permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 12:50 AM, Linda <linda_shewan@yahoo.com.au> wrote:

> That would correspond to what Anastasia says in the Ringing Cedar Series -
> it amazes me how much of the unbelievable stuff is written in those books
> that then seem to be scientifically discovered or I read articles about...
>  Linda
>

For 40 years, this Russian family was cut off from all human contact,
unaware of World War
II<http://boingboing.net/2013/01/29/for-40-years-this-russian-fam.html>
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
n 1978 a team of Russian geologists took a helicopter to a remote part of
Siberia and encountered a family that had not had contact with anyone for
40 years. The family were Old Believers -- members of a "fundamentalist
Russian Orthodox sect, worshiping in a style unchanged since the 17th
century." They fled to Siberia in 1936 to escape persecution.
"...more than 150 miles from the nearest settlement, in a spot that had
never been explored. The Soviet authorities had no records of anyone living
in the district.""

"A couple of kettles served them well for many years, but when rust finally
overcame them, the only replacements they could fashion came from birch
bark. Since these could not be placed in a fire, it became far harder to
cook. By the time the Lykovs were discovered, their staple diet was potato
patties mixed with ground rye and hemp seeds".

In some respects, Peskov makes clear, the taiga did offer some abundance:
"Beside the dwelling ran a clear, cold stream. Stands of larch, spruce,
pine and birch yielded all that anyone could take.... Bilberries and
raspberries were close to hand, firewood as well, and pine nuts fell right
on the roof."

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. More often than not, though, there was no meat, and
their diet gradually became more monotonous. Wild animals destroyed their
crop of carrots, and Agafia recalled the late 1950s as "the hungry years."
"We ate the rowanberry leaf," she said,

*roots, grass, mushrooms, potato tops, and bark, We were hungry all the
time. Every year we held a council to decide whether to eat everything up
or leave some for seed.*

Famine was an ever-present danger in these circumstances, and in 1961 it
snowed in June. The hard frost killed everything growing in their garden,
and by spring the family had been reduced to eating shoes and bark. Akulina
chose to see her children fed, and that year she died of starvation. The
rest of the family were saved by what they regarded as a miracle: a single
grain of rye sprouted in their pea patch. The Lykovs put up a fence around
the shoot and guarded it zealously night and day to keep off mice and
squirrels. At harvest time, the solitary spike yielded 18 grains, and from
this they painstakingly rebuilt their rye crop."

"Slowly, over several visits, the full story of the family emerged. The old
man's name was Karp Lykov, and he was an Old
Believer<http://orthodoxwiki.org/Old_Believers>—a
member of a fundamentalist Russian Orthodox sect, worshiping in a style
unchanged since the 17th century. Old Believers had been persecuted since
the days of Peter the
Great<http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=fZKbsRzTvLkC&pg=PA27&dq=old+believers+peter+the+great&hl=en&sa=X&ei=08kBUa65LKWc0QW3qYCICA&ved=0CC4Q6AEwADgK#v=onepage&q=old%20believers%20peter%20the%20great&f=false>,
and Lykov talked about it as though it had happened only yesterday; for
him, Peter was a personal enemy and "the anti-Christ in human form"—a point
he insisted had been amply proved by Tsar's campaign to modernize Russia by
forcibly "chopping off the beards of
Christians."<http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=-Ag2bbYzgacC&pg=PA72&dq=peter+the+great+beard+tax&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ookCUZW8I-eS0QWbtYCYBA&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=peter%20the%20great%20beard%20tax&f=false>But
these centuries-old hatreds were conflated with more recent
grievances;
Karp was prone to complain in the same breath about a merchant who had
refused to make a gift of 26 *poods* [940 pounds] of potatoes to the Old
Believers sometime around 1900.

Things had only got worse for the Lykov family when the atheist
Bolsheviks<http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8jkFD4ZXjd8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Plot+to+Kill+God:+Findings+from+the+Soviet+Experiment+in+Secularization&hl=en&sa=X&ei=k4oCUbmnO4ml0AWT4YCoAg&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=The%20Plot%20to%20Kill%20God%3A%20Findings%20from%20the%20Soviet%20Experiment%20in%20Secularization&f=false>took
power. Under the Soviets, isolated Old Believer communities that had
fled to Siberia to escape persecution began to retreat ever further from
civilization. During the purges of the 1930s, with Christianity itself
under assault, a Communist patrol had shot Lykov's brother on the outskirts
of their village while Lykov knelt working beside him. He had responded by
scooping up his family and bolting into forest.

That was in 1936, and there were only four Lykovs then—Karp; his wife,
Akulina; a son named Savin, 9 years old, and Natalia, a daughter who was
only 2. Taking their possessions and some seeds, they had retreated ever
deeper into the taiga, building themselves a succession of crude dwelling
places, until at last they had fetched up in this desolate spot. Two more
children had been born in the wild—Dmitry in 1940 and Agafia in 1943—and
neither of the youngest Lykov children had ever seen a human being who was
not a member of their family. All that Agafia and Dmitry knew of the
outside world they learned entirely from their parents' stories. The
family's principal entertainment, the Russian journalist Vasily Peskov
noted, "was for everyone to recount their dreams."

The Lykov children knew there were places called cities where humans lived
crammed together in tall buildings. They had heard there were countries
other than Russia. But such concepts were no more than abstractions to
them. Their only reading matter was prayer books and an ancient family
Bible. Akulina had used the gospels to teach her children to read and
write, using sharpened birch sticks dipped into honeysuckle juice as pen
and ink. When Agafia was shown a picture of a horse, she recognized it from
her mother's Bible stories. "Look, papa," she exclaimed. "A steed!""