One of Russia's Last 'Old Believers' Still Lives in Siberia

Soviet geologists expected rocks, not a religion-fueled time warp, when they spotted a lone garden deep in Siberia in 1978. Writing for the Guardian, Sophie Pinkham revisits the Lykov family, so-called Old Believers who fled into the conifer forests known as the taiga in the 1930s to escape Soviet rule and preserve a 17th-century version of Russian Orthodox beliefs—no priests, no modern technology, not even bread. For more than four decades, they survived on potatoes, pine nuts, and wild plants and adhered to a rigid code of what was "allowed," raising children who'd never seen a wheel and who learned to read on birch bark.

Pinkham tracks how, after their discovery in the late '70s, the Lykovs transformed from near-mythic hermits to a national obsession. Today, the last surviving daughter of four Lykov children, Agafia, still lives in the forest, but with a helicopter SOS button, a cabin funded by billionaire Oleg Deripaska, and a growing YouTube footprint that turns her austere life into digital spectacle. Pinkham's piece uses Agafia's story to probe Russian ideas of holiness, isolation, and self-sufficiency—and how living outside of history now requires state and billionaire support. Check out pictures of the family here, or read the full piece.