40 years in Russia's Wilds - A Story

[Grey Fox]

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/For-40-Years-This-Russian-Family-Was-Cut-Off-From-Human-Contact-Unaware-of-World-War-II-188843001.html

Siberian summers do not last long. The snows linger into May, and the cold weather returns again during September, freezing the taiga into a still life awesome in its desolation: endless miles of straggly pine and birch forests scattered with sleeping bears and hungry wolves; steep-sided mountains; white-water rivers that pour in torrents through the valleys; a hundred thousand icy bogs. This forest is the last and greatest of Earth's wildernesses. It stretches from the furthest tip of Russia's arctic regions as far south as Mongolia, and east from the Urals to the Pacific: five million square miles of nothingness, with a population, outside a handful of towns, that amounts to only a few thousand people.

When the warm days do arrive, though, the taiga blooms, and for a few short months it can seem almost welcoming. It is then that man can see most clearly into this hidden world—not on land, for the taiga can swallow whole armies of explorers, but from the air. Siberia is the source of most of Russia's oil and mineral resources, and, over the years, even its most distant parts have been overflown by oil prospectors and surveyors on their way to backwoods camps where the work of extracting wealth is carried on.

Thus it was in the remote south of the forest in the summer of 1978. A helicopter sent to find a safe spot to land a party of geologists was skimming the treeline a hundred or so miles from the Mongolian border when it dropped into the thickly wooded valley of an unnamed tributary of the Abakan, a seething ribbon of water rushing through dangerous terrain. The valley walls were narrow, with sides that were close to vertical in places, and the skinny pine and birch trees swaying in the rotors' downdraft were so thickly clustered that there was no chance of finding a spot to set the aircraft down. But, peering intently through his windscreen in search of a landing place, the pilot saw something that should not have been there. It was a clearing, 6,000 feet up a mountainside, wedged between the pine and larch and scored with what looked like long, dark furrows. The baffled helicopter crew made several passes before reluctantly concluding that this was evidence of human habitation—a garden that, from the size and shape of the clearing, must have been there for a long time.

There's more, click the Link.

[derspiess]

Fascinating.  I also read an account (v. Luck?) of a German recon patrol in WWII encountering a remote Russian village where the people were unaware of the revolution and WWII going on.  They assumed the Germans were Russian soldiers and asked them how their "little father", the czar, was doing.

[garbon]

Yeah, I think we briefly discussed this in the OTT recently. Fascinating stuff.

[Darth Wagtaros]

Fascinating.  I also read an account (v. Luck?) of a German recon patrol in WWII encountering a remote Russian village where the people were unaware of the revolution and WWII going on.  They assumed the Germans were Russian soldiers and asked them how their "little father", the czar, was doing.

I assume te Germans liquidated them after raping all the females?

[derspiess]

Fascinating.  I also read an account (v. Luck?) of a German recon patrol in WWII encountering a remote Russian village where the people were unaware of the revolution and WWII going on.  They assumed the Germans were Russian soldiers and asked them how their "little father", the czar, was doing.

I assume te Germans liquidated them after raping all the females?

According to the author they left them alone. Russians themselves may have done that later, dunno.

[Valmy]

Fascinating.  I also read an account (v. Luck?) of a German recon patrol in WWII encountering a remote Russian village where the people were unaware of the revolution and WWII going on.  They assumed the Germans were Russian soldiers and asked them how their "little father", the czar, was doing.

That sounds apocryphal to me.  It sounds like the kind of story the Germans liked to make up (like the charge of the Polish Hussars against tanks) and while I could certainly see a village this isolated way out in Siberia the Germans were fighting in European Russia where that sounds incredibly unlikely.

[Barrister]

There is a community of old believers (or as they were called, white russians) out near one of the towns I used to prosecute in.

Funny people.  Drank like absolute fishes.  Unlike a lot of other religious minorities who keep to themselves, not the hardest workers.

[Admiral Yi]

That sounds apocryphal to me.  It sounds like the kind of story the Germans liked to make up (like the charge of the Polish Hussars against tanks) and while I could certainly see a village this isolated way out in Siberia the Germans were fighting in European Russia where that sounds incredibly unlikely.

I can conceive of this happening in some out of the way spot in the Pripyet marshes or the Caucusus.

[Legbiter]

Yet the Lykovs lived permanently on the edge of famine. It was not until the late 1950s, when Dmitry reached manhood, that they first trapped animals for their meat and skins. Lacking guns and even bows, they could hunt only by digging traps or pursuing prey across the mountains until the animals collapsed from exhaustion. Dmitry built up astonishing endurance, and could hunt barefoot in winter, sometimes returning to the hut after several days, having slept in the open in 40 degrees of frost, a young elk across his shoulders.

Hardcore. I wouldn't last 5 minutes there.

[derspiess]

Fascinating.  I also read an account (v. Luck?) of a German recon patrol in WWII encountering a remote Russian village where the people were unaware of the revolution and WWII going on.  They assumed the Germans were Russian soldiers and asked them how their "little father", the czar, was doing.

That sounds apocryphal to me.  It sounds like the kind of story the Germans liked to make up (like the charge of the Polish Hussars against tanks) and while I could certainly see a village this isolated way out in Siberia the Germans were fighting in European Russia where that sounds incredibly unlikely.

It was in Hans von Luck's book and I believe he claimed to have spoken with the villagers.  Russia (even just the European part) is a pretty huge place and it seems plausible to me that a German recon battalion could come across a place that had remained hidden for a while. 

[derspiess]

That sounds apocryphal to me.  It sounds like the kind of story the Germans liked to make up (like the charge of the Polish Hussars against tanks) and while I could certainly see a village this isolated way out in Siberia the Germans were fighting in European Russia where that sounds incredibly unlikely.

I can conceive of this happening in some out of the way spot in the Pripyet marshes or the Caucusus.

I'll dig out the book & see where he said he had found them.