The Lykovs of the Siberian Taiga, Continued: Visiting Agafia

Remember the Russian family that lived for 40 years in isolation in the Siberian wilderness? Vice caught up with the last living Lykov, Agafia, for an episode of their “Far Out” series. Publisher (and, in this instance, narrator) John Martin also wrote about the experience for Vice’s website, where he mentions that “One of the more peculiar notions she’s picked up” — from the Old Believer newspapers that visitors occasionally leave behind — “is that bar codes are marks of the devil. ‘It’s the stamp of the Antichrist,’ she said. ‘People bring me bags of seeds with bar codes on them. I take the seeds out and burn the bags right away and then plant the seeds. The Antichrist stamp will bring the end to the world,’ she said. ‘God won’t save everyone.’ “

I emailed John a few more questions.

What were some things you learned from Agafia?

I learned, or perhaps it was reinforced in my mind, that people can live off-grid and mostly alone with minimal intrusion and help from the ‘outside.’ It’s not an impossible lifestyle, and, especially in the case of the former, it’s how all our ancestors lived. It blew my mind that there was a 70-year-old woman doing it in the middle of the mountains of Siberia, of all places. She projects this grandmotherly warmth, and almost frailty, but then will just march up a steep-ass snow-covered hill and start sawing logs while the young crew of soft New Yorkers are all winded from just walking there. It also made me sure that all hermits are running from something — in the case of Agafia, well, her father’s case, it was Communists. I just like the idea that most of the world is so in touch with modern amenities, and then there’s this isolated old lady in Siberia who has almost none of them, and she’s seemingly happier than anyone else I’ve met.

And from being in Siberia in general?

Russia is a fucked up place. There’s definitely vestiges of Soviet mentality and state-run bureaucracy that permeate everything from simple things like ordering dinner at a restaurant to exchanging money, to doing more complicated things like getting permits, renting helicopters, and in general just getting things done. Going through layers of permission was very frustrating and … Russian doll-like. Siberia is almost a world apart from Western Russia, however, in both distance and sense of place. It almost seems folly that any one government could ever try to rule this place. It’s wild, untamed. It’s just so vast that when you think of it in context of the Old Believers, it makes sense that this is where they’ve fled to for centuries to escape persecution. There’s so few people, and so much land, and so much of it inhospitable by our standards, which makes it ever more impressive when you meet the people who live there.

Did you eat anything interesting?

Oh yes! While I very much wanted to sample the potato dumplings Agafia was making, she wouldn’t eat with us (Old Believer religion rules). We ate well with with our Siberian fixers, who were these hardcore burly Russian dudes who were kind of like the Three Stooges meets Bear Grylls or something. And they brought salt pork, which I developed an addiction to. It’s basically slabs of cured pork fat with a little meat. Like bacon, but less meat. Salty as hell, usually eaten in small bits on bread for breakfast. Very common in Russia but for some reason it just felt like the food you needed to eat after sleeping outside in -30 weather. And in restaurants in town we had something called a Taiga Salad, which is some sort of pheasant salad that I became fond of. We also shot an episode of our food show “Munchies in Moscow” on our night off. We went out with Alexei Zimin of the restaurant Ragout, and he took us around the new and amazing Moscow eating and drinking establishments. There’s a lot of good places there that have sprung up in the last couple years — a real food scene for sure. It ended with one of his chef buddies knocking out our producer with one punch. Moscow is a wild ride.

Do you think Agafia would want to participate in The Hairpin’s “Alone In” series? Alone in Siberia for 70 Years? Ha … ehh, okay that’s probably in poor taste. And she wasn’t alone the whole time…

At this point she’s media-savvy, so I think she would definitely be game to participate, although it might be a little tough to get her on the phone. I could definitely get you on the phone with Heimo and Edna Korth who live alone (together) above the Arctic Circle in an area as remote as Agafia.

Is there anything you wish you’d asked her but didn’t?

I’m really interested in the survival aspect of it, because she’s so anathema to the stereotype of a mountain man hermit, I wanted her to teach me her secrets. I wanted to know more about her day to day and the skills she learned growing up. We tried asking her, but she has this circular way of answering questions that made interviewing her rather challenging. If we would ask her if her way of life is difficult, for instance, she’d answer with a “difficult? this is just how I live.” Also the fact that I don’t speak Russian wasn’t helping, and everyone on the crew was a Godless heathen, so Agafia’s Biblical allusions were lost on us for the most part. The one thing that we didn’t get to explore, which we would have liked to, was the living situation when her family was still alive. Due to inclement weather, our time with her was cut short by a day, which was when we were supposed to put on skin skis and go six miles or so to a cabin that her brothers lived in, away from the father and daughters. While there’s no explanation for why they lived there, there is some speculation that it was the father wanting to keep the genders separate.

Oh, I should mention that when we left that she gave me a bag of cats “for Obama.” Two kittens in a burlap sack.

Oh my god, what did you do with them?!

Told her I would get them to Obama then tossed them out of the helicopter at 2,000 feet.

Kidding. Gave them to the parks dept who were apparently going to auction them off. “Agafia and Yerofei’s Cats!” I can only imagine the riches it brought them.