life. She told Peskov afterwards that at some point during one of her journeys outside the taiga, she married someone.

She gave no further details. Nobody has ever established who he was, where he is, or what happened. It sits in the record as a single sentence from a woman who has otherwise been documented more thoroughly than almost any private citizen in Russia. The other trips were for medical treatment, to see distant relatives, and to meet other Old Believers.

She was flown out in 2016 with a leg problem and treated in hospital, and went back as soon as she could. She has been offered a house in a village more times than anyone has counted. She has met governors and journalists and a Russian Orthodox patriarch. She has appeared in documentaries watched by millions of people who will never go anywhere near her.

She keeps goats and chickens now, which she did not have before. Supplies get flown in a few times a year. Her health has declined, and she has started accepting more help than she used to. And she turned 80 in 2024. For 18 years she had a neighbor. Yerofey Sedov was one of the geologists from the original expedition.

And after gangrene took his leg, he came back and built himself a cabin down the slope from her. He told journalists he had come to help her. It ran the other way. He was elderly and disabled, and he depended on Agafia for food and firewood for most of the time he was there. Her assessment of him, given to a documentary crew, was that Yerofey was a waste, that nobody needed him, that he was not a helper and needed helping himself.

She has also said that on two occasions he threatened her and behaved, in her word, sinfully. They listened to the radio together anyway, until he died in May 2015 at 77. For 18 years he was the only other person in the valley, and that appears to have been sufficient reason to keep feeding him. She has one recorded answer to the question everybody asks her, whether she wishes the helicopter had never seen the clearing, whether the family would have been better left alone.

She shook her head. She said she did not know whether they would have survived without them. They were running out of tools. They were running out of food. And she had no scarves left. The obvious version of this story is that the outside world found the Lykovs and killed them. Four decades of survival, then contact, then three funerals in a week.

 Peskov, who knew them better than any outsider, did not accept it. And the medical record does not support it. Two of the three died of organ failure that had been building for decades on a diet of pine nuts and frozen potatoes. Only Dmitri’s death is plausibly connected to the visitors. And Dmitri was offered a helicopter and a hospital and said no.

What actually killed the Lykov children was the 42 years, not the three. And the 42 years were a decision. Karp Lykov watched his brother shot in a field and concluded that the state would come for his family next. And he was not wrong about that. Old Believers were being arrested and shot. What he chose was the only exit available to a man with no money, no protection, and no country prepared to defend his right to make the sign of the cross with two fingers instead of three.

He also chose it for four other people, two of whom did not exist yet. Dmitri and Agafia were born into a decision made before their birth in response to a danger they never saw on behalf of a faith they were taught by the only two people they had ever met. Dmitri died at 41 having refused the hospital that would probably have saved him in the terms his father had given him.

There was never a point at which he could have chosen otherwise because he had never encountered another way of thinking. Agafia is the exception. And that is what makes her interesting rather than tragic. She has now had more than 40 years of contact with the outside world. She has seen it, been flown into it, been treated by it, and been offered a permanent place inside it repeatedly.

She has all the information her brother never had. She still goes back. Six times out. Six times back. Aeroplanes, cars, money, hospitals, a marriage nobody can account for, and then the same slope. The same graves. The same hut. The clearing is still cut into the slope where the pilot saw it in 1978. There are five graves on the hillside.