Agafia Lykova, 70 year old hermit, hospitalized

January 16, 2016 10:44 AM

According to the Guardian,

"Agafia Lykova is the last remaining member of a deeply religious family that fled civilisation in 1936 and did not know about the second world war until geologists stumbled upon them in 1978. After she contacted the “mainland” with an emergency satellite telephone to ask for medical help, the governor, Aman Tuleyev, ordered her evacuation from her homestead near the Abakan river to a hospital in Tashtagol, according to the Kemerovo region website."

Lykova, one of the few remaining Old Believers, is the subject of the documentary The Forest in Me.

See also: The Smithsonian Magazine's excellent article on the Lykova family.

posted by chainsofreedom (19 comments total)

I read Lost In The Taiga several years ago. Such an interesting situation. She is a tough woman.
posted by Beti at 11:05 AM on January 16, 2016

Here is a video about her from VICE (worth the 40 minutes) and two previous Metafilter threads: [1] [2]
posted by pravit at 11:13 AM on January 16, 2016 [6 favorites]

"Well, since you have traveled this far, you might as well come in."

That line from the Smithsonian article is astounding. Forty years, at least, since they've seen another human, and that's the first response.
posted by mhoye at 11:16 AM on January 16, 2016 [12 favorites]

That Smithsonian article is one of the best things I've ever read. I still think about her and the rest of the family every now and again. The thing that stuck with me the most (strangely) is how, once they were found by the outside world, the only thing they really wanted was salt. Thanks for posting.
posted by triggerfinger at 11:16 AM on January 16, 2016 [8 favorites]

I hope she does not get stuck in a place she doesn't want to be in.
posted by SLC Mom at 11:36 AM on January 16, 2016 [13 favorites]

Previously (with previouslier previouslies linked therein).
posted by languagehat at 11:42 AM on January 16, 2016

I hope that they don't overwhelm her with kindness at that hospital: it'll be enough of a shock to her system with the helicopter ride, being away from the only home she's ever known, and then plunked down on a strange place. She really doesn't need a huge if well-meaning crowd surrounding her all the time, she'll also need some solitude and quiet.
posted by easily confused at 12:18 PM on January 16, 2016

IIRC, she did spend some time in a village with relatives quite a few years ago. They tried to get her to stay but in the end she elected to go back to the homestead. So she has been exposed to the outside world and has been pretty steadfast about making decisions for herself.
posted by Beti at 12:29 PM on January 16, 2016 [4 favorites]

That Smithsonian article is one of the best things I've ever read.

And yet, even though presented at smithsonianmag.com it doesn't seem to have been found worthy enough for inclusion in the actual Smithsonian magazine (which has really gone downhill in recent years, according to this subscriber).
posted by Rash at 1:41 PM on January 16, 2016

I highly recommend the Vice video. My hope is she's not that sick, but she agreed to be hospitalized just to get away from that fucking creep who moved in next door to her.
posted by Ian A.T. at 2:47 PM on January 16, 2016

Yerofei died last year. Link.
posted by pravit at 7:40 PM on January 16, 2016 [3 favorites]

“When I finally met Agafia, what surprised me was that rather than feeling like a primitive situation, it felt like arriving in the future – to a world with no technology, the vast forest littered with discarded space junk,” Marshall told Russia Beyond the Headlines, referring to the fact that Lykova’s home is under the flight path of rockets from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. “It is an incredible and beautiful place.”
posted by polymodus at 9:11 PM on January 16, 2016 [2 favorites]

I don't think illness alone would have made her pick up the satellite phone. (The fact that someone gave her one is interesting in itself.) Surely she'd survived illnesses by herself out there in the past (think about all the things we go through in our lives that are no big deal with prompt medical care -- pneumonia, dental abscesses, broken bones, heart attacks). Whatever happened, she wasn't able to care for herself. With respect to her privacy, I'm really interested in what happens to her.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 7:56 AM on January 17, 2016

I think it was probably a combination of illness and age. It's easier for us to care for ourselves, or at least suffer through it, when we get sick when we are young. 70 years old is a bit harder to push through pain.
posted by chainsofreedom at 10:00 AM on January 17, 2016

'36 was a good year to GTFO of Russia if you could, that's for sure.

last year some idle wikipedia reading led me to track through the full scope of the purge years.

Previously I was under the impression it was just some party thing, couple hundred people at the top getting chopped as Stalin consolidated his position.

The reality was rather horrifically different!
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 10:25 AM on January 17, 2016

> Previously I was under the impression it was just some party thing, couple hundred people at the top getting chopped as Stalin consolidated his position.

The reality was rather horrifically different!
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 10:25 AM on January 17 [+] [!]

To be fair, the Soviet government under Lenin was pretty nasty too. What little I've read leads me to trust the hypothesis that the revolution was strangled in its cradle by the White Army and the Red Army. I blame, of course, the White Army and their backers for all this, but the leadership of the Bolshevik Party helped. As far as I can tell — the historiography of the early Soviet Union is an utter mess, so even the people competent to speak to this matter (read: not me) can't speak with any confidence — they had absolutely no idea what to do with control of an isolated state on the periphery of the world, standing exposed at the vanguard of a world revolution that never came. Lacking all hope of winning the world, they did what they had to do to win the war, but winning the war destroyed everything worth saving.

The parts of Bolshevism that survived the utter disaster of 1918-1922 came out damaged and insane; Stalin, or someone as paranoid and deadly as Stalin, was a practical inevitability in the wake of four years of starvation and viciously murderous war of all against all.

Consider this graph of the population of Petrograd over time. The catastrophic drop that you see in the mid-20th century was the Siege of Leningrad; the almost equally catastrophic drop in the early 20th century was the starvation and mass flight during the civil war.

tl;dr: Russian history is some bleak shit. Hiding from it was totally rational.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 4:37 PM on January 17, 2016 [2 favorites]

> the historiography of the early Soviet Union is an utter mess, so even the people competent to speak to this matter (read: not me) can't speak with any confidence

Not sure what you mean by this. The historiography of the early Soviet Union is no worse than that of many other states for that period since the archives were opened after 1991, and you can read in great detail about how and why decisions were made. I recommend Kotkin's new biography of Stalin (the first volume takes 800 pages to get up to 1928) for an up-to-date and very well informed take on it.
posted by languagehat at 8:26 AM on January 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

The Guardian says she's headed back home as soon as EMS can transport her. Glad to hear it.
posted by Beti at 10:36 AM on January 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

Love reading and esp watching her story. But, man, that bit in the Vice video about Yerofei's threats...messed up.
posted by evening at 6:26 AM on January 23, 2016