Lost in the Taiga: One Russian Family's Fifty-Year Struggle for Survival and Religious Freedom in the Siberian Wilderness

Book Synopsis: In the late 1970s, a Russian pilot flying over a remote, mountainous stretch of the Siberian taiga, the vast subarctic forest, spotted a tilled field hundreds of miles from any known settlement. He could not believe his eyes; in this forbidding part of the world, human habitation was a statistical impossibility. A team of scientists parachuted in and were stunned by what they found: a primitive wood cabin, and a family dressed in rags that spoke, thought, and lived in the manner of seventeenth-century Russian peasants during the reign of Tsar Peter the Great. How they come here, how they survived, and how they ultimately prevailed in a climate of unimaginable adversity make for one of the most extraordinary human adventures of this century.

Acclaimed Pravda journalist Vasily Peskov has visited this family once a year for the past twelve years, gaining their trust and learning their story. It begins in the late seventeenth century, when a community of Russian Orthodox fundamentalists made a two-thousand-mile odyssey from the Ukraine to the depths of the Siberian taiga to escape religious persecution at the hands of Peter the Great, who sought to reform the Russian Orthodox Church. For nearly 250 years, this band of “Old Believers” kept the outside world at bay, but in the 1930s Stalin’s brutal collectivization program swept East and threw them from their land. But the young family of Karp Osipovich Lykov refused to abandon the only way of life they knew, and fled even deeper into the desolate Siberian hinterland. By the time Peskov came to know them, they had been alone for more than fifty years, surviving solely on what they could harvest, hunt, and build by their own means. The sole surviving family member, the daughter Agafia, lives by herself in the Lykov family cabin to this day.

In Lost in the Taiga, Peskov brings to life the Lykovs’ faith, their doubt, and their epic struggle against an unyielding wilderness, even as he pays homage to a natural habitat that is being despoiled so rapidly it may soon no longer exist. Peskov’s account has captured the imagination of the world: published in ten countries on three continents, it is being made into a movie by internationally acclaimed filmmaker Jean-Jacques Annaud. Lost in the Taiga is a lyrical celebration of the Siberian taiga’s savage beauty, and a moving testament to the power of the human will.