A Russian Family Was Isolated for 40 Years, Unaware of WWII (2013)
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A Russian Family Was Isolated for 40 Years, Unaware of WWII (2013)
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Re: A Russian Family Was Isolated for 40 Years, Unaware of WWII (2013)
#2Vice did a fun piece on this family a few years back that - on location - captures the environment they survived in ->
Re: A Russian Family Was Isolated for 40 Years, Unaware of WWII (2013)
#3If anyone is interested, the Lykovs were part of a group of 'Old Believers' (староверы) a sect of the Russian orthodox church. The primary reason many people who shared their faith fled major cities was because of Communist religious purges (an attempt to solve the problem of 'Religion is the opium of the people')
Re: A Russian Family Was Isolated for 40 Years, Unaware of WWII (2013)
#4Primitive Technology is really interesting. This guy is super good at it : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA
He's trying to get iron smelted right now, but that's really hard. It seems the problem the Lykovs ran into was that their metal items rusted after a while and they couldn't repair them. It's really hard to live without pots, and knives.
Re: A Russian Family Was Isolated for 40 Years, Unaware of WWII (2013)
#5If anyone is interested, the Lykovs were part of a group of 'Old Believers' (староверы) a sect of the Russian orthodox church. The primary reason many people who shared their faith fled major cities was because of Communist religious purges (an attempt to solve the problem of 'Religion is the opium of the people') https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Believers
Yep and in an irony of history, they, not the Metropolitan of Moscow, were actually being better at adhering to tradition.
Re: A Russian Family Was Isolated for 40 Years, Unaware of WWII (2013)
#6I remember reading this a while back on HN, for those interested in the discussion, here's the link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10125523
Re: A Russian Family Was Isolated for 40 Years, Unaware of WWII (2013)
#7Your Beliefs Doesn't Make You A Better Person; Your Behavior Does;
Re: A Russian Family Was Isolated for 40 Years, Unaware of WWII (2013)
#8Primitive Technology is really interesting. This guy is super good at it : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA He's trying to get iron smelted right now, but that's really hard. It seems the problem the Lykovs ran into was that their metal items rusted after a while and they couldn't repair them. It's really hard to live without pots, and knives.
I'm a fan of these videos! if I get stranded on an Island my only hope is to have enough battery and this guy's videos on a usb drive =)
Re: A Russian Family Was Isolated for 40 Years, Unaware of WWII (2013)
#9Vice did a fun piece on this family a few years back that - on location - captures the environment they survived in -> https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tt2AYafET68
Thanks for sharing. Just watched it very interesting.
It was nostalgic seeing the old prayer book in Slavonic, with pages almost brown from being leafed through and used daily. I remembered by grandfather's books, they used to be like that. He tried to teach me some Slavonic, remember at least knowing the alphabet enough to read the words.
Then I like how Agafia explains what it is like to listen to the news about the outside world. The man who came to live next "door" (their relationship seems ...complicated) has a radio, and they listen to it sometimes. She mentions the impression she gets about the outside world from it, just terrible things: people killing each other, mining accidents, terrorist acts. It is as if aliens captured some of our broadcasts and tried to infer what we are like. Not that we are doing stellar job, but the news would make it seem like we are failing even more.
The other interesting comment was from the park ranger how wilderness cleanses people. Nobody is out that far stealing or committing crimes. That far out people are happy to see each other, help each other, hunters in their cabins leave food, matches and firewood.
Had to laugh of course, at her using the mangled test missile crashed nearby to scare the bears away, by hitting it with a stick. It is hard to fathom a more complete mix of Russian stereotypes in one single image: feisty old woman with a stick, wearing a head scarf, bears, soviet military artifact, and Siberia.
Re: A Russian Family Was Isolated for 40 Years, Unaware of WWII (2013)
#10I remember my uncle telling me about them when I was growing up in the 90s. He was an officer responsible for the environmental impact assessment of the Baikonur rocket launches and visited Lykovs a couple of times. They lived really close to the area where Proton rocket boosters are supposed to fall down. Couple of years ago I found out that V. Peskov even mentioned my uncle in his 'Lost in the Taiga' book about the Lykov family.